As far as a base level ethical framework, Utilitarianism, I hold, should be one of the primary starting points when alayzing any ethical dilemma. And as far as its presitige, it inarguably dominates the theoretical ethical landscape. There isn't a single philosophical framework that I know of that doesn't incorporate a good deal of utilitarian ethics. Period.

Do you think this is true of post-marxist, postmodernist and phenomenological philosophies as well? And what about Nietzsche’s relentless critiques of utilitarianism? I guess what I’m wondering is if utilitarianism is a big enough umbrella ( isnt consequentialiam an even bigger umbrella?) to cover political and ethical positions extending to the far left as well as the right.

— Garrett Travers

However, economics is not a utilitarian practice, fundamentally, and never should be. Very few people are motivated by anything short of greed, and greed is not an evil. In fact, praxiologically, it is going to be difficult for anyone to make the case that they aren't motivated almost exclusively by what has been termed "greed," which I would, in that specific sense, regard as irrational self-interest, or self-interest with a disregard to people's rights

I’m sure you would agree that utilitarianism and ethical philosophy in general is based around an understanding of concepts like rationality , motivation, emotion and hedonism. Such notions are obviously involved in notions
like greed, self-interest and distinctions between the rational and the irrational, and between rationality and emotion.

I bring this up because, given your professed respect for
the scientific method, I wonder what you feel is the relevance of the latest ideas in cognitive neuroscience for the ethical philosophy. For instance, many segments of contemporary psychology have all but abandoned the classic distinction between the rational and the irrational that you seem to uphold , and the opposition between the affective and the cognitive in the wake of research by people like Damasio, Panksepp and the predictive processing community. Among those who accept the implications of this research, it seems libertarian political views are a rarity. Is this just coincidence? Are these science theories politically motivated or is it the case that political views shift in parallel with the evolution of psychological models?Should we expect that utilitarian models originating 300 years ago should survive intact when the psychological assumptions they are based on have changed significantly in recent years?

Forget Sam Harris -- call General Mills to set up a company to sell intelligence-restoring omelettes in convenient heat-and-eat packages (recyclable, of course) — Bitter Crank

Mr. Graham tried something like that with the graham cracker.

“The graham cracker was inspired by the preaching of Sylvester Graham who was part of the 19th-century temperance movement. He believed that minimizing pleasure and stimulation of all kinds, including the prevention of masturbation, coupled with a vegetarian diet anchored by bread made from wheat coarsely ground at home, was how God intended people to live, and that following this natural law would keep people healthy.”

There is another way to understand the Flyn effect. We have to begin by asking what it is that improves such things as nutitition. We can also ask what it is that leads to a progressive increase in life expectancy, taller humans and the continuing breaking of records in Olympic sports. The answer of course is that our knowledge of biology , physiology and medicine has improved over the centuries, changing our physiology in all of these ways.
If increase in knowledge is behind this, then rather than looking at improvement in intelligence as the result of improvement in nutrition, it may make more sense to see historical development of intelligence in terms of neural connectivity, which is how our brain manifests cultural transmission.
As we change our social and physical environment ( including our bodies) through our technologies, these feed back to us and increase the complexity of neural connections, producing an accelerating trajectory of knowledge growth. Intelligence should be seen as a self-perpetuating reciprocal process of human-environment interaction.

To use a computer analogy, instead of equating intelligence with hardware, we should see it as software continually updating itself.

you haven't addressed the topic and have instead waisted our time on an anti-scientific, metaphysical belief that we both know isn't true. As you have addmitted. As it happens you've also pointed out that it is a metaphysical domain, instead of a scientific one, which was literally my point the entire time — Garrett Travers

Let’s see if we can clarify something. Metaphysical beliefs are commitments that guide scientists in their larger understanding of their subject matter, but that doesn’t mean that it directly affects how they interpret empirical
evidence. In fact, most scientists aren’t even aware of the background presuppositions they bring to the doing of science. 10 scientists on a room can all operate implicitly on the basis of slightly different metaphysical assumptions without this affecting in the slightest their ability to agree on the basic facts of their field of study. The fact that these are pre-suppositions doesn’t make them anti-scientific, it makes them conditions of possibility of science. Objectivism’s
view of science is informed by its own set of metaphysical assumptions.

Metaphysics is not the ground and condition of physics, nor physics the ground and condition for metaphysics. — Cornwell1

Logical positivists may take this position, but I agree with the following:

“What has to be the case for genuine science as such to be possible? This is a question from outside science and is, by definition, a philosophical—even a metaphysical—question. Those who say that science can answer all questions are themselves standing outside science to make that claim. That is why naturalism—the modern version of materialism, seeing reality as defined by what is within reach of the sciences—becomes a metaphysical theory when it strays beyond methodology to talk of what can exist. Denying metaphysics and upholding materialism must itself be a move within metaphysics. It involves standing outside the practice of science and talking of its scope. The assertion that science can explain everything can never come from within science. It is always a statement about science.”

So, if you don't agree with this view, and you know I said no scientist abides by it, and you've been arguing for it anyway, even though we were talking about the nature of ethics, then I'm gonna need to know why you've been wasting time on this absolute quackery instead of addressing what was the topic of this forum — Garrett Travers

Oh dear… I guess I have a hard time resisting responding to sweeping generalizations like “no scientist abides by it”. Was it really necessary to pull that one out of your ass rather than saying something more measured and careful like ‘I hope not too many scientists abide by it’?

I’m reluctant to get into the main topic of the op when this is the way you deal with secondary topics.

What do you suppose would be the outcome of a poll of philosophers concerning the ‘absolute quackery’ status of mathematical platonism vs Objectivism? I’ll bet it would be pretty close, so you might try a slightly humbler stance.

To place this sentence: "Perhaps philosophy isn’t a good match for you."

In the same statement as this sentence: "In short, mathematical objects are just as “real” as ordinary physical objects."

Is the kind of irony even numbers cannot be used to quantify. Which, judging from your strange, implacable commitment to pseudo-science - which Mathematical Platonism is by definition - qualifies it as just as "real" as ordinary physical objects. — Garrett Travers

1) As I said earlier, I do not personally support a platonist view of mathematics

2)Mathematical platonism isn’t supposed to be science. It’s metaphysics. You may not agree with this particular kind of metaphysical position, but the nature of metaphysics is that such that it stands as the ground and condition of possibility of scientific thought. Therefore it is not amenable to validation or falsification through empirical investigation, but only through philosophical argument.

But what you're putting forth so far excuses, for example, the way the Nazis treated the Jews during WWII. "The attributes that are to be valued in the Jews were invisible to the Nazis. The Nazis acted ethically, in accordance with their insight into the Jews." — baker

That’s exactly right. Ethical intent was not the issue. Lack of insight was. The Jew for centuries represented the alien interloper in European thought. The intent wasn’t to see them as alien and thus morally suspect. Antisemitism was and still is the product of a failure to transcend the gap between cultures.

Mathematical objects are independent of intelligent agents and their langauge, thought, and practices... in the Platonic Realm of the Forms....Which doesn't exist. Even from Penrose's own view, his concept of the material world of mathematics is in that of the Forms, not in this material universe. Do you understand now? — Garrett Travers

I understand that you have an intense need to reduce complexities and ambiguities in ideas to caricatures. Perhaps philosophy isn’t a good match for you.

As the Stanford Encyclopedia states:

“Platonism must be distinguished from the view of the historical Plato. Few parties to the contemporary debate about platonism make strong exegetical claims about Plato’s view, much less defend it. Although the view which we are calling ‘platonism’ is inspired by Plato’s famous theory of abstract and eternal Forms, platonism is now defined and debated independently of its original historical inspiration.”

For modern mathematical platonists, “independence is meant to substantiate an analogy between mathematical objects and ordinary physical objects. Just as electrons and planets exist independently of us, so do numbers and sets. And just as statements about electrons and planets are made true or false by the objects with which they are concerned and these objects’ perfectly objective properties, so are statements about numbers and sets. In short, mathematical objects are just as “real” as ordinary physical objects.”

You may disagree with this view of math, as I do, but you should appreciate that more than a few scientists and mathematicians support it.

This has gotten to the point where this topic has been completely derailed by an insistence on asserting that math is an objective fact of the universe, when we all know, and all scientists know, that it isn't. And Penrose is not claiming that it is. — Garrett Travers

Boy, you do a lot of whining, and with quite an arrogance. What is this ‘we all know that’ crap? I can’t think of any statement less philosophical in spirit than the self-satisfied ‘we all know that’. I am not a mathematical platonist, but Penrose is. I am just trying to clarify his position. You said that both you and Penrose believe math is a language. Penrose does not think math is just a language. Mathematical platonism asserts the following:

There are mathematical objects.
Mathematical objects are abstract.
Mathematical objects are independent of intelligent agents and their language, thought, and practices.

Taking up being in the world would never step beyond the boundaries of historical possibilities, just as science could never step radically out of the paradigms that make its thinking possible, just as a person's freedom is bound to personal and cultural history, still. Anything beyond must be familiar in its parts, and any revolutionary shake up can only shake what is contained therein, that is, "shake" language as such. If it is within language that the shaking occurs, then this cannot be beyond language. — Astrophel

It is confusing. At one end is ‘Das man’ , a stiflingly normative mode of discursive being-with-others that precludes original thinking. At the other end is authentic Dasein pursuing its ownmost possibilities of being. But I would suggest that for Heidegger even when we are caught within the normative framework, we are not simply introjecting shared ways of speaking and thinking.

Heidegger's(2010) task is to explain how a Dasein which always understands others in relation to its very own pragmatic totality of relevance ends up believing in a cultural world of linguistic practices that appear to be the same for all. “...what purports to be an opening up of the world is in fact its concealment: by appealing to public opinion and tradition, idle talk creates in Dasein the belief that it possesses universally acknowledged and thus genuine truths.”

Heidegger chooses words like average, vague, flattened , confused, uprooted state of suspension, and ambiguous to describe Dasein's being as Das Man, to indicate that the heedfulness of Care is still primordially and implicitly operative even when it is explicitly concealed and suppressed . Average everyday discourse has to be vague, approximate, superficial and ambiguous enough to conceal, disguise, cover over, miss, obscure, suppress the fact that the meaning of what is shared is never interpreted identically for each dasein.

“What is talked about is understood only approximately and superficially. One means the same thing because it is in the same averageness that we have a common understanding of what is said.” “Publicness ” does not get to "the heart of the matter," because it is insensitive to every difference of level and genuineness.”

“Idle talk conceals simply because of its characteristic failure to address things in an originary way [urspriinglichen Ansprechens]. It obscures the true appearance of the world and the events in it by instituting a dominant view [herrschende Ansicht].”“Usually and for the most part the ontic mode of being-in (discoverture) is concealment [Verdeckung]. Interpretedness, which is speech encrusted by idle talk, draws any given Dasein into 'one's' way of being. But existence in the 'one' now entails the concealment and marginalization of the genuine self [eigentlichen Selbst]. Not only has each particular given itself over to 'one', 'one' blocks Dasein's access to the state it finds itself in [Befindlichkeit].”(Heidegger 2011)

Heidegger says that there are genuine modes
of discourse where individual differences do not become flattened in this way.

Penrose here is not saying that math exists in the universe, but that the truth that can be gleaned from the universe through the implementation of mathematics goes well beyond the confines of what we that it could be used for. Math is more a langauge for reality, rather than reality itself. — Garrett Travers

I dont think he is simply saying that math is a language. There is. i necessary connection between words and real objects. If we view language in referential terms, a particular word in one language can refer to a real object in the world, but that word will be different in a different language. Or a culture may not even have a word for the object. Penrose is saying that mathematical truths are themselves real objects that can only be discerned through the intellect.

“Plato's world consists not of tangible objects, but of 'mathematical things'. This world is accessible to us not in the ordinary physical way but, instead, via the intellect. One's mind makes contact with Plato's world whenever it contemplates a mathematical truth, perceiving it by the exercise of mathematical reasoning and insight. This ideal world was regarded as distinct and more perfect than the material world of our external experiences, but just as real.”

That being said, I am glad someone brought at least one person to have made this claim to the table, even if he isn't compelling in any regard[/quote]
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Don’t forget Godel and Penrose. Here’s more from Penrose:


“The notion of mathematical truth goes beyond the whole concept of formalism. There is something absolute and "God-given' about mathematical truth. This is what mathematical Platonism, as discussed at the end of the last chapter, is about. Any particular formal system has a provisional and 'man-made' quality about it. Such systems indeed have very valuable roles to play in mathematical discussions, but they can supply only a partial (or approximate) guide to truth. Real mathematical truth goes beyond mere manmade constructions.”

He's claiming that consciousness has the power to detect reality, not that reality is made of math. It's time to put this to bed — Garrett Travers

I don’t think it’s sleepy.

Is the math in the detector or in the reality being detected? If the world is is such that our mathematical concepts fit it so well, then we could say that math is platonic in that we are equipped in Kantian fashion with categories that order nature mathematically. In such a view, we don’t have direct access to nature as the thing in itself, and so can’t claim that nature itself has such characteristics. Alternately, we could argue that the math isnt just in our categories but really is a property out there in the world. This is a different understanding of Platonism, placing the forms not in our heads but out there.

From Live Science:

Scientists have long used mathematics to describe the physical properties of the universe. But what if the universe itself is math? That's what cosmologist Max Tegmark believes.

Some people argue that math is just a tool invented by scientists to explain the natural world. But Tegmark contends the mathematical structure found in the natural world shows that math exists in reality, not just in the human mind.

“In Tegmark's view, everything in the universe — humans included — is part of a mathematical structure. All matter is made up of particles, which have properties such as charge and spin, but these properties are purely mathematical, he says. And space itself has properties such as dimensions, but is still ultimately a mathematical structure.

"If you accept the idea that both space itself, and all the stuff in space, have no properties at all except mathematical properties," then the idea that everything is mathematical "starts to sound a little bit less insane," Tegmark said in a talk based on his book "Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality" (Knopf, 2014).

"If my idea is wrong, physics is ultimately doomed," Tegmark said. But if the universe really is mathematics, he added, "There's nothing we can't, in principle, understand."

The beyond of language? — Astrophel

Yes, this is at the core of Derrida’s thinking, and Heidegger’s as well.
In 'Logic as the Question concerning the Essence of Language' Heidegger tells us he wants, 'in a confrontation with the tradition', to rethink logic, to "revolutionarily shake up the notion of logic" from the ground up, but that he can only provisionally point to his notion of the primordial ground of language as the basis of this new grounding of logic. Traditionally, language is thought as a tool of thinking, as secondary to thinking, as grounded on grammar, which in turn is grounded on logic. Heidegger says “the first thing we need is a real revolution in our relation to language.”

There are scientists that claim that the universe is comprised of mathematics. Or are you making a distinction between numbers and mathematics?
— T Clark

I'm going to start here by saying: find me one and show me his arguments. — Garrett Travers

“[]I believe consciousness to be closely associated with the sensing of necessary truths — and thereby achieving a direct contact with Plato’s world of mathematical concepts.”(Roger Penrose)

"the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and that there is no rational explanation for it".( Eugene Wigner, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences)

These Platonic views of mathematics suggest the belief that universe itself is mathematical rather than it being the case that our brains are wired to see it that way.

it's a false dichotomy to have only one, or only the other. The two are compatible. I am an independent rational mind capable of choosing my own courses of actions, and I am also suspended within a vast network of people all influencing eachother. T — Garrett Travers

My favorite psychologist is a fellow by the name of George Kelly, who many consider to be the founder of cognitive therapy. In his approach , all of our motives and interests are united via one fundamental desire , which is to make sense of our experience of a world which is flowingly changing from one minute to the next. Negative feelings like anxiety, anger and fear are the expressions of a failure to make sense of things , they the current or impending experience of chaos and confusion. Our rational aims involve anticipating events in as far reaching a way as possible by construing replicative patterns in the flux. This goal critically depends on other people, because they are the richest sources of new experience in our lives.

Loving relationships are about a bond of mutual sharing and creative inspiration, which is the ultimate form of anticipatory sense making. Thus, individual happiness is inherently other-centered and other-dependent. Rational choice is driven by motives which are inherently socially oriented in that personal satisfaction depends on construing harmonious patterns in experience. We love others for the same reason that we love ourselves , and do for others for the same reason that we do for ourselves. We are always ‘selfish’ for the sake of a knowing embrace of the world.


The key here is that we can only thrive with others to the extent we can empathize with them , by seeing the likenesses between them and us. So the key issue that ethics has to contend with isn’t the good of the individual vs the good of the group, but how to expand one’s circle of friends by discovering likenesses and commonalities where there appeared to be none.

Ethics is a tool for optimal behavior. Just as science is a tool for optimal obervation of reality. Just as math is a tool for optimal analysis of patterns, values, and change. Just as Jazz is a tool for optimal musical performance. All of these are conceptual tools by which we appraoch domains of interest for optimal results in each respective domain. — Garrett Travers

The thing about tools is that they have a habit of re-defining the task that they were supposedly designed for.
Take science, for instance. It is designed for observation of reality, but we often don’t appreciate that it already pre-selects what counts as real, and over time, it changes its critieria concerning what counts as real, factual evidence. So it turns out the assumed passive tool of observation is also the active creator.
Ethics as a tool operates the same way.

Others here have already mentioned that there are philosophies and psychologies of mathematics which treat them not as pure products of the mind but results of embodied interactions with the world, much like perceptual objects. Thus they are neither purely subjective features of mind not objective features of the world but the result of an indissociable interaction between the two.

I'm not arguing that interpersonal ethics aren't to be considered. It is the people in this forum that are arguing that ethics is only the domain of interpersonal relations. I am arguing that both are encompassed by ethics, and that ethics is first and foremost an individual pursuit, as the Stoics, one school among many, also contend. — Garrett Travers

Part of the source of the disagreement you have been encountering may be that all the the terms involved:ethics, individual, private, public, self, have shifted their sense over the past two millennia of Western philosophy, and particularly in the modern era. For instance, for a Heidegger the ‘self’ is defined as an interaction with a world. So from that perspective, to say that ethics is an individual pursuit is to say that it is inherently about being with others, since that is what the ‘individual’ is. That may sound incoherent to you , but many models within the social as well as the biological sciences have also moved in the direction of seeing the self as a constantly shifting product of interaction with a social and physical environment. If your approach is closely related to Objectivism , you are relying ona model of the self which probably sees it as akin to a computer , which receives data from the world, processes and stores it in relation to desires and goals which are intrinsic to it , and then selects its behavioral options. In this approach, there is a clear cut distinction between self and non-self, private and public. It would seem obvious that such a being’s interests are separable from those of a community seen as some abstract whole. Even if you disagree with the approach, one can model the psychology of individuals according to a different schematics, that is less like a computer than it is an ecological system. You can see how this muddies the separation between private and public, individual and collective.
You’ve probably noticed how politics on the left is more and more embracing such ways of thinking.

one has to deal with language and logic, and language is self referential, roughly put. — Astrophel

Language viewed as a logical grammar is self-referential. Language viewed through the phenomenology of someone like Merleau-Ponty is embodied, and therefore self-transformating. For Derrida language points beyond itself. Deconstruction , as a post- structuralism, began as a response to the structuralist models of language that think of it as a self-referential totality.

Also, you're kind of a jerk. — RogueAI

May have something to do with his being an Ayn Rand devotee. Often those two go together.

The values of the individual are organized and shaped via interaction with a larger culture, so the individual is already operating within that larger framework in enacting an ethical code. That was Nietzsche’s argument against utilitarianism.
— Joshs

This is completely irrelevant. It doesn't matter how values are shaped or within what culture an individual lives. Each individual chooses to direct their own behavior as they enact it. It isn't possible for others to act for you. — Garrett Travers

Everything you think is shaped by your wider culture , even as your own ideas represent a variation on that larger thematics. Your choices and freedom
are constrained by that larger frame. In order to grasp that you would have to know how to read Kant, James, Hegel , Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche and many others.

Considering that Rand's ethical epistemology is the single most comprehensive and sophisticated epistemology generated since Immanuel Kant, I would say her work is invaluable to my ethical framework, just like Kant's, Hume's, Mill's, Locke's, and all others. However, I'd say hers is far more sophisticated than Hume's and Locke's, and every bit as groundbreaking Kant's and Mill's. — Garrett Travers

No, I’d say Rand failed miserably to understand Kant, and instead represents a bastardized version of 18th century pre-Kantianism.

Regardless of whether or not any practice is an achievement of culture, it is only individuals that can enact codes of ethics, the whole cannot do so, because the whole does not have brain or cpu, only indiviudals do. — Garrett Travers

The values of the individual are organized and shaped via interaction with a larger culture, so the individual is already operating within that larger framework in enacting an ethical code, whether they realize it or not. That was Nietzsche’s argument against utilitarianism.

Regardless
My whole point here was that relegating ethics exclusively to interpersonal relations is both binary and demonstrably inaccurate across ethical frameworks. Ethics is the domain of both arenas, public and private. — Garrett Travers

Except you can’t disentangle the private from the public, even if you are Ayn Rand. Btw, do you find her work valuable to your ethical approach?

Jeremy Bentham and Mills divised an ethical framework to cover both individual and interpersonal ethics (Utilitarianism). — Garrett Travers

That’s right: Right actions are those that are likely to result in the greatest happiness of the greatest number.
What makes individual pursuit of pleasure ‘right’ is that it also benefits the totality.

The Stoic ethical framework is almost exclusively predicated upon individual behavior. — Garrett Travers

Yes, but my focus is on modern ethics.

The Objectivist framework, being the most comprehensive ethical framework to date - with perhaps the exception of Kantian ethics, is predicated almost exclusively on individual flourishing and well-being. — Garrett Travers

Objectivism, unlike utilitarianism, is agent-focused. But both view individual satisfaction of desire in relation to the collective. The ethicality of self-interest is defined by its comparison with. the interest of the whole. The self makes no sense except against the background of a community of selves and their values systems . So the ‘ought’ of ethics, whether it be centered around individual desire or the group, is an achievement of culture and operates in the context of specific material practices and social relations.

ideas such as self-flourishing and individual well-being have never been divorced from ethics in any significant, or historical capacity. I — Garrett Travers

I have in mind contemporary philosophical discussion of ethics. My point is not that self-care is divorced from interpersonal ethics for modern thinkers , but that they are tied together in a dependent relationship, with the ethical aspect of self-care being for the sake of interpersonal ethics. Those philosophers for whom this is not the case, that is, for whom self-care is not subordinate to the interpersonal, tend to reject ethics as unjustifiable ( Heidegger, Nietzsche)

Morality encompassess the behaviors I engage in privately, as I have the power to impact my life in ways both beneficial and deleterious, and because I am confined to my body and am its sole proprietor with sole responsibility over my well-being — Garrett Travers

It strikes me as a bit odd to refer to my self-care in terms of ‘morality’ unless that term is being used so broadly as to take it out of the realm of ethics as it is conventionally understood. Self-care is generally associated with ethics to the extent that cari h for oneself enhances one’s ability to care for others.

Phenomenology puts the burden of meaning at the level of basic questions to the "things themselves" which is, in my thinking, reduction away from argument and analysis and toward intuitional givens. The pain in the kidney is, I argue, foundational, unassailable, absolute. — Astrophel

On the one side are phenomenologists like Henry, who talk about grounding affectivities as immediate and unchanging:

“Henry calls attention to the way in which we are aware of our feelings and moods. When we are in pain, anxious, embarrassed, stubborn or happy, we do not feel it through the intervention of a (inner) sense organ or an intentional act, but are immediately aware of it. There is no distance or separation between the feeling of pain or happiness and our awareness of it, since it is given in and through itself. According to Henry, something similar holds for all of our conscious experiences. To make use of a terminology taken from analytical philosophy of mind, Henry would claim that all conscious experiences are essentially characterized by having a subjective ‘feel' to them, that is, a certain quality of ‘what it is like'”.

“Self-affection understood as the process of affecting and being affected is not the rigid self-identity of an object, but a subjective movement. A movement which Henry has even described as the self-temporalisation of subjectivity. But as he then adds, we are dealing with a quite unique form of temporalisation, which is absolute immanent, non-horizontal and non-ecstatic. We are dealing with an affective temporality, and even though it seems to involve a perpetual movement and change, nothing is changed. In fact, it would be wrong to characterize absolute subjectivity as a stream of consciousness. There is no streaming and no change, but always one and the same Living Present without distance or difference. It is always the same self affecting itself.”

On the other side are phenomenologists like Husserl:

“…sthere is no Being which has sense outside of this
historicity or escapes its infinite horizon, since the Logos and the Telos are nothing outside the interplay of their reciprocal inspi­ration, this slgmfies then that the Absolute is Passage. Traditionality is what circulates from one to the other, illuminating one by the other in a movement wherein consciousness discovers its path in an indefinite reduction, always already begun, and wherein every adventure is a change of direction [conversion] and every return to the origin an au­dacious move toward the horizon.” (Derrida on Husserl)

All this 'being in the world, and sein und dasein - is metaphysical hocus pocus. Any philosophy worth reading begins with epistemology; and the epitome of epistemology is scientific method. — karl stone

How about philosophy that ties into cutting edge science, like cognitive theory or perceptual psychology? As an adherent of ‘scientific method’ I would assume you try to keep up with actual research results in such cutting edge fields. If so you may notice increasing attention paid to phenomenology. For instance, check out the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
https://www.springer.com/journal/11097

If by that you mean reality is complex, then I agree - which is part of what makes it so astounding. There are 26 letters on a keyboard, from which can be constructed about 200,000 english words, that can be strung into a virtually infinite number of meaningful sentences. Similarly, there are 118 chemical elements, and four fundamental forces - and that's before we get into quantum physics, from which all the diversity of life on earth is written. If you're not amazed by that - and feel some yearning need to string up philosophical fairy lights and set off fireworks to make reality special, then you're missing something — karl stone

This reminded me of Wittgenstein.

“Wittgenstein told his audience that what he was doing was 'persuading people to change their style of thinking , . He was, he said, 'making propaganda' for one style of thinking as opposed to another. 'I am honestly disgusted with the other', he added. The 'other' he identified as the worship of science, and he therefore spent some time in these lectures execrating what he considered to be powerful and damaging forms of evangelism for this worship - the popular scientific works of the time, such as Jeans's The Mysterious Universe:

“Jeans has written a book called The Mysterious Universe and I loathe it and call it misleading. Take the title ... I might say the title The Mysterious Universe includes a kind of idol worship, the idol being Science and the Scientist.”

(Ray Monk’s Wittgenstein)

Uncompromising Realists are assuming that they can observe the world from an objective perspective, which eliminates the subjective biases of the observer. Although, objectivity is the ideal goal of Science, it's an unattainable perfection. — Gnomon

From a realist perspective, bias is a dirty word , a failure to grasp what is truly there to be grasped, if only as an unreachable ideal, an ‘unattainable perfection’. For post-realism, objectivity is a dirty word , concealing what is always already there for us, and ‘bias’ speaks to the actual world, not to a flawed representation of it.

Pain, e.g., is intuited entirely outside of how time and its flow is construed, regarless of it being an event IN time. I would put it like this: there is no way to conceive the structure of time such that it has any bearing whatever on the immediate experience of affect. — Astrophel

Pain is no different than the intuited moments of sense that Husserl describes as flowingly changing.

From a recent paper of mine:

Husserl's grounding of affectivity in inner time consciousness is a transcendental grounding, not a naturalistic one. Underlying and founding all strata of bodily and interpersonal dynamics is the assimilative basis of temporal constitution as retention, primal impression and protention. This is Husserl's primordial pre-condition for any world , any being.

The subjective and objective sides of the structure of temporal synthesis are not separate entities but only poles of a single act of intentional sense. In this synthesis, both the subject and the object pole contribute their own quality of feeling to what ‘an object is for the subject' in its valuative , affective sense. The energetic dynamism of feeling isn't something added to a content of perception from outside of it, in causal relation with it as agent of conditioning. Meaning content implies its own affective force, the affective signature is intrinsic to the objective and subjective sides. This is what constitutes the ‘life' in what Husserl calls the living present. The affective qualities contributed by the objective pole (noema) are its vivacity. Husserl describes the affective allure contributed by the objective pole as “that varying vivacity of a lived experience, of a datum of consciousness.”(Passive and Active Synthesis, p.214)

And an affective signature is intrinsic to the subject, in the form of desires, tendencies, strivings, anticipations, aimed at the objective pole. As Husserl says, there are rays emanating from subjective side to the objective side and vice-versa. Both affects originating on the subjective side and those originating on the objective side are implied in all intentional meaning. The always present affective qualities of the object (beautiful, pleasurable, unpleasant) are not made thematic in objectivating acts (perceiving a spatial object), but they are in valuative acts. And one's affective, hedonic attitude toward the object of an intention (disappointed, depressed, elated, bored, frightened) may not be thematized in theoretical interest, but will appear in our practical attitude toward the world.

Natural bodily structures are not the basis of affect for Husserl. If one wants to still talk about a body, what remains of the body for Husserl once one has dug beneath all the sedimented layers of constituted meaning, would be the ‘body' of the retention-impression-protention triad of time consciousness. Husserl's starting point in time consciousness is already is already a self-othering, thus an exposure to the foreign from within the resources of subjectivity, prior to any configurational-corporeal constitution, prior to any empirically defined physiological or psychological structures, prior to human beings, but presupposed by them. Affect is not an evolutionary device, it is synonymous with entity, being, existence, object, subject. Being as the moment of experience is simultaneously the feeling of being affected and the feeling of anticipatory striving. These precede the notion of a body as biological organism, and instead is a pre-condition for being of any sort. Feeling, understood most primordially, is simply movement (not in empirical but subjective space), transition, becoming, time.

Husserl's model of inner time consciousness generates a primordial motivational principle in the guise of associative synthesis. Unlike naturalist causal forms of association, in which the bond between elements is externally conditioned, in Husserl's motivational model noetic anticipatory assimilation dominates the foreignness of the noematic object pole. That is to say, associative synthesis achieves a belongingness between the constituting and constituted poles as a unity of identification, homogeneity, similarity, likeness.

“Thus each everyday experience involves an analogizing transfer of an originally instituted objective sense to a new case, with its anticipative apprehension of the object as having a similar sense. To the extent that there is givenness beforehand, there is such a transfer.“ (Cartesian Meditations, p.111) “ all immediate association is an association in accordance with similarity. Such association is essentially possible only by virtue of similarities, differing in degree in each case, up to the limit of complete likeness. Thus all original contrast also rests on association: the unlike comes to prominence on the basis of the common. Homogeneity and heterogeneity, therefore, are the result of two different and fundamental modes of associative unification.” (Experience and Judgement) “...consciousness is connected in the most general way to another consciousness by a commonality that is correlatively noetic and noematic; and all connection is connection through "commonality." through uniformity and similarity.”(Passive and Active Synth, p.485)

This means that the capacity of experiences to delight or disturb us, particularly when it comes to profoundly self-affecting valuative concerns, is much more a function of the relation of the event to our strivings and anticipations than it is to whatever qualitites of feeling (enticement, allure, vivacity) are contributed by the object pole in itself.

when one lacks the insight into another's capabilities, one doesn't know thusly, one doesn't know one lacks said insight. Instead, one is convinced that one already has the right insight into another's capabilities..

"You are inferior, and therefore, I can beat you, I can take from you, I can kill you, and you must let me do so".

It's an approach to ethics that externalizes the standard of ethical behavior, making it the responsibility of the other for how others treat them. It says, "You are responsible for how I treat you. If you want to be treated better, you need to prove to me that you deserve it." — baker

No, it’s an approach to ethics that makes the ability to act ‘ethically’ a function of insight, and no internalization of standards will get around that fact, because it’s not a question of ethical intent but of insight. Wanting to do the right thing, and having all manner of rules and guidelines for dong the right thing, are worthless if the attributes within another that are to be valued are invisible to one.

Thinking about the temporal experience of listening to music, or of reading a novel, can be misleading, though, if we think of the perceptual process as something that takes place wholly during the very short duration of a "present moment" and if we think of this momentary "present moment" of experience as being merely externally constrained by the past through the exercise of short term memory and by the imaginative anticipation of a future experience that has not yet occurred. — Pierre-Normand

Are you familiar with the concept of the ‘specious present’, which I think was coined by William James? The idea, presented famously by Husserl, is that the present moment is a tripartite structure that consists of retention , primal presentation and protention (anticipation). Retention and protention don’t occupy separate temporal positions relative to the ‘now’, they all belong simultaneously to it.

In the account of Heidegger and also Gendlin, this is put more radically:

“Temporalizing does not mean a "succession" of the ecstasies. The future is not later than the having-been, and the having-been is not earlier than the present. “Dasein "occurs out of its future"."Da-sein, as existing, always already comes toward itself, that is, is futural in its being in general." Having-been arises from the future in such a way that the future that has-been (or better, is in the process of having-been) releases the present from itself. We call the unified phenomenon of the future that makes present in the process of having been temporality.”(Heidegger 2010)

“The future that is present now is not a time-position, not what will be past later. The future that is here now is the implying that is here now. The past is not an earlier position but the now implicitly functioning past.”“......the past functions to "interpret" the present,...the past is changed by so functioning. This needs to be put even more strongly: The past functions not as itself, but as already changed by what it functions in”(Gendlin)

As a pragmatist, I assert that no philosophical position is meaningful unless it has concrete implications for phenomena present in the everyday world, life, and experience of normal human beings. — T Clark

You mentioned forms of philosophy reliant on truth propositional logic as not pragmatically meaningful, but I assume you would also include many Continental philosophers. There is a danger that ‘normal human beings’ becomes synonymous with ‘ human being who can understand the philosophy’. But the greatest works of continental philosophy, from Plato to Descartes, Spinoza, Hegel and Nietzsche, were initially and for the most part still to this day meaningful to only a small segment of the population. But such ‘useful’ philosophies became the basis for interpretations by mathematicians and scientists (Newton, Frege, Gauss, Heisenberg, Godel, Turing, Darwin, Freud) who produced models influenced by these ideas which in turn led to new technologies, therapies, sciences. So the usefulness doesn’t happen as a direct communication from abstract philosophy to ‘normal human beings’ , it happens in stages, by being translated into more and more pragmatically articulated versions over time, accessible to increasingly large segments of the population. The general concepts that led eventually to the computer you are using were first formulated by ‘useless’ philosophers 200 years ago. The concrete technology is just the final stage in a long process of the spread of an idea. As we speak there are a handful of philosophers generating the conceptual basis of what will constitute the next technological revolution 50 or 100 years from now. Only then will ‘normal human beings’ likely recognize its value, and only in a more narrowly engineered form.

Philosophers mostly talk about knowledge as a proposition that can be true or false. In a pragmatic view, knowledge is a conceptual model that can be accurate or less accurate. — T Clark

Unless you mean to exclude pragmatics like Dewey and James, in a pragmatic view. knowledge is a conceptual
model that can be more or less USEFUL.

A group of writer is psychology and phenomenology have put for their their own notion of non clock-time which draws from dynamical systems theory. I wonder what connection this may have to your comment on non-linear time.

Shaun Gallagher(2011) elaborates:

“A number of theorists have proposed to capture the subpersonal processes that would instantiate this Husserlian model [of time] by using a dynamical systems approach (Thompson 2007; van Gelder 1996; Varela 1999). On this view, action and our consciousness of action arise through the concurrent participation of distributed regions of the brain and their sensorimotor embodiment (Varela et al. 2001).”

Thompson(2007) says:

“The present moment manifests as a zone or span of actuality, instead of as an instantaneous flash, thanks to the way our consciousness is structured. As we will see later, the present moment also manifests this way because of the nonlinear dynamics of brain activity. Weaving together these two types of analysis, the phenomenological and neuro biological, in order to bridge the gap between subjective experience and biology, defines the aim of neuro-phenomenology (Varela 1996), ` an offshoot of the enactive approach.”

Varela's attempt to ‘phenomenologize' empirical accounts of time consciousness involves rejecting time as a fixed linear sequence of nows (what Husserl calls clock time)

“In fact, we have inherited from classical physics a notion of time as an arrow of infinitesimal moments, which flows in a constant stream. It is based on sequences of finite or infinitesimal elements, which are even reversible for a large part of physics. This view of time is entirely homologous to that developed by the modern theory of computation. […] This strict adherence to a computational scheme will be, in fact, one of the research frameworks that needs to be abandoned as a result of the neuro-phenomenological examination proposed here”

“The traditional sequentialistic idea is anchored in a framework in which the computer metaphor is central, with its associated idea that information flows up-stream . Here, in contrast, I emphasize a strong dominance of dynamical network properties where sequentiality is replaced by reciprocal determination and relaxation time.” ( Varela 1997)

Varela(1997) offers a concept of duration that is independent of linear time:

“…time in experience is quite a different story from a clock in linear time. Thus, we have neuronal-level constitutive events that have a duration on the 1/10-scale, forming aggregates that manifest as incompressible but complete cognitive acts on the 1-scale . This completion time is dynamically dependent on a number of dispersed assemblies and not a fixed integration period, in other words it is the basis of the origin of duration without an external or internally ticking clock.”. “the fact that an assembly of coupled oscillators attains a transient synchrony and that it takes a certain time for doing so is the explicit correlate of the origin of nowness.”

A day-old infant has very limited cognition skills. So, by your logic, ethical treatment of very young infants should likewise be limited — SophistiCat

The examples I gave dealt with limitations on ethical treatment of others resulting from lack of insight into their capabilities. As to the question of the relation between ethical valuation and capability in general I would only say that there is a direct correlation between ethical valuation and either present capability or potential for future capability. We dont presently accord rights to stones, insects or mollusks, but that could change in accord with our knowledge concerning their capabilities.

We don't know Time via our physical senses, but only with our sixth sense of Reason, which relates one thing or state to another. Time is not Real, but Ideal, a metaphor in the mind, not a flowing river or immobile ice-cube out there. — Gnomon

How does this relate to Kant’s model of time?

Leaves the question: Is there any mystery left, when we analyze time? Isn't it perfectly clear? Critique welcome — Raymond

What you’re talking about isn’t time in its fundament essence , it’s a mathematical abstraction based on the model of reality as objects in motion. Other models have been put forth that take apart the idea of objectivity that ‘clock-time’ is based on.

, I am wary of the feeling that comes along with this that there is something arbitrary about the relation between the individual and the purpose they pursue, the feeling that we ought generally to think of purposes as choices or preferences. That feels weak to me. Oxygen is useful and valuable relative to the purpose of the respiratory system, which is in turn useful and valuable relative to the purpose of remaining a going concern. Swell. But that’s not a choice or a preference in any simplistic way. (And I want to say that, the fact that we can choose to prevent ourselves from breathing, doesn’t mean that each moment we don’t we must have chosen to continue. Bollocks.) — Srap Tasmaner

Living systems self-organize in a functionally unified manner, which means that they behave in ways that are normatively structured. So, yes, respiration, digesting, reproduction are useful with respect to the whole functioning of the organism, but they are also tied together such that each subcomponent affects and is interaffected by the others for the sake of a unified direction of functioning. When an ant crawls over a carpet, it doesn’t just make use of a pre-programmed set of reflexes, it adapts itself to a surface it has never experienced before. It makes choices in how it navigates the carpet, and this behavior draws upon all of the subsystems and causes them to adjust themselves in turn accordingly to the needs of the main activity.


Organisms anticipate into their environment, shaping it according to their needs, purposes, preferences This has been referred to as a kind of proto-cogntition. While the range of variation in physiological behavior is sharply constrained by inherited factors compared to actual cognition, they share the basic feature of normative goal-orientation. At the level of human cognition, choice and preference is constrained by a prior history of integrated habits of understanding, which is interwoven with social practices and conventions. So to say that’s human behavior is purpose-relative is to say that we are sense-making, goal-driven creatures whose choices are intricately constrained by a network of pre-established channels
of intelligibility.