What are such paradigm shifts in Philosophy?
— SpinozaNietzsche

Maybe nothing more than who is still the more referenced, after the longer time.

I submit, under that criteria, there are but two: Aristotle with pure logic, Kant with pure reason. All others construct philosophies ultimately grounded in, or at least conditioned by, presuppositions of them. — Mww

According to that logic, most of what Kuhn considered to be paradigm shifts in the sciences would have to be ignored.

It still seems impossible, or better put, an absurd possibility, for me to imagine I could prove to myself that myself is not there, but then again, I began this wondering in the first place, and I still have no idea what a “myself” actually is.

It is no wonder I know so little of the world; I can’t even see my face in a mirror, and further, I can’t see my face in a mirror even while it is appearing the mirror itself is me — Fire Ologist

Have you read any Wittgenstein, particularly his later work? He tried to show how the kinds of questions you’re asking result from confusions caused by how our language is grammatically structured around the subject-predicate relation. This linguistic heritage straitjackets the way we think about meaning into boxes, generalities and abstractions like assuming the mind as some kind of container, the existence of a thing as an inert property , and factual knowledge as divorced from the context of interactions in which we use that knowledge and make it relevant and intelligible. In other words, your puzzlement comes less from the way the world is than the presumptions you are tacitly relying on in posing your questions. Start by asking yourself , not what something means in itself, but what you are trying to do with it.

↪Joshs Yes, I can see you two wouldn't get along. Talis is a reactionary from the post-modernist pov, but then that probably applies to me also :yikes: — Wayfarer

Please don’t be a reactionary. I highly recommend
Lee Braver’s ‘A Thing of this World’, in which he discusses and compares Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Foucault, Heidegger and Derrida. He is well known for translating the challenging prose of poststructuralist writings into clear and accessible concepts. Do me a favor and send the book to Tallis, too.

These and the many other advances in neuroscience make me think that philosophy might have to change its mind — Rob J Kennedy

Philosophy changes its mind all the time, usually well before the sciences do. The kinds of neurological ’fixes’ you describe have little to do with the meaning of paradigm shifts as Thomas Kuhn meant them. Improvement in a technology need not require any global transformation in thinking.

I wrote to Tallis after getting one of his books, and he replied very positively. I will look out for that title! (Looking at the Amazon page, one of the reviews comes from James le Fanu, another UK writer from a medical background, who's book Why Us? also really impressed me, about 10 years ago, which is of a similar genre. ) — Wayfarer

I had never heard of Tallis until you mentioned him. I’m sure he has interesting ideas to offer, but he’s an ignoramus when it comes to poststructuralism. Reading the following nauseated me.

I was reminded of Roger when I read Intellectual Impostures by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont (henceforth S&B). Like Roger, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Jean Baudrillard and Gilles Deleuze have the habit of using terms of which they have not the faintest understanding, in order to impress the impressionable. Unlike Roger, they did not grow out of it and, also unlike Roger, they were rewarded not with obscurity but with international fame and the adulation of seemingly intelligent academics the world over.

For many years, Lacan, Derrida, Kristeva et al got away with murder, confident that their readers would have only the slightest acquaintance with the areas of knowledge they expropriated to prop up their ideas and their reputation for scholarship, indeed for omniscience. Few if any real historians took note of Michel Foucault's eccentric periodisations; with a single exception, analytical philosophers did not think of Derrida as someone to engage in a debate about the contemporary significance of J.L. Austin and speech act theory; and for every ten thousand students who learned about Rousseau's ideas from popularisations of Derrida, there was hardly one who had read, and reflected upon, Rousseau's writings for herself.

Eventually the postmodern Theorists started to attract the attention of experts in the disciplines into which they had strayed. Linguists looked at their linguistics and found it littered with elementary errors. Derrida, for example, repeatedly confused the sign as a whole with the signifier and so have his many hundreds of thousands of obedient disciples. This error is one of the cornerstones of his work. Other linguists were amused by the Derrideans' ignorance of linguistics outside of Saussure -- this ignorance perhaps strengthening their confidence in their ability to pronounce on the whole of language. Historians have examined Foucault's egregious versions of the history of thought and have discovered that even the miniscule and eccentric empirical base upon which his broad sweep theories are poised is grossly at variance with the documentary evidence. His periodisation -- crucial to his vision of Western history and of man as `a recent invention' -- would, to take one small example, require Descartes to have lived sometime after he had died, in order to fit into the right episteme. Indeed, one does not have to be much of a scholar to demonstrate that Foucault's epistemes and the so-called ruptures epistemologiques separating them -- the central notions of the book (The Order of Things) that brought him his international fame -- correspond in no way to any historical reality

I hear the Existentialists are mighty fond of him, too.
— Joshs

What are your thoughts on the existentialist reading of Nietzsche? Is this illustrative of his fecundity, or is it a partial misreading in your assessment? — Tom Storm

To me it’s like interpreting a film on different levels. You can certainly read Nietzsche as an existentialist and get a lot of him that way. Understanding him as a postmodernist doesn’t invalidate the existentialist perspective so much as radicalize it, put it on steroids.

It has been said that all of today’s philosophy is built on Kant. I would add that all of postmodernist philosophy is built on [deliberately misreading] Nietzsche.
— Joshs
"Beware lest a statue slay you." :zip: — 180 Proof

I hear the Existentialists are mighty fond of him, too.

I do like Nietzsche like a writer, but I have serious doubts on his contributions on aesthetics, ethics, epistemology, and whatever branches of philosophy are taught in schools nowadays. The reason why Nietzsche might be the most popular "philosopher" in Europe I think is his writing ability, not his philosophy. — Eros1982

Don’t believe it. It’s been 135 years since Nietzsche went crazy and his ideas still haven’t been absorbed by most of today’s philosophers. That’s how ahead of his time he was, and a statement of how stagnant today’s intellectual scene is. It has been said that all of today’s philosophy is built on Kant. I would add that all of postmodernist philosophy is built on Nietzsche.

His aphorisms are masterpieces of world literature, but nothing great happens in Nietzsche's "philosophy". This is what I came to believe — Eros1982

But you also said in a previous thread that you have little background in philosophy, having wasted two years attempting to learn it.

If it is given that a thing is intelligible, in what sense are there conditions for the possibility of its being intelligible? For that which is given, re: those things that are intelligible, the very possibility of it is also given, so wouldn’t the conditions be met? — Mww

What Thompson means by condition of possibility here isn’t simply the generic givenness that things are intelligible but the specific way they are intelligible, their manner of being. Heidegger gives a good illustration of the blind spot for the conditions of possibility for the intelligibility of things.

The most immediate state of affairs is, in fact, that we simply see and take things as they are: board, bench, house, policeman. Yes, of course. However, this taking is always a taking within the context of dealing-with something, and therefore is always a taking-as, but in such a way that the as-character does not become explicit in the act.

The non-explicitness of this “as” is precisely what constitutes the act's so-called directness. Yes, the thing that is understood can be apprehended directly as it is in itself. But this directness regarding the thing apprehended does not inhibit the act from having a developed structure. Moreover, what is structural and necessary in the act of [direct] understanding need not be found, or co-apprehended, or expressly named in the thing understood

But philosophy is not a science, and not necessarily subject to the sorts of historical analysis common to the sciences. Would you happily call pointillism a paradigm? Or Shinto? Seems a stretch. — Banno

Philosopher Lee Braver happily associates philosophies and metaphysical eras with paradigms. There is the Kantian paradigm, the Heideggerian paradigm, etc. He takes his lead from writers like Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and Heidegger.

This is more of a stretch, but perhaps Thompson also recognizes how Stephen Law's Going Nuclear is of relevance in the case of many who profess idealism, and use idealist arguments to feign philosophical sophistication and to avoid the apperance of losing arguments. — wonderer1

I can’t help but suspect that Law would consider Thompsons’s thoughts below as a form of idealism.

I would give up both realism and anti-realism, then, in favour of what could be called a pluralist pragmatism. What the pluralist insists on is that there is no foundational version, one which anchors all the rest or to which all others can be reduced. The pragmatist insists that the world is both found and made: it is made in the finding and found in the making.To erase the boundary between knowing a language and knowing our way in the world gives us a fresh appreciation of the world. That world, however, is not given, waiting to be represented. We find the world, but only in the many incommensurable cognitive domains we devise in our attempt to know our way around. The task of the philosopher is not to extract a common conceptual scheme from these myriad domains and to determine its faithfulness to some uncorrupted reality; it is, rather, to learn to navigate among the domains, and so to clarify their concerns in relation to each other.

To make it complete, we need to realize that, given the described situation, we not only don’t have any contact with reality, but actually, as a consequence, we have absolutely no idea about what the word “reality” means. We need to realize that thinking that it is possible to think of the concept of “reality” is an illusion. If whatever we think comes exclusively from a contact with our own subjectivity, then the very idea of “reality” is an illusion. It is like those who have been born blind and, nonetheless, that try to figure some ideas about what colors are. They do it, they say that they have tried and they have been able to produce some ideas, but it is clear that, whatever idea they have been able to produce inside themselves, it can only be an illusion. — Angelo Cannata

This last option is from Berkeley? It would seem to just reverse the roles that subject and object play in a realist account, by placing an idealist subject in the position of the really real object. What you left out is a relativism which eliminates the distinction between reality and appearance. This allows for the existence of that which is outside of or other than the subject without claiming any foundational status for what appears.

The blind spot keeps us from recognizing these things.
— Joshs

What do you think of Thompson's comment towards the end of the video, about idealism being a philosophical crutch? — wonderer1

Not sure, since he didn’t have time to elaborate. How do you interpret it?

It's a similar argument to Nietzsche's, which is why I can understand it. In fact it seems Collingwood and Nietzsche share many similar positions. — Vaskane

God, I hope not. That would make me much less interested in Nietzsche.

↪Wayfarer The natural sciences are observational-experimental methods, force-multiplied by mathematical techniques, for the manifest purpose of publicly correcting "common sense" experiences (e.g. folk psychologies, customary intuitions (i.e. stereotypes, clichés, X-of-the-gaps stories, etc), cognitive biases, institutional (dogmatic) superstitions, etc) in order to testably explain aspects of the natural world and ourselves — 180 Proof

The natural sciences are conventionalized versions of philosophy whose ‘advantage’ over the latter is not that they secure better access to truths about the world, or that they progress and philosophy doesn’t , or that they progress faster than philosophy, but that they conceal individual differences in point of view by using a generic, flattened down vocabulary, which mathematics excels at. As such , they constitute a kind of common sense with respect to the more nuanced and particularized sense of the best philosophy. They represent the progress of an in-common standardized and technicized sense. Testability and falsification dont eliminate or minimize bias, they tighten up and standardize the conceptualization of a bias ( paradigm) so it can be utilized by a community of researchers in productive ways, and to make it easier to overthrow one bias is favor of a new bias.The blind spot keeps us from recognizing these things.

I always understood thrownness as a limitation or boundary that might impact upon our anticipatory sense making. Are you suggesting the more salient dimension to this is how we are thrown into adaptation? — Tom Storm

Sort of. For Heidegger it’s not so much a matter of adapting to already formed external realities. Rather, it about creating possibilities.

““The essence of something is not at all to be discovered simply like a fact; on the contrary, it must be brought forth. To bring forth is a kind of making, and so there resides in all grasping and positing of the essence something creative…. To bring forth means to bring out into the light, to bring something in sight which was up to then not seen at all, and specifically such that the seeing of it is not simply a gaping at something already lying there but a seeing which, in seeing, first brings forth what is to be seen, i.e., a productive seeing.”

Maybe Heidegger is more helpful frame as he posits the idea of thrownness. We are "thrown" into existence, born into a specific time, place, and cultural context, without any control over these matters. — Tom Storm

Thrownness is an interesting concept. You’re right that some interpret this as meaning the history of external circumstances which shapes us outside our control. But others argue that thrownness has more to do with how the future comes toward us than how the past constrains us. In other words, thrownness is our creative muse, whispering in our ear, opening up new worlds of possibility. Even what we consider to be autonomously willed choice is something we are thrown into.

This play is undoubtedly characteristic of the ways in which we conceive of human perception, experience and judgement. Do you want to suggest that it has an actuality beyond that? — Janus

Yes. Every aspect of the world interacts with every other such that no laws , rules or fixities constrain it. Instead, interactions produce new interactions which produce new interactions. The cosmos is in the business of reinventing its past constantly. The ideality of this continual self-creation does not depend on the mind of a human subject. We are simply a participant in it, but a participant who can rapidly reinvent worlds. The fact that there are no laws constraining future possibilities on the basis of a fixed in place history does not mean change and becoming means chaos and arbitrariness. On the contrary, we live in natural and social circumstances of relative stability and familiarity. One does not need a universe of already fixed properties in order to be able to anticipate new events.

The non-locality of selfhood is serial aboutness: the self, as such, is a continual roadmap to somewhere else.* In its act of thinking, the self displaces itself from what it thinks about such that whatever it thinks about is not-yet-but-will-be. In this regard, thought is both manipulatable and unapproachable. Herein we get a whiff of Satre’s human freedom in the form of the uncontainable self as consciousness. Existentialism must therefore be about authenticity, and its impossibility. The authentic self, therefore, is rooted in a series of forward-looking fictions about the illusive_elusive self as once-was-but-no-longer-is. — ucarr

This absent-self idea comes from Heidegger but Sartre insisted on bringing back the Cartesian subject and freely willing consciousness as the basis of the self.

We are outside the minds of other people. Do you think that we can learn about the workings of other people's minds by observation of their behavior? Doesn't your statement amount to saying psychology is impossible? — wonderer1

There are approaches within psychology which argue that
‘mind’ is not an inside set off against an outside, but an inseparable interaction, a system of coordinations with an environment in which what constitutes the perceiving (the inside) and the perceived environment ( the outside) are defined and changed by their reciprocal interaction. Because as individuals embodied and embedded in the world we are already outside ourselves in this way, there is no radical distinction between perceiving ourselves ( we come back to ourselves from the world) and perceiving others.
Mind is thus treated no differently than organism , which has no true ‘inside’ given they it is nothing but a system of interactions with an environment it defines on the basis of its normative way of functioning. But neither is there a true ‘outside’. So this modifies Wayfarer’s idealism somewhat into a play better the ideal and the real in which neither side has priority.

As long as the philosophy of mind does not make use of a sharp and categorically clear approach to the theory of science and instead loses itself in all kinds of irrationalities, it can be called dead.
In this form, it is of no use to science, nor does it provide an explanation for the nature of consciousness, but rather causes confusion. The instrumentalist approach of neuroscience and AI does not need such a philosophy. — Wolfgang

Perhaps the problem originates from the categorical nature of the distinctions you make between what you understand as the subjective and the empirically objective, the physical and the mental. Is instrumentalism in neuroscience a necessity or a choice? The research program of neurophenomenology would seem to be one example of a non-instrumental approach to neuroscience. Or is this irrational? I’m curious as to what other ‘irrationalities’ you have in mind with regard to philosophy of mind. Could you give some examples? This may help to determine whether the source of the difficulties you raise lies with the philosophical models or with the limits of your imagination.

It’s the Uber-pizza

The reliance on excessive vocabulary and technical jargon is the desperate cry for relevance and convincing others of its own importance. The more one relies on esoteric vocabulary, the more unnecessarily complex the idea becomes. This can give the illusion of complexity and intelligence where it does not exist — Philosophim

Do you have any famous philosophers in mind here, or just the hoi polloi?

I personally think that one can break the history of philosophy into two categories. These categories are the will to meaning and the will to power; Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were known for putting a focus on these, but I think the roots themselves go back to antiquity — Dermot Griffin

.

Nietzsche didn’t speak of will to meaning but will to truth, a subset of will to power. His notion of power wasn’t some kind of concentrated energy possessed by certain individuals or institutions to be used for good or evil. He believed that all meaning is the effect of differential relations within a system of values. Each individual psyche is organized as such schemes, gestalts, matrices of inter-affecting vectors of drives competing with and altering each other. Social power works the same way, as differential forces flowing though and between persons in a culture, so that each of us in our practices reciprocally affect each other to form social systems and institutions shaped in certain ways, producing and changing the meanings that they have for us. Power exerts its effects bottom up rather than top down, through all kinds of complex feedback mechanisms.

↪L'éléphant :up: No problem. I would also add that I never know who a person really is. — Tom Storm

No wonder. Ever notice how who you think the other person in your relationship is changes over time, and who they and you are changes through being affected by the reciprocal interaction of the growing relationship itself?

So, I don't think science has anything much to say here, as I see all of science as dealing only with things as they appear to us. I don't see the Popper/ Kuhn "split" as a significant polemic; I think the views of each can be accommodated within the views of the other — Janus

The Kuhn-Popper split is one of philosophy rather than science, and the two views definitely cannot be accommodated within each other, any more than postmodernism can be accommodated within realism. They both talk about the allegedly ‘same’ world outside of our schemes, but in terms sharply different from each other.

We can exercise our imaginations on that question without fear of incoherence or performative contradiction, but definite views are out of the question. That's the way I see our situation, for what it's worth — Janus

You may have a more definite view without being aware of it. That’s why I mentioned the split between Kuhn and Popper on how what’s out there impacts our scientific knowledge. This difference reflects a difference in understanding the nature of reality in itself. I imagine you have a preference between these two philosophies of science.

it deems logically impossible, but what appears from the vantage of that metaphysics as unintelligible, senseless and incoherent
— Joshs

Aren't those the same thing? — Lionino

Is logical impossibility the same thing as nonsense? Doesn't what is logically impossible conform to the criteria of meaning that allow a judgement of its meaningful incompatibility to be made? For something to be outside of this metaphysical criteria would be for it to appear as random, chaotic, not subject to logical judgement at all.

So, basically, when we say, it is metaphysically impossible for something to happen in a metaphysical system, we are saying, given a metaphysical system M and a proposition X, "In M, X is impossible", it seems that whether X is possible or not boils down to the semantics of M, that is, whether some of the properties or consequences of X are in contradiction to the axioms of M, making untrue analytic statements — Lionino

Wouldn’t the boundaries of a metaphysical system be defined not by what it deems logically impossible, but what appears from the vantage of that metaphysics as unintelligible, senseless and incoherent? What is logically possible and impossible would seem to be reciprocally implied, and both would define what is included WITHIN the system, not what is other than it.

A number of writers make a distinction between physicalism and naturalism on the basis of the inclusion or exclusion of the role of subjective point of view in the determination of the object.
— Joshs

If the object is defined as 'the object as perceived' then of course it is trivially true that the subjective point of view would be a determinant. But if the object is defined as 'that which interacts with our senses resulting in perception' then the subjective point of view would be a result, not a determinant…

The argument that claims that because it is a mind which says that there are existents which are mind-independent, it follows that there can be no mind-independent existents, is a very weak argument which trades on conflating what we say with what actually might exist independently of our saying. As far as I can tell this impoverished argument (in the West at least) comes from Schopenhauer. — Janus

Have you heard of Object Oriented Ontology, or Speculative Realism? They compose a diverse group united by the claim that philosophy since Kant has been in the the thrall of correlationism, which makes what objects are in themselves beholden or secondary to their relation to a perceiving subject.They argue that this amounts to an anthropocentric smothering of the real. The OOO alternative assigns to objects intrinsic attributes hidden from perceiving subjects. Lee Braver compares this with other approaches to the real, and prefers what he calls Transgressive Realism.

If we are realists and hold that the world is “out
there,” independent of us, and that knowledge means
grasping it as it is in itself, then it seems that two
possibilities are open: either we can achieve this
knowledge or we can’t. The point of traditional
pre-Critical epistemology is to teach us how to push
our minds beyond their natural limitations so that
they can limn reality itself. As Leibniz promised,
if we can leave behind the restrictions of the body
and senses, we can come to think with God’s head,
at least to some degree. Skeptics, of course, take the
other option, arguing that we can never surpass our
all-too-human ways of knowing. We should give
up dreams of transcendence and make peace with
common life’s beer, billiards, and backgammon.
But Kant opened up a third path: the world of
phenomena is the one we live in, the only world we’ll
ever know in this life, so we should stop treating it
as second best. We can substitute intersubjective
agreement among ourselves for agreement with
reality in itself. This would be a new kind of truth,
one that is a lesser truth, perhaps, but a truth none­theless, the only kind fit for creatures like us.

The Speculative Realists believe that it is An­ti-Realism that represents the childish view, for it amounts to a kind of cosmic narcissism where being exists only in correlation with us or, in Heidegger’s terms, that being can only be in our clearing. This makes the world less our home than our nursery room where everything is organized around us. The Pre-Critical Realists mistakenly thought that we can only find genuine reality elsewhere, in a transcendent realm. But the Speculative Realists argue that we don't have to look to some beyond to find what exceeds our grasp; everything has an inner essence we are not privy to. For the Speculative Realists, studying this world is not setling for second best, but neither should we setle into a completely domesticated world.

Rather, we should resettle in more interesting places, away from the anthropocentric city, to study the interactions that take place among beings far away from our prying eyes. I find this line of thought intriguing and I take their warning about the danger of conceptual solipsism, but I'm still too much of an Anti-Realist to embrace Speculative Realism whole-heartedly. It seems right to me that we always bring our thoughts to any consideration of the world as it is independently of us, which automatically compromises any absolute independence. But the Speculative Realists are right to point out that the Anti-Realists may have exaggerated the comprehensiveness of our pre-forming of experience. If experience were so fully pre-digested by the ways our minds process information, we could never experience surprise. Specific, ontic surprises, sure, but not radical surprises that violate and transform our very notions of what is.

If the Pre-Critical Realists tell us not to settle for
the tawdry shabby world we find ourselves in, and
the Anti-Realists tell us to settle into this world as
our home, and the Speculative Realists urge us to
resetle elsewhere, Transgressive Realism emphasiz­es the way reality unsetles us. We can never settle down with a single way of understanding the world because it can always unexpectedly breach these. Such experiences do not get squeezed into our mental structures but instead violate them, crack­ing and reshaping our categories.

This violation is the sign of their externality since everything we conceive remains the offspring of our concepts and so retains a family resemblance with them. Rather than the wholly independent noumenal realm that Hegel rightly rejects, these are experiences that we have but which shatter our ways of understanding experience, exceeding our comprehension but not escaping our awareness. Transgressive Realism, I believe, gives us a reality that transcends our ways of thinking, but not all ac­cess to it, offering a middle path that lets us have our ineffable cake and partially ef it too. These aporetic experiences enter our awareness, not through the pathways prepared by our minds but in spite of them, transgressing our anticipatory processes.

If you follow Transgressivee realism rather than Kant, I think it commits you to a different view of the nature of reality beyond our schemes and theories You will hew closer to Kuhn’s notion of scientific progress through revolutions than to Popper’s appropriation through falsification.

A scientific theory is usually felt to be better than its predecessors not only in the sense that it is a better instrument for discovering and solving puzzles but also because it is somehow a better representation of what nature is really like. One often hears that successive theories grow ever closer to, or approximate more and more closely to, the truth. Apparently generalizations like that refer not to the puzzle-solutions and the concrete predictions derived from a theory but rather to its ontology, to the match, that is, between the entities with which the theory populates nature and what is “really there.” Perhaps there is some other way of salvaging the notion of ‘truth' for application to whole theories, but this one will not do. There is, I think, no theory-independent way to reconstruct phrases like ‘really there'; the notion of a match between the ontology of a theory and its “real” counterpart in nature now seems to me illusive in principle. Besides, as a historian, I am impressed with the implausability of the view. I do not doubt, for example, that Newton's mechanics improves on Aristotle's and that Einstein's improves on Newton's as instruments for puzzle-solving. But I can see in their succession no coherent direction of ontological development. On the contrary, in some important respects, though by no means in all, Einstein's general theory of relativity is closer to Aristotle's than either of them is to Newton's. Though the temptation to describe that position as relativistic is understandable, the description seems to me wrong.(Kuhn’s Postscript to Scientific Revolutions)

Which text are you quoting? — Paine

The Age of the World Picture. You can find it in The Question of Technology.

The outcome is hopefully an account of mind in a physical world that does not rely on the nonsense of idealism. — Banno

As long as an organizing contribution of a subject can be detected in the description of physical phenomena, then a species of idealism is at work.

, if we leave aside Habermas’s insistence on the primacy of implicit rationality, solidarity, and consensus, we should admit that he could successfully advance our understanding of contemporary social realities — Number2018

If we leave aside his focus on rational communication and consensus, aren’t we ignoring the central features of his philosophical outlook? It seems to me that Habermas’s notion of communicative action is anathema to Deleuze.

“…philosophers have very little time for discussion. Every philosopher runs away when he or she hears someone say,
"Let's discuss this." Discussions are fine for roundtable talks, but philosophy throws its numbered dice on another table. The best one can say about discussions is that they take things no farther, since the participants never talk about the same thing. Of what concern is it to philosophy that someone has such a view, and thinks this or that, if the problems at stake are not stated? And when they are stated, it is no longer a matter of discussing but rather one of creating concepts for the undiscussible problem posed. Communication always comes too early or too late, and when it comes to creating, conversation is always superfluous. Sometimes philosophy is turned into the idea of a perpetual discussion, as "communicative rationality," or as universal democratic conversation."

Nothing is less exact, and when philosophers criticize each other it is on the basis of problems and on a plane that is different from theirs and that melt down the old concepts in the way a cannon can be melted down to make new weapons. It never takes place on the same plane. To criticize is only to establish that a concept vanishes when it is thrust into a new milieu, losing some of its components, or acquiring others that transform it. But those who criticize without creating, those who are content to defend the vanished concept without being able to give it the forces it needs to return to life, are the plague of philosophy. All these debaters and communicators are inspired by ressentiment. They speak only of themselves when they set empty generalizations against one another. Philosophy has a horror of discussions… ( What is Philosophy)

Whether Heidegger was right or wrong to describe Nietzsche as producing the last metaphysic is a question here. Is the ground of personal being wrestled with here or are conditions not so easy to approach? — Paine

What Heidegger meant was that Nietzsche was the last to follow in Descartes’ s footsteps in treating the world as picture , as objects represented by and placed in front of a subject. Any philosophy which uses concepts like paradigm, worldview , point of view or perspective is, in Heidegger’s thinking, a metaphysics of world as picture.

This objectifying of whatever is, is accomplished in a setting-before, a representing, that aims at bringing
each particular being before it in such a way that man who calculates can be sure, and that means be certain, of
that being…What it is to be is for the first time defined as the objectiveness of representing, and truth is first, defined as the certainty of representing, in the metaphysics of Descartes. The title of Descartes’s principal work reads: Meditationes de prima philosophia [Meditations’ on First Philosophy]. Prote philosophia is the designation coined by’ Aristotle for what is later called metaphysics. The whole of modern metaphysics taken together, Nietzsche included, maintains itself within the interpretation of ‘what it is to be and of truth that was prepared by Descartes.

What he is rejecting is the notion of a thinking substance. The soul is not something we have. In his refinement of the soul-hypothesis Nietzsche posits a “soul of subjective multiplicity”. This solves the problem of the seeming mystery of a thought that comes when it wishes rather than when I wish. It is not that the thought has some kind of independent existence and comes to me from elsewhere, but simply that there is not something within me, an “I” or “ego” or “little ‘one’” that is the agent of my thoughts. This is not a denial of agency, it is a denial of something within me, some substance or soul-atom that is the agent. — Fooloso4

Yes, the self is a community of competing drives, and
they are loosely united by one overarching drive or will to power, that dominates at any given time. A thinking substance must go the way of all substantive things. Agency organizes particulars according to relational patterns whose origins and purposes it does not have mastery over in the sense of the carrying through ofna prior self-knowing.

But every purpose and use is just a sign that the will to power has achieved mastery over something less powerful, and has impressed upon it its own idea [Sinn] of a use function; and 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, taking the shortest route with least expenditure of energy and cost, – instead it is a succession of more or less profound, more or less mutually independent processes of subjugation exacted on the thing, added to this the resistances encountered every time, the attempted transformations for the purpose of defense and reaction, and the results, too, of successful countermeasures. The form is fluid, the ‘meaning' [Sinn] even more so . . . It is no different inside any individual organism: every time the whole grows appreciably, the ‘meaning' [Sinn] of the individual organs shifts, – sometimes the partial destruction of organs, the reduction in their number (for example, by the destruction of intermediary parts) can be a sign of increasing vigour and perfection.

If we don't decide what we will, and if we can't choose our paths, and "fall into" our values, in what way can we choose to embrace or not embrace moral or empirical notions of truth? It seems like we have some capacity for truth and self-determination or we don't, and if we don't, then books about self-overcoming are useless. And why the focus on being controlled by bad ideas? — Count Timothy von Icarus

We already know we colloquially use and understand notions like ‘decision’, ‘choice’ and ‘will’ in different ways according for different philosophies. Cartesian desert-based approaches , which are assumed to arise from the deliberately willed actions of an autonomous, morally responsible subject, are harsher and more ‘blameful' in their views of justice than deterministic , non-desert based modernist approaches and postmodern accounts, which rest on shaping influences (bodily-affective and social) outside of an agent's control. The very autonomy of the Cartesian subject presupposes a profound arbitrariness to free will. We say that the subject who has free will wills of their own accord, chooses what they want to choose , and as such has autonomy with respect to ‘foreign' social and internal bodily influences. The machinations of the free will amount to a self-enclosed system.

This solipsist self functions via an internal logic of values that, while rational within the internal bounds of its own subjectivity, is walled off from the wider community of selves and therefore can choose value in a profoundly irrational or immoral manner with respect to social consensus. Therefore, the very autonomy of the Cartesian subject presupposes a profound potential laxity and arbitrariness to individual free will in relation to the moral norms of a wider social community. Modernist deterministic moral arguments of those like Pereboom and Nussbaum surrender the absolute solipsist rationalism of free will-based models of the self in favor of a view of the self as belonging to and determined by a wider causal empirical social and natural order .If we ask why the agent endowed with free will chose to perform a certain action , the only explanation we can give is that it made sense to them given their own desires and whims. If we instead inquire why the individual ensconced within a modernist deterministic or postmodern relativist world performed the same action, we would be able to make use of the wider explanatory framework of the natural or discursive order in situating the causes of behavior.

Whereas Pereboom and Nussbaum argue that moral blame is ‘irrational', postmodern approaches, defined in very broad terms, don't view blame in terms of a rational/irrational binary but rather in terms of pragmatic usefulness determined in relation to contextually changing inter-subjective practices.

Gergen’s postmodernist constructionism argues:

“In its critical moment, social constructionism is a means of bracketing or suspending any pronouncement of the real, the reasonable, or the right.” “ Constructionist thought militates against the claims to ethical foundations implicit in much identity politics - that higher ground from which others can so confidently be condemned as inhumane, self-serving, prejudiced, and unjust. Constructionist thought painfully reminds us that we have no transcendent rationale upon which to rest such accusations, and that our sense of moral indignation is itself a product of historically and culturally situated traditions. And the constructionist intones, is it not possible that those we excoriate are but living also within traditions that are, for them, suffused with a sense of ethical primacy.”

Enactivist writers such as Evan Thompson and Francisco Varela emphasize 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.”

It should be noted that In postmodernist accounts like that of Nietzsche, Foucault and Deleuze, a ‘personal’ point of view or perspective isnt eliminated from the participation in a social community. But in effect, this point of view is pre-personal, not the possession of a substance we call the self or the ego or the soul.

Nietzsche writes;

When I dissect the process expressed in the proposition ‘I think,' I get a whole set of bold claims that are difficult, perhaps impossible, to establish, – for instance, that I am the one who is thinking, that there must be something that is thinking in the first place, that thinking is an activity and the effect of a being who is considered the cause, that there is an ‘I,' and finally, that it has already been determined what is meant by thinking, – that I know what thinking is.

I will not stop emphasizing a tiny little fact that these superstitious men are loath to admit: that a thought comes when “it” wants, and not when “I” want. It is, therefore, a falsification of the facts to say that the subject “I” is the condition of the predicate “think.” It thinks: but to say the “it” is just that famous old “I” – well that is just an assumption or opinion, to put it mildly, and by no means an “immediate certainty.” In fact, there is already too much packed into the “it thinks”: even the “it” contains an interpretation of the process, and does not belong to the process itself. People are following grammatical habits here in drawing conclusions, reasoning that “thinking is an activity, behind every activity something is active, therefore –.” Following the same basic scheme, the older atomism looked behind every “force” that produces effects for that little lump of matter in which the force resides, and out of which the effects are produced, which is to say: the atom. More rigorous minds finally learned how to make do without that bit of “residual earth,” and perhaps one day even logicians will get used to making do without this little “it” (into which the honest old I has disappeared).

We can say that someone chooses or wills, and mean that what they do is not simply a carbon copy of a pre-established social norm. But it also does not mean that choice and decision draw from an innner mental space that just sits there to be ultized. When we intend to mean something , to choose, we always mean something slightly other than what we intended. What we call volition is this unpredictability within the structure of choice. We are always slightly surprised by what we find ourselves willing.
So there is a loose internal coherence to volition, but it is not the rationality of propositional logic. Rather, it is a certain inferential compatibility between one moment of experience to the next that provides the glue of personal unity.

One powerful argument in favor of Nietzsche's strong sense of responsibility, quite apart from any thesis regarding free will, is his heavy use of what I call the blaming perspective, according to which people are held accountable as the authors or agents of their actions

Robert Solomon was an existentialist philosopher, and read Nietzsche through that lens. That’s fine , but his perspective has little to do with the Nietzsche I am discussing. I’m not saying Solomon is wrong, only that his work won’t provide any tools for dealing with the Nietzsche of Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze, which is the one I am representing. Solomon wants Nietzsche to be a philosopher of personal responsibility, like Sartre, Kierkegaard and other existentialists Solomon champions. But postmodern interpreters of Nietzsche argue this is precisely what Nietzsche’s notion of personhood critiques. More important than which interpretation is right is which reading is more promising from a psychological and ethical point of view.

Just checking is this Thompson? I always thought this quote was credited to Dan Zahavi, (2008) Internalism, Externalism, and Transcendental Idealism. Synthese 160:355-374 — Tom Storm

You’re right, the first two paragraphs are Thompson and the last two are from Zahavi. Good catch ( didnt think anyone was paying attention).

Only when the subject loses itself, when it sheers off from pragmatic experience in space and time, and when the illusions of habitual normality have collapsed- only then does the world of the unforeseen and the astonishing become open”. (Habermas, ‘The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity,’ p 93). How can we abandon firm and stable grounds of self-nurturing while avoiding the pitfalls of self-oblivion? — Number2018

Well, I don’t think following Habermas’s Kantian modernist path is the answer.

Maybe. I just don't see how physicalism differentiates itself from the wider umbrella of naturalism...
— Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't see much distinction between physicalism and naturalism, other than in usage. My impression is that "physicalism" is just the word more commonly used in the context of discussing philosophy of mind. For example, the question on the 2020 Philpapers survey is, "Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism?". If "physicalism" was replaced with "naturalism" would it make a difference? — wonderer1

A number of writers make a distinction between physicalism and naturalism on the basis of the inclusion or exclusion of the role of subjective point of view in the determination of the object.

Evan Thompson writes:

"I follow the trajectory that arises in the later Husserl and continues in Merleau-Ponty, and that calls for a rethinking of the concept of “nature” in a post-physicalist way—one that doesn't conceive of fundamental nature or physical being in a way that builds in the objectivist idea that such being is intrinsically or essentially non-experiential.

Many philosophers have argued that there seems to be a gap between the objective, naturalistic facts of the world and the subjective facts of conscious experience. One way of formulating the hard problem is to ask: if we had a complete, canonical, objective, physicalist account of the natural world, including all the physical facts of the brain and the organism, would it conceptually or logically entail the subjective facts of consciousness? If this account would not entail these facts, then consciousness must be an additional, non-natural property of the world.

One problem with this whole way of setting up the issue, however, is that it presupposes we can make sense of the very notion of a single, canonical, physicalist description of the world, which is highly doubtful, and that in arriving (or at any rate approaching) such a description, we are attaining a viewpoint that does not in any way presuppose our own cognition and lived experience. In other words, the hard problem seems to depend for its very formulation on the philosophical position known as transcendental or metaphysical realism.

Metaphysical realism assumes that everyday experience combines subjective and objective features and that we can reach an objective picture of what the world is really like by stripping away the subjective. It consequently argues that there is a clear distinction to be drawn between the properties things have “in themselves” and the properties which are “projected by us”. Whereas the world of appearance, the world as it is for us in daily life, combines subjective and objective features, science captures the objective world, the world as it is in itself. But to think that science can provide us with an absolute description of reality, that is, a description from a view from nowhere; to think that science is the only road to metaphysical truth, and that science simply mirrors the way in which Nature classifies itself, is – according to Putnam – illusory. It is an illusion to think that the notions of “object” or “reality” or “world” have any sense outside of and independently of our conceptual schemes. Putnam is not denying that there are “external facts”; he even thinks that we can say what they are; but as he writes, “what we cannot say – because it makes no sense – is what the facts are independent of all conceptual choices”.

We cannot hold all our current beliefs about the world up against the world and somehow measure the degree of correspondence between the two. It is, in other words, nonsensical to suggest that we should try to peel our perceptions and beliefs off the world, as it were, in order to compare them in some direct way with what they are about. This is not to say that our conceptual schemes create the world, but as Putnam writes, they don't just mirror it either. Ultimately, what we call “reality” is so deeply suffused with mind- and language-dependent structures that it is altogether impossible to make a neat distinction between those parts of our beliefs that reflect the world “in itself” and those parts of our beliefs that simply express “our conceptual contribution.” The very idea that our cognition should be nothing but a re-presentation of something mind-independent consequently has to be abandoned.

I think Joseph Rouse’s distinctions are helpful. He distinguishes between orthodox, liberal and radical naturalisms.

Orthodox naturalists divide over the unity of science: physicalists insist that what there is can ultimately be reduced to or supervenes upon physical entities, or that the methods of the “special sciences” are dependent upon or legitimated by an understanding of their physical basis; pluralists recognize the ontological or methodological autonomy of astronomy, chemistry, biology, the neurosciences, and perhaps geology or the environmental sciences.

Rouse’s radical naturalism shares with liberal naturalism “a more pluralistic conception of scientific understanding than is characteristic of orthodox naturalisms, and reject conceptions of nature that would require error-theoretic, reductionist, or non-truth-conducive treatments of conceptual, epistemic, moral/political, or aesthetic normativity. I endorse liberal naturalists’ emphasis upon “anti-supernaturalism” as the most definitive naturalist commitment, and my view has some overlap with the primacy some liberal naturalists (e.g., Price 2004, 2011) accord to understanding human conceptual and epistemic capacities as natural phenomena (“subject naturalism”) over seeking scientific imprimatur for a physicalist or other scientistic metaphysics.”