Me:

Keep your eye out for the direction of the trends over the coming decades concerning the usefulness of the concept of the male-female binary within the social and biological sciences, and the wider culture.

Amadeus to @Vaskane

You have presented precisely nothing to 'overturn' the sex binary. There is no such thing as a human is not either male or female. — AmadeusD

Male/female are extremely important in biology and biologists, on the whole, reject entire the attempts to trivialize them.But I would also add engineers to that list. They use the terms constantly to refer to something non-biological which is analogous. — AmadeusD

I’m not just making this stuff up. From a recent paper in a biology journal:

Biomedical scientists are increasingly calling the biological sex into question, arguing that sex is a graded spectrum rather than a binary trait. Leading science journals have been adopting this relativist view...

You may want to explain this as bowing to political pressure from the left, but the fact remains that the biological sciences are moving away from the male-female binary. It shouldn’t be difficult for you to find papers in biological journals justifying this position scientifically. Why don’t you read a few. I’m sure they can satisfy your questions better than we can. I’m not suggesting a new consensus has been reached yet. In fact, the paper I quoted from disagrees with the non-binary view.

Can I ask you, setting aside the complex theory, if you had to explain trans to a group of people with no understanding of the issue, how would you frame it? — Tom Storm

Freud said we are all fundamentally bisexual. I say we are all irreducibly trans. Gender is like personality. Just as no two people share the same personality, no two people belong to the same gender. We can of course group people in loose sorts of ways by similarities in personality and gender behavior. The same is true of the concept of biological sex. Right now most still find it useful to think in terms of two categories, but I think eventually biological sex will be melded with gender in most people’s minds.

There is not anyone who isn't male or female, but current understanding. Why isn't that good enough? — AmadeusD

It’s good to the extent that it’s useful. It’s obviously useful
for you. Is it useful for your teachers and your peers? Keep your eye out for the direction of the trends over the coming decades concerning the usefulness of the concept of the male-female binary within the social and biological sciences, and the wider culture.

But if people can understand each other, I see no reason to understand this as people learning "Arab Reason," "Hindu Reason," or "Jewish Reason," through some sort of non-rational process so that they can then communicate. It would seem to be more the case that people learn these different contexts of reason through reason — Count Timothy von Icarus

There are many different systems of reason, perfectly logical within themselves, but no overarching way to arbitrate between different systems of rationality.

Wittgenstein argues that heterogeneous language-games cannot be resolved rationally, since rationality exists only within particular language-games. He calls the process that changes the way someone thinks a kind of “conversion”
brought about by “persuasion” rather than autonomous, rational discourse. While freely admitting that reasons would be given, he asks, “but how far do they go? At the end of reasons comes persuasion. (Think what happens
when missionaries convert natives).” The point is that for them to count as reasons, the interlocutor must already share a form of rationality or argu­ment language-game, which in turn cannot be imparted by reasoning on
pain of infinite regress. Wittgenstein even employs violent imagery to make the point: “is it wrong for them to consult an oracle and be guided by it?— If we call this ‘wrong’ aren’t we using our language-game as a base from
which to combat theirs.( Lee Braver)

I understand. My point doesn't change. If behavior is necessarily associated with one's biological sex, it must only exhibit in that sex. If the same behavior can be seen in both sexes, then it is not sexual behavior, but human behavior. Unless the transgender community can counter this, they do not have a valid argument — Philosophim

They do counter it. You keep referring to two sexes. Many within the transgender community no longer accept this binary, even if we treat it as two opposite poles of a spectrum. Btw, I don’t necessary accept every facet of this argument, but you dont seem to accord it even a smidgen of validity.

Its a contradiction to say that behaviors belong to one sex, but can cross into the other sex. Thus the transgender communities rationalization is not rational — Philosophim

It a not a question of crossing from one sex to another, but of questioning the categorical purity of the concept of biological sex.

The brokenness is the desire to be the other sex to the point of thinking you can actually be the other sex. Its not that you were born in the wrong body. — Philosophim

I think the transgender community as a whole has been moving away from this trope of ‘being born in the wrong body’, which is why there has been a move to marginalize the term ‘transexual’. Many in the transgender community believe that gender is intertwined in a hopelessly inseparable way not only with cultural influences, but interweaves culture and biological sex just as inseparably. A sex isn’t a slab of anatomy. it is defined by how it is performed. Sexed bodies are processes of interactive behaving, not simply collections of dna, so gender isnt something to be tacked onto a scientized specimen after the fact.

I think Sex and Gender are patently, inarguably different sets of properties and are easily discernable from one another. It is totally bizarre to me that it's taken seriously that they are either the same thing, or somehow reliant on one another — AmadeusD

Would you agree that in humans and other mammals there are sex-correlated differences in brain function that lead to the differences in behavior between males and females that allow, for instance, dog owners and trainers to quickly recognize males and females on the basis of these inborn brain differences and they are manifested in behavior? would you further allow that if there are such inborn sexual-related differences in psychological-behavioral gender , that there are likely intermediates between male and female inborn brain organization. In other words, an inborn basis for a spectrum of psychological genders?

We can never be radically surprised by the world.

The words of a person who has never smoked toad venom or watched Tom Brady win a Superbowl despite being down 28-3 at the end of the third quarter. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Novelty is in the eye of the beholder, you would agree. There are distinct varieties of novelty, defined by their affective meaning. A joyful surprise is a very different assessment in comparison with a horrifying surprise. I want to make the bold assertion that there is nothing but novelty, and we can group its varieties into two general categories:assimilable vs unassailable. Assimilable novelty is perceived as creative satisfaction , and unassailable novelty is experienced as what is boring, frightening, confusing.

Experiences of unintelligibility and meaninglessness represent a type of movement characterized by apparent emptiness and paralysis. Boredom, monotony, weariness and exhaustion connected with redundant experience would be, paradoxically, of the same species as the shock and trauma of dramatic otherness. As counterintuitive as it may seem, repetition of experience could only be perceived as redundant to the extent that such monotonous experience disturbs us by its resistance to intimate readability. Boredom and monotony are symptoms not of the too-predictable, but of a previously mobile, fluidly self-transformative engagement beginning to become confused, and thus seemingly barren of novelty.

So-called wearingly redundant or vacuous experience evinces the same pathology as the shocking and disturbing because these two types of events are variants of the same condition; an ongoing dearth of coherence or comprehensibility. The confusion, incoherence and mourning at the heart of experiences of monotony and exhaustion as well as shock and surprise manifest a
strange territory barren of unrecognizable landmarks. The `too same' and the `too other' are forms of the same experience; the terrifying mobility of the near-senseless, the impoverishment, moment to moment, of the meaning of each new event. It is AS IF the rate of repetition of novelty has been decelerated during experiences of crisis. We know that we are no longer what we were in such states, but we cannot fathom who or what we, and our world, are now; we are gripped by a fog of inarticulation. While still representing transit, such a destitution or breakdown of sense seems like an ongoing redundancy, a death of sense.

If the affectivities of disturbance and incomprehensibility we tend to associate with significant novelty are in fact symptoms of apparent stagnation and paralysis , which sorts of affects are indications of effective novelty? The unknown, the absolutely novel, may be most intensely available to us to the degree that we anticipate the
unanticipatable, which is only to say that a certain intimacy, continuity and gentleness pervade our most effective movement through repeated novelty. It is not affectivities of the shocking, the surprising or the strange which inaugurate our escape from the monotony and complacency of perceived authoritarian, vacuous repetition, since the latter are precisely species of the former. It is affectivities of joyful, interested engagement which express an acceleratively mobile engagement with otherness. The most stimulatingly fresh pathways imaginable are direct measures not of the confused incomprehension of disturbance but of the intimacy of familiar anticipation.

I entered this thread in order to set out a distinction between belief and truth, which ↪Astrophel apparently conflates.

What are you doing here — Banno

Just slumming. But dont you think that teasing out the relation between identity and difference, the familiarly same and the surprisingly novel, is relevant to the OP’s assertion that existence is part and parcel of justification itself?

. One recognises novelty from a base of familiarity. If that is what you are trying to say, then yes. But the world need not be bound by what you are capable of recognising, if that is what you are trying to imply.

Otherwise, we would understand novelty as soon as we encounter it. But while we might recognise that something is new, it does not follow that we recognise what that something is. — Banno

We can never be radically surprised by the world. Even objects we have never seen before are recognizable at some level with respect to a pre-understanding. We haven’t seen this particular thing but we have seen things like it , or we at least recognize it as a thing. But we dont spend much of our time simply staring at things, we use them, and their status as objects with properties dissolves into the uses we make of them in order to do things. Most of our surrounding world consists of value objects that mean what we use them for. We then notice what is novel as an interruption of our goal-oriented activity. But even when things are going smoothly and according to plan, novelty is already at work every moment. We wouldn’t be able to experience anything if that were not the case.

But once again I am attempting to condense a droplet of clarity from the cloud of chestnuts and quotes that habituate your posts. By not setting your account out clearly, you leave yourself plausible deniability.

Which I find wearying. — Banno

How many postmodern writers have you read who you believe to have set out their account clearly? Heidegger? Derrida? Deleuze? Foucault? I figure if you dont see the clarity in their arguments, and they articulate in a much more effective way what I’m trying to get across, why not save my breath and just quote them?

Everyone's a realist in some sense, no? :wink: — jkop

God forbid. It might seem that way if you haven’t stumbled upon a satisfying alternative view of the world, but there are quite a number of these. The catch is that they require the overthrow of deeply entrenched metaphysical presuppositions. Given Searle’s longstanding clueless hostility toward postmodern thinking, I wouldn’t count on him to offer guidance in this respect.

he never denied this about the phenomenon, that it was true that there was something beyond the "noematic sense" So there is an object "inherent to the sense" as well as the transcendent world that is put in parentheses. Husserl excludes "the real relation between perceiving and perceived." When he talks like this, he proves himself not to be an idealist, acknowledging what is there and actual, just suspended, and he does present the basis for following through on the promise of the reduction which is to establish the ultimate marriage between what is known, liked, disliked, approved, rejected, accepted and so forth, and what is "there," for the status of the noematic world is not to be deemed simply derivative or representational — Astrophel

You’re misreading the meaning of transcendence of the object for Husserl. What transcends the noematic appearance of the spatial object is not external to the subjective process. It is immanent to it. For instance , out of my objectivating constituting performances, a football is given to me as this object which maintains itself as a unity through all the changes in its appearance. But the football as a unified thing is transcendent to what I actually
see. I strive to get closer and closer to the object as a unity via further adumbrations. But i can never achieve complete fulfillment. In this sense the idea of unitary object will always be transcendent to what I actually experience through constituted modes of givenness. But notice that the object’s transcendence is already defined in relation to the direction of my intending activity. The world can never transcend me except in relation to , and on the basis of, my already structured intentional sense. In this way what is beyond me always in some sense belongs to me. Husserl was not a realist. Husserl says the following is the incorrect ,Cartesian way of interpreting the Transcendental Ego:

“In my ego there is formed, from out of the proper sources of transcendental passivity and activity, my “representation of the world, ” my “picture of the world, ” whereas outside of me, naturally enough, there is the world itself. But is this really a good way of putting it? Does this talk about outer and inner, if it makes any sense at all, receive its meaning from anywhere else than from my formation and my preservation of meaning?”(Phenomenology and Anthropology)

“All that exists for the pure ego becomes constituted in him himself; furthermore, that every kind of being including every kind characterized as, in any sense, "transcendent” has its own particular constitution. Transcendence in every form is an immanent existential characteristic, constituted within the ego. Every imaginable sense, every imaginable being, whether the latter is called immanent or transcendent, falls within the domain of transcendental subjectivity, as the subjectivity that constitutes sense and being. The attempt to conceive the universe of true being as something lying outside the universe of possible consciousness, possible knowledge, possible evidence, the two being related to one another merely externally by a rigid law, is nonsensical. If transcendental subjectivity is the universe of possible sense, then an outside is precisely nonsense. But even nonsense is always a mode of sense and has its non-sensicalness within the sphere of possible insight.”

You only see the relative as the unconnected because you oppose it to self-presence, as if nihilist meaninglessness were the only alternative to the thinking of presence-in-itself.

No, I don't think so. I thought you were saying they were unconnected because your response to "people can learn to communicate ideas across cultures and transcend current boundaries" seemed to be negative - that the ideas changing would imply there was no real communication.

But if we're in agreement that there is meaningful communication there, then I don't see how different cultures are a barrier that reason can't transcend, or an area where reason fails to apply — Count Timothy von Icarus

I’m all in favor of reason. But if by reason you mean the consulting of criteria and rules of reasonableness that exist prior to and outside of the actual, contextually unfolding situation in which they are being used, without that context modifying the sense of those criteria and rules, then this is a non-starter for me. As the later Wittgenstein argues, there is nothing in a rule that tells us whether we are following it correctly. In every situation where reason is involved, agreeing on what is the case is always accompanied by a redetermination of what is at stake and at issue in the interchange. That is to say, a paradoxical element of unreason belongs to the very heart of reason.

The truly groundless is not defined by anything else. To hate something else is to stand in a relation to it where you are defined by what you hate. To be merely indifferent to something is still to be defined by something, for its boundaries are the limit of your being and interest. Only an attitude of love, the identification of the self in the other, avoids this limitation, allowing for what is truly unconditioned. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Since when does love have priority over any other affectivity? One can only identify the self in the other if the other is already recognizable in some fashion. What matters to us, what we care about, whose suffering we empathize with, is dependent in the first place on what is intelligible to us from our vantage as nodes within a larger relational matrix (first order morality). We can only intend to recognize and welcome the Other who saves us from chaos; we intend to reject the Other who offers the oppression of incommensurability. Freedom from incoherence implies a sense of liberation, freedom from the order of intelligibility and intimacy a sense of subjection. We always have intended to welcome, sacrifice ourselves for the intelligible Other, and always disliked, `chose against' the incommensurate Other. What is repressive to us is what we cannot establish harmonious relation with. We cannot get beyond this link between the lovable and the recognizable without losing the basis of any ethics, which is the ability to distinguish between, even if without yet defining, what is preferred and what is not.

It is not likely you take any of this seriously. Philosopher generally don't. But blood and guts Nietzsche? I don't think so — Astrophel

Actually, I prefer what Foucault and Deleuze have done with
Nietzsche. They show what can be done with an ethics of contingent, relative becoming.

Yes, there is no outside. The idea is patently absurd, as if, as Rorty put it, the perceptual apparatus were a mirror of nature. But then, it is clear as a bell that the world is there, and it is not a representation at all, but is stand alone there, and by this I simply mean its existence as thereness possesses something that is, as Kierkegaard put it, its own presupposition. When we observe an object, the object becomes what it is in the observation, making it both a transcendental object, as the distance is never bridged, as well as an object of finitude, and this latter is what Heidegger holds — Astrophel

For Heidegger, there is nothing but the outside, in the sense of the always already ahead of itself of temporalizing understanding.

In directing itself toward ... and in grasping something, Da-sein does not first go outside of the inner sphere in which it is initially encap­sulated, but, rather, in its primary kind of being, it is always already "outside" together with some being encountered in the world already discovered. Nor is any inner sphere abandoned when Da-sein dwells
together with a being to be known and determines its character. Rather, even in this "being outside" together with its object, Da-sein is "inside, " correctly understood; that is, it itself exists as the being-in-the-world which knows. Again, the perception of what is known does not take place as a return with one's booty to the "cabinet" of consciousness after one has gone out and grasped it. Rather, in perceiving, preserving, and retaining, the Da-sein that knows remains outside as Da-sein.

Neither is the world ‘stand-alone’ there. The world is the unified totality of relevance relations, possibly ways for Dasein to be. Heidegger also calls world ‘beings as a whole’.

“…in all comportment we become aware of comporting ourselves in each case from out of the 'as a whole', however everyday and restricted this comportment may be…However concerned we are to comport ourselves with respect to various issues and to speak in terms of individual things, we nevertheless already move directly and in advance within a tacit appeal to this 'as a whole‘...We are always called upon by something as a whole. This 'as a whole' is the world.

The world temporalizes itself, which is to say, it continually projects itself anew as a whole. Dasein is continually thrown into a new world. The world worlds.

The projection is...a casting ahead that is the forming of an 'as a whole' into whose realm there is spread out a quite specific dimension of possible actualization. Every projection raises us away into the possible, and in so doing brings us back into the expanded breadth of whatever has been made possible by it. The projection and projecting in themselves raise us away to possibilities of binding, and are binding and expansive in the sense of holding a whole before us within which this or that actual thing can actualize itself as what is actual in something possible that has been projected.

So there is a concept that resolves the problem how to establish a world without concepts?

A good paradox tempts us to find a resolution, but ensures that no solution can be found. This is a good paradox. The paradox is formulated in language. So it is itself included in the problem. So "language in itself" transcends our concept of language, the "world in itself" transcends our concept of the world and the relationship or link between the two will always transcend anything we can articulate in language — Ludwig V

We dont use a concept to establish a world without concepts, we find ourselves thrown into a world ( we ‘are’ a self by continually transcending toward the world) and speak from amidst the beings ( things, concepts, uses) that are actualized from out of that world which projects itself. We can speak that world inauthentically in terms of extant things , symbols and concepts, or we can speak it authentically as a self-transcending happening (which concepts imply but conceal) , an occurrence. Then language is itself the transcending rather than a concept of itself.

Assuming naive realism, then you do in fact see the lamp, not something else in your own seeing. Seeing it, and the fact that it is there and visible, makes it possible to know that you're seeing it. — jkop

Interesting. Phenomenology and poststructuraliam arrive at conclusions quite similar to this, except that they do it without assuming realism at all.

It is phenomenologically absurd to speak of the phenomenon as if it were something behind which there would be something else of which it would be a phenomenon in the sense of the appearance which represents and expresses this something else. A phenomenon is nothing behind which there would be something else. More accurately stated, one cannot ask for something behind the phenomenon at all, since what the phenomenon gives is precisely that something in itself. (Heidegger)

The world does not much care what you believe, and will continue to inflict novelty and surprise on your beliefs. — Banno

That’s right, but because novelty is not a neutral in-itself, the world will inflict novelty within the boundaries of specifically organized discursive structures of intelligibility.

“…absent meaning-objects, reality cannot be called on to substanti­ate our claims independently of our practices of gathering and evaluating evidence. “Correspondence to reality” is merely a way of saying that some­thing is true, a compliment we pay to our best beliefs, as Rorty liked to say, but one that never gets outside our practices.

“Well, if everything speaks for an hypothesis and nothing against it—is it then certainly true? One may designate it as such.—But does it certainly agree with reality, with the facts?—With this question you are already going round in a circle.” (PI)

Nor can mental contents do the trick since practices of knowing trump any internal feelings or ideas.John McDowell captures this idea beautifully:

“now if we are simply and normally immersed in our practices, we do not wonder how their relation to the world would look from outside them, and feel the need for a solid foundation discernible from an external point of view. So we would be protected against the vertigo if we could stop supposing that the relation to reality of some area of our thought and language needs to be contemplated from a standpoint independent of that anchoring in our human life that makes the thoughts what they are for us. . . . This realism chafes at the fallibility and inconclusiveness of all our ways of finding out how things are, and purports to confer a sense on “But is it really so?” in which the question does not call for a maximally careful assessment by our lights, but is asked from a perspective transcending the limitations of our cognitive powers.”

We can appeal to nothing beyond these practices because any such appeal thereby incorporates the evidence into our language-games, thus compromising its desired independence from our practices. For the pos­sibility of making mistakes to operate, we need a way of comparing our beliefs to a reality that is, at least in principle, accessible to comparisons.

“‘But I can still imagine someone making all these connexions, and none of them corresponding with reality. Why shouldn’t I be in a similar case?’ If I imagine such a person I also imagine a reality, a world that surrounds
him; and I imagine him as thinking (and speaking) in contradiction to this world.”(PI)

The sense of wonder created by philosophy is merely the giddy dizziness one gets from being spun around to the point of disorientation; thankfully, it fades as we regain our bearings. (Lee Braver)

But knowledge certainly is not what is sought in all this. It is value. All of these endless ruminations in philosophy end here, in the pursuit of what can be generally called value. Any utterance made by a human dasein (or a fish, cat or cow dasein) has its telos in value, and value is the ONLY, I claim, no reducible phenomenological dimension of the world's presence. The only absolute — Astrophel

Nietzsche certainly thought that the buck stops with value. To be more precise, with a value-positing will to power. So in truth , the irreducible is the endless self-overcoming of value. But I don’t think that’s the kind of value-thinking you have in mind.

It may well be that language and its non- language counterpart, the "existence" of an actuality that "appears," cannot be separated, for they are a unity.

This is a major point of Heidegger, that language and the world are "of a piece." But there is always a "distance" between language and such actualities that cannot eliminated. To understand this is to see something really quite profound. I "know" that my cat's existence is "other" than the language I deploy to think what it — Astrophel

Heidegger’s concept of being-in-the -world determines that language and world are precisely not at a distance from each other. On the contrary, language discloses self and world together, as our always already being thrown into worldly possibilities. Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein make related points. The distance is not between language and the world, it is between our self and our self, due to the fact that, through language, we always come to ourselves from the world.

My cat’s existence is an existence for me, as a function of the relevance of the cat for my ongoing social practices. The discovery of this relevance through language both discloses the meaning of the cat anew and alters my previous sense of meaning of the cat for me. What would it even mean to refer to the cats existence apart from what I want to do with the cat in thinking about its existence?

It isn’t that we are presented with a pre-sorted world where catego­ries kneel for us to affix words to them like Adam naming the animals, but that we are always already in a linguistic world. We cannot sift out pristine reality from our reality, making the distinction empty. (Lee Braver)

Michel Henry's sense of the pure, or the "raw" and fleshy" encounter must stand as its own presupposition, not reducible to anything else. — Astrophel

How would you differentiate his notion of the pure encounter with that of Merleau-Ponty or Husserl? Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the flesh as corporeal intersubjectivity has been incorporated into the reciprocally causal models of embodied, enactivist approaches. Husserl, however, considers causality to be a product of the natural attitude. We have to bracket empirical causality to arrive at its primordial basis in intentional motivation.

. My absolute criterion is not killing kids, if the rest of the world fails to be properly guided by that, is my condemnation and rejection unjustly moralistic, or just? — Lionino

The devil is in the details, no? One can unproblematically posit an absolute of process, an injunction against my acting to insure the loss of something I care about. But as soon as I fill in the content of what it is I can’t abide losing, absolutism gives way to the relativism of interpretation. Is a fetus a kid? Is a murdering bad seed a kid? And what constitutes murder, and bad intent?

If you are utilitarian, there is no such thing as a (correct) absolute, there is only whatever will bring the greatest welfare. Maybe killing a kid to save thousands is good — some primitive societies believed so.
Your post seems to assume utilitarianism — Lionino

The problem with utilitarianism is its need to universalize the concept of pleasure. As Hilary Putnam writes of Dewey’s critique of utilitarianism:

The assumption that people act only on self-interested motives was sometimes defended on the basis of the hedonist psychology of Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, which held that everyone ultimately "really" desires only a subjective psychological quantity (called "pleasure" by Bentham) and that this "quantity" was a purely subjective matter. As John Dewey put it long ago,

"When happiness is conceived of as an aggregate of states of feeling, these are regarded as homogenous in quality, different from one another only in intensity and duration. Their qualitative differences are not intrinsic, but are due to the different objects with which they are associated (as pleasures of hearing, or vision). Hence they disappear when the pleasure is taken by itself as an end."

This disappearance of the qualitative differences is (as far as importance to the agent's "happiness" is concerned), of course, just what makes it possible for the utilitarian to speak of "summing pleasures, "maximizing" them, and so on. But if Dewey's alternative view is right (as I believe), and if

“agreeableness is precisely the agreeableness or congruence of some objective condition with some impulse, habit, or tendency of the agent,"

then

"of course, pure pleasure is a myth. Any pleasure is qualitatively unique, being precisely the harmony of one set of conditions with its appropriate activity. The pleasure of eating is one thing; the pleasure of hearing music, another; the pleasure of an amiable act, another; the pleasure of drunkenness or of anger is still another."

Dewey continues,

"Hence the possibility of absolutely different moral values attaching to pleasures, according to the type or aspect of character which they express. But if the good is only a sum of pleasures, any pleasure, so far as it goes, is as good as any other-the pleasure of malignity as good as the pleasure of kindness, simply as pleasure.”

Just ask how a causal relation produces a knowledge claim. Can't be done, simply because there is nothing in the apodictic principle that an event in the world requires a cause that can deliver an "aboutness" in the mind TO an object — Astrophel

Otoh, a reciprocal , recursive, self-organizing model of causality can do the job that linear causality cannot. Reciprocal causality produces normative, goal-oriented sense-making consisting of anricipatory acting on and modifying a world that in turn feeds back to modify the cognizer, forming a loop of ‘aboutness’.

↪Joshs Also, as the ultimate or absolute "mystery", g/G is neither an explanation nor a justification because attempting to answer such questions as "Why do we exist?" and "What is right or good?" with (a/the) "mystery" only begs those questions. — 180 Proof

:up:

So... if a philosopher arrives at a hypothesis of the Absolute Being of all beings; and derived therefrom, a corresponding morality; a strict deontology, she is no less offensivel than an adherent to a religion who subscribes to an Absolute God and a corresponding morality? It's not strictly the idea of God that is abhorrent, but adherence to any Absolute because of the threat such adherence brings to morality? — ENOAH

There are degrees of abhorrentness, corresponding to the nature of absoluteness being claimed. The absolutism of religious fundamentalism (Evangelical Christian , Haredi Judaism, Muslim, etc) is more intolerant than the absolutism of Hegelian dialectic, or the hidden absolutism of scientistic atheists like Dennett and Dawkins, for whom the validity of empirical truth is grounded in unquestioned presuppositions.

Is it truly the idea of God that is abhorrent, Platonic or otherwise? Or, is it what we have done to that via the corruptible vehicle of so called religion? I.e., the former, an absolute criterion for the true and real; the latter conformist, restrictive and violent in its sanction of blameful moralisms — ENOAH

If you believe in an absolute criterion of the true and the real, and the rest of the world fails to be properly guided by your absolute, you won’t consider your blameful condemnation and rejection of that world to be unjustly moralistic, conformist and restrictive. If, on the other hand, you don’t believe in absolutes, you are in a much better position to avoid moralistic condemnation and rejection of others to begin with.

For me, the best argument against god isn't that there isn't enough evidence, but that regardless of whether or not there is evidence, the very idea of god is abhorrent. This is why I consider self-declared agnostics to be closet theists.
— Joshs

One of the more intriguing responses I've read here in a while.

But is this an argument or more of reaction? Which very idea of god is abhorrent? — Tom Storm

Good question. I have in mind the platonic idea of god as an absolute substance, content, form, quality. A sun around which all objects revolve. An unfalsifiable, unchangeable criterion for the true, the real and the good. This idea is abhorrent to me because it is conformist, restrictive and violent in its sanction of blameful
moralisms.

For me we cannot know about God or prove it. That doesn't mean there is no Possibility of god. So i choose to be an agnostic and i believe that is the most convenient position a philosopher could hold — Abhiram

For me, the best argument against god isn't that there isn't enough evidence, but that regardless of whether or not there is evidence, the very idea of god is abhorrent. This is why I consider self-declared agnostics to be closet theists.

There is no idea of Aristotle’s , or anyone else, that is simply carried through from one historical period to the next in its protected, pristine identity. Ideas are always repurposed and redefined via their transmission through history.

Sure, but they're still the same core ideas being transmitted. If each formulation is sui generis and unconnected to the last, then philosophy is impossible. Perspectivism need not entail relativism — Count Timothy von Icarus

You only see the relative as the unconnected because you oppose it to self-presence, as if nihilist meaninglessness were the only alternative to the thinking of presence-in-itself. What grounds meaning is neither the identical nor the unconnected, neither causality nor chaos, but the motivated, the relevant, the consistent. History, change, negation, difference; none of these can be understood if they are subordinated to a platonism of the absolute, the total, the identical.

. The Doctrine of Transcendentals itself could pass from its embryonic form in the mind of pagan, Greek Aristotle through Islamic thought, to medieval Latin Christianity precisely because it could transcend Greek, Islamic, or Latin terms of discourse. This is reasons transcendence at work. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I would argue that the Doctrine of Transcendentals was transmitted up to the current philosophical milieu , as were Plato’s forms , Descartes’ Cogito and Kant’s transcendental subjectivity, along the way having their sense transformed continually. I think if Aristotle were re-animated and brought to the present time, he would disappoint many of his modern followers by siding with the most traditionalistic ethical elements of our culture. His thinking was a bit ahead of his time, and well behind our time. His thinking is separated from ours by all of the philosophies that followed one another in the intervening historical development, each critiquing the previous era’s limitations and pointing to new possibilities. There is no idea of Aristotle’s , or anyone else, that is simply carried through from one historical period to the next in its protected, pristine identity. Ideas are always repurposed and redefined via their transmission through history. Development of ideas is a contingent movement, not a logical one.

Further, people have "their reasons" for their views as they understand them, but there are also metaphysical reasons for these reasons if they are not to be simply "uncaused. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Reasons are caused within an interplay of reciprocal causality and reciprocal interaffecting, in the way the structure and function of an organism is caused by the selective pressures of a reciprocally causal ecological system. The function and aim of reason ( and metaphysics), just as the function of a hand or an eye, is not settled in advance, but arises alongside the emerging phenomenon. This is a non-linear rather than linear notion of causality. The rules are changed by the feedback from their consequences. One cannot attain an alien culture’s reasons without first understanding the worldview within which these reasons are intelligible. In order to understand their worldview, we cannot simply draw from some already established metaphysics, since a metaphysics amounts to a worldview There is no way to align multiple, incommensurable worldviews on the basis of a universal notion of reason grounded in a universal metaphysics. One has to be willing to alter one’s own worldview and metaphysical basis of reason in order to achieve dialogue with another perspective.

… the origin of the emergence of a thing and its ultimate usefulness, its practical application and incorporation into a system of ends, are toto coelo separate; that anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually interpreted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose by a power superior to it; that everything that occurs in the organic world consists of overpowering, dominating, and in their turn, overpowering and dominating consist of re-interpretation, adjustment, in the process of which their former ‘meaning' [Sinn] and ‘purpose' must necessarily be obscured or completely obliterated. No matter how perfectly you have understood the usefulness of any physiological organ (or legal institution, social custom, political usage, art form or religious rite), you have not yet thereby grasped how it emerged: uncomfortable and unpleasant as this may sound to more elderly ears,– for people down the ages have believed that the obvious purpose of a thing, its utility, form and shape, are its reason for existence, the eye is made to see, the hand to grasp.

… the whole history of a ‘thing', an organ, a tradition can to this extent be a continuous chain of signs, continually revealing new interpretations and adaptations, the causes of which need not be connected even amongst themselves, but rather sometimes just follow and replace one another at random. The ‘development' of a thing, a tradition, an organ is therefore certainly not its progressus towards a goal, still less is it a logical progressus.(Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals)

I don't think everything that might be labeled "relativism," would fall prey to the problems of misology. Schindler is talking about a particular sort of relativism that denies the ability of reason to make judgements vis-á-vis what is declared relative. It is in this that it becomes absolutizing. Relational explanations, those where perspective is essential, notions of concepts as unfolding historically (e.g. Hegel) might be called "relativistic" in some sense, but they are not blocking off their subject matter from the purview of reason — Count Timothy von Icarus

How would universal reason, or even Rorty’s conversation of mankind, adjudicate the following ‘differends’ (to use Lyotard’s term for the inability of the established terms of discourse to recognize a claim made by the victim)?

… a conception of conversation that retains an aspect of universality is sometimes put forward in postmodern discussions -- namely, the notion of the "conversation of mankind." Of course it does seem odd that Richard Rorty, the pragmatic liberal, whether or not we would assign him the title of postmodern, retrieves this conception of conversation from the politically conservative Michael Oakeshott.

In terms of the conversation of mankind, incommensurability is defined only within the conversation, in the vocabulary of the metadiscourse, and if a group refuses to take up, or is incapable of taking up that vocabulary they are not agreeing to disagree. One can find numerous examples of such groups. The Sinn Fein (the political wing of the IRA) in Northern Ireland had at one time refused to take their seats in the British parliament when elected. They attempted to remain within their own conversation and did not accept the vocabulary of the other official one; an overarching conversation was refused. A group of aborigine coal miners in New Zealand refused to take up the terms of collective bargaining because in their view the vocabulary and legal processes of the industrialists -- which in the West would represent civility (agreeing not to disagree) and participation in conversation -- was immoral. This group, to join in the conversation, would have to adopt a vocabulary and procedure to which they object and find abhorrent. So also, native American tribes who did not have within their vocabulary the conceptions of property, legal ownership, purchase or sale, were not genuine participants in the negotiations which resulted in the white man's ownership of the forests and rivers.

For persons of African-American or Native-American descent who feel that their needs for freedom and dignity do not find adequate expression in the dominant language of formal rights, for women and gays who feel that their needs for self-identity do not find adequate expression in traditional gender roles, and for workers who feel that their needs for justice do not find adequate expression in the contractual language of a wage agreement, refusal to enter into the established discourse may well represent a principled moral stance against oppression and injustice.

The conversation of mankind would be a universal conversation based on a presupposed (meta)consensus -- a contract, expressible in prescriptive terms, an agreement to disagree. In contrast, the universality claimed for the hermeneutical model of conversation involves neither a metaconsensus nor a method of adjudication. This model does not entail a metanarrative. Although it lays claim to universality, it does not claim adjudicative power. It is not prescribed as a solution to problems; it is not that we ought to converse. The claim is rather that we cannot avoid conversing. It is not a matter of agreeing to participate in a particular conversation, but rather a matter of finding ourselves already cast (sometimes as unwilling participants) in one or many conversations which are organized (or disorganized) in paralogical fashion. This means that wherever we find ourselves we are always in a hermeneutical situation, in a conversation, and more precisely, in one conversation among others. This universality has nothing to do with a universal conversation. As Gadamer indicates, the universality of hermeneutics is in no way inconsistent with the fact that a particular conversation contains its own limits within itself, but "fits perfectly well with the factual limitedness of all human experience and with the limits governing our linguistic communication and possibility for expression" (DD 95).

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

At 52:00 he reads a footnote that addresses ↪Joshs objection. — Leontiskos

I am reminded of Richard Rorty’s remark about relativism:

Relativism certainly is self-refuting, but there is a difference between saying that every community is as good as every other and saying that we have to work out from the networks that we are, from the communities with which we presently identify. Postmodernism is no more relativistic than Hilary Putnam’s suggestion that we drop trying for a ‘God’s-eye view’ and realize that ‘We can only hope to produce a more rational conception of rationality or a better conception of morality if we operate from within our tradition.’ The view that every tradition is as rational or as moral as every other could be held only by a god, someone who had no need to inquire or deliberate. Such a being would have escaped from history and conversation into contemplation and metanarrative. To accuse postmodernism of relativism is to try to put a metanarrative in the postmodernist’s mouth. One will do this if one identifies ‘holding a philosophical position’ with having a metanarrative available. If we insist on such a definition of ‘philosophy’, then postmodernism is postphilosophical. But it would be better to change the definition.

I think of Newton, developing calculus to describe physical phenomena. And perhaps some math is created in this fashion today. But by and large it's not an empirical process. Although math is called the Queen of the Sciences, it is not really a science — jgill

You’re saying math is not empirical for roughly the same reason that a novel or poem is not empirical, right?

The main problem with sensorimotor theory would be the fact that with the same input to the sense organs or sensibilities of different individuals, the behavioural and mental eventual output of the each individuals can be vastly different. And also the same behavioural output can be achieved by different sensorimotor inputs. — Corvus

It can’t be vastly different, because individuals are not solipsisms. Embodied and phenomenological interpretations consider the embeddedness of the embodied subject in a world of linguistic cultural practices to be of fundamental importance to the understanding of behavior.

“…intersubjective (social and cultural) factors already have an effect on our perception and understanding of the world, even in the immediacy of our embodied and instrumental copings with the environment.”(Shaun Gallagher)

Sense always co-implies body, and subjectivity belongs to intersubjectivity. Being in the world for Merleau-Ponty is occupying a position within a shared gestalt (the same world for everyone). I am primordially situated in an intersubjective world.

” My friend Paul and I point out to each other certain details of the landscape; and Paul's finger, which is pointing out the church tower, is not a finger-for-me that I think of as orientated towards a church-tower-for-me, it is Paul's finger which itself shows me the tower that Paul sees, just as, conversely, when I make a movement towards some point in the landscape that I can see, I do not imagine that I am producing in Paul, in virtue of some pre-established harmony, inner visions merely analogous to mine: I believe, on the contrary, that my gestures invade Paul's world and guide his gaze. When I think of Paul, I do not think of a flow of private sensations indirectly related to mine through the medium of interposed signs, but of someone who has a living experience of the same world as mine, as well as the same history, and with whom I am in communication through that world and that history.

“ In the experience of dialogue, there is constituted between the other person and myself a common ground; my thought and his are inter-woven into a single fabric, my words and those of my interlocutor are called forth by the state of the discussion, and they are inserted into a shared operation of which neither of us is the creator. We have here a dual being, where the other is for me no longer a mere bit of behavior in my transcendental field, nor I in his; we are collaborators for each other in consummate reciprocity. Our perspectives merge into each other, and we co-exist through a common world. In the present dialogue, I am freed from myself, for the other person's thoughts are certainly his; they are not of my making, though I do grasp them the moment they come into being, or even anticipate them. And indeed, the objection which my interlocutor raises to what I say draws from me thoughts which I had no idea I possessed, so that at the same time that I lend him thoughts, he reciprocates by making me think too. It is only retrospectively, when I have withdrawn from the dialogue and am recalling it that I am able to reintegrate it into my life and make of it an episode in my private history”.
(Phenomenology of Perception, p.471).

Another difficulty of the sensorimotor theory of mind would be, that there are many different factors which affects the state of mind. And it cannot explain most subconscious or unconscious mental events. — Corvus

It explains them differently than a psychoanalytic model of the unconscious.

“From the point of view of a phenomenology of the lived body, the unconscious is not an intrapsychic reality residing in the depths "below consciousness". Rather, it surrounds and permeates conscious life, just as in picture puzzles the figure hidden in the background surrounds the foreground, and just as the lived body conceals itself while functioning. Unconscious fixations are like certain restrictions in a person's space of potentialities produced by an implicit but ever-present past which declines to take part in the continuing progress of life. (Thomas Fuchs)

In the end, I fear that all of us, no matter how well educated in this subject, still need to piss and eat and still need to treat the world as though realism were true, which means avoiding the worst of the cold, trying to dodge cancer and scrounging enough money to live comfortably into old age. — Tom Storm

On the other hand, psychologist George Kelly makes some good points about the dangers of a realistic attitude being taken too far:

…the notion finally struck me that, no matter how close I came to the man or woman who sought my help, I always saw him through my own peculiar spectacles, and
never did he perceive what I was frantically signaling to him, except through his. From this moment I ceased, as I am now convinced every psychotherapist does whether he wants to admit it or not, being a realist. More important, I could now stop representing psychology to clients as packaged reality, warranted genuine and untouched by human minds. Perhaps"realism" is not a good term for what I am talking about. It is obvious, of course, that I am not talking about Platonic realism. Nobody talks about that any more. The realism from which my clients and I are always trying to wriggle loose might possibly be called "materialistic realism." At least it is the hardheaded unimaginative variety nowadays so popular among scientists, businessmen, and neurotics.

What actually jarred me loose was the observation that clients who felt themselves confronted with down-to-earth realities during the course of psychotherapy became much like those who were confronted with downright dogmatic interpretations of either the religious or psychological variety. On the heels of this observation came the notion that dogmatism -the belief that one has the word of truth right from the horse's mouth-and modern realism -the belief that one has the word of truth right from nature's mouth-add up to the same thing. To go even further, I now suspect that neither of these assumptions about the revealed nature of truth is any more useful to scientists than it is to clients.

If one is to avoid dogmatism entirely he needs to alert himself against realism also, for realism, as I have already implied, is a special form of dogmatism and one which is quite as likely to stifle the client's creative efforts. A client who is confronted with what are conceded to be stark realities can be as badly immobilized as one confronted with a thickheaded therapist. Even the presumed realism of his own raw feelings can convince a client that he has reached a dead end. I am not a realist-not any more and I do not believe either the client or the therapist has to lie down and let facts crawl over him. Right here is where the
theoretical viewpoint I call the psychology of personal constructs stakes out its basic philosophical claim.
There is nothing so obvious that its appearance is not altered when it is seen in a different light. This is the faith that sustains the troubled person when he undertakes psychotherapy seriously.

To state this faith as a philosophical premise: Whatever exists can be reconstrued. This is to say that none of today's constructions-which are, of course, our only means of portraying reality is perfect and, as the history as the faith expressed of human thought repeatedly suggests, none is final. Moreover, this is the premise upon which most psychotherapy has to be built, if not in the mind of the therapist, at least in the mind of the client. To be sure, one may go to a therapist with his facts clutched in his hand and asking only what he ought to do with them. But this is merely seeking technical advice, not therapy. Indeed, what else would one seek unless he suspected that the obstacles now shaping up in front of him are not yet cast in the ultimate form of reality? As a matter of fact, I have yet to see a realistic client who sought the help of a therapist in changing his outlook. To the realist, outlook and reality are made of the same inert stuff. On the other hand, a client who has found his therapeutic experience helpful often says, “In many ways things are the same as they were before, but how differently I see them!"

This abandonment of realism may alarm some readers. It may seem like opening the door to wishful thinking, and to most psychologists wishful thinking is a way of coming unhinged. Perhaps this is why so many of them will never admit to having any imagination, at least until after they suppose they have realistically demonstrated that what they secretly imagined was there all the time, waiting to be discovered. But for me to say that whatever exists can be reconstrued is by no manner or means to say that it makes no difference how it is construed. Quite the contrary. It often makes a world of difference. Some reconstructions may open fresh channels for a rich and productive life, Others may offer one no alternative save suicide.

Funny about the crows. Europeans never came up with 0 on their own. :rofl: — Patterner

I’m not planning on swapping my calculator for a chiclid. I dont even know what a chicklid is.

If the dog had the capacity to understand mathematics, and it was our inability to teach it that was the problem, it would not need teaching any more than we did. It would have developed mathematics as we did — Patterner

I agree animals dont learn formal mathematics, but that’s not to say they don’t have mathematical capabilities.

We often think of mathematical ability as being uniquely human, but in fact, scientists have found that many animal species—including lions, chimpanzees, birds, bees, ants, and fish—seem to possess at least a rudimentary counting ability or number sense. Crows can understand the concept of zero. And a study published in April found that both stingrays and cichlids can take this rudimentary "numerosity" to the next level, performing simple addition and subtraction for a small number of objects (in the range of 1 to 5).

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/06/what-the-simple-mathematical-abilities-of-animals-can-tell-us-about-ourselves/

https://www.mathnasium.com/blog/math-isnt-just-for-humans-animals-can-count-too#:~:text=Some%20animals%20are%20better%20at%20counting%20than%20others.&text=In%20the%20late%201980s%2C%20chimpanzees,objects%20on%20a%20computer%20screen.

If the dog had the capacity to understand mathematics, and it was our inability to teach it that was the problem, it would not need teaching any more than we did. It would have developed mathematics as we did — Patterner

I agree animals dont learn formal mathematics, but that’s. it say they don’t have mathematical capabilities.

https://www.mathnasium.com/blog/math-isnt-just-for-humans-animals-can-count-too#:~:text=Some%20animals%20are%20better%20at%20counting%20than%20others.&text=In%20the%20late%201980s%2C%20chimpanzees,objects%20on%20a%20computer%20screen.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/06/what-the-simple-mathematical-abilities-of-animals-can-tell-us-about-ourselves/

In any case, the principle of transcending egoic consciousness is fundamental to many faith traditions — Wayfarer

Varela and Thompson, in their book The Embdied Mind, made their way from empirically demonstrating a groundless self to emphasizing the beneficial ethical implications of the decentering of the Cartesian subject. They assert that a thoroughgoing understanding of the groundlessness of personhood reveals the mutual co-determination of subject and world. This realization can in turn lead, through the use of contemplative practice of mindfulness, to the awareness of universal empathy, compassion and benevolence.

‘In Buddhism, we have a case study showing that when groundlessness is embraced and followed through to its ultimate conclusions, the outcome is an unconditional sense of intrinsic goodness that manifests itself in the world as spontaneous compassion.”(Thompson)

But I never understood how assuming a groundless ego leads to spontaneous compassion and benevolence. The basis of our awareness of a world isn't simply relational co-determinacy, but the experience of motivated, desiring CHANGE in relational co-determinacy. For Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, every moment of return to the thinking of totality conjures a different affect and a slightly different motivated meaning of the whole. Feelings of compassion and benevolence belong to an infinite spectrum of always changing affectivities of positive and negative valence. Phenomenal awareness as transition from one kind of relational unity to another can just as well be malevolent as benevolent. Within the range of kinds of relationality, a particular phenomenal awareness may be a lessening of compassion or a strengthening of it. We can not say it is always benevolent, only that it is always a new sense of the correlational, that it is never without co-determinacy. Becoming is the restless anxiety of desire, striving, motivation, and the ground of all affect and valuation.