There can be no asserted being without a subject, and there can be no actual being without an object. — Bob Ross
We see the things themselves, the world is what we see: formulae of this kind express a faith common to the natural man and the philosopher— the moment he opens his eyes; they refer to a deep-seated set of mute “opinions” implicated in our lives. But what is strange about this faith is that if we seek to articulate it into theses or statements, if we ask ourselves what is this we, what seeing is, and what thing or world is, we enter into a labyrinth of difficulties and contradictions.
What Saint Augustine said of time— that it is perfectly familiar to each, but that none of us can explain it to the others— must be said of the world. [Ceaselessly the philosopher finds himself] obliged to reinspect and redefine the most well-grounded notions, to create new ones, with new words to designate them, to undertake a true reform of the understanding— at whose term the evidence of the world, which seemed indeed to be the clearest of truths, is supported by the seemingly most sophisticated thoughts, before which the natural man now no longer recognizes where he stood. Whence the age-old ill-humor against philosophy is reanimated, the grievance always brought against it that it reverses the roles of the clear and the obscure. The fact that the philosopher claims to speak in the very name of the naïve evidence of the world, that he refrains from adding any thing to it, that he limits himself to drawing out all its consequences, does not excuse him; on the contrary he dispossesses [humanity] only the more completely, inviting it to think of itself as an enigma.
This is the way things are and nobody can do anything about it. It is at the same time true that the world is what we see and that, nonetheless, we must learn to see it— first in the sense that we must match this vision with knowledge, take possession of it, say what we and what seeing are, act therefore as if we knew nothing about it, as if here we still had everything to learn. But philosophy is not a lexicon, it is not concerned with “word-meanings,” it does not seek a verbal substitute for the world we see, it does not transform it into something said, it does not install itself in the order of the said or of the written as does the logician in the proposition, the poet in the word, or the musician in the
music. It is the things themselves, from the depths of their silence, that it wishes to bring to expression.
Philosophy is a strange business. I'm about to complain that an ordinary expression that I understand as well as anyone else is incomprehensible. — Ludwig V
Can we not reject the split, except as a methodological tool for understanding one aspect of a single world? — unenlightened
Yeah, I'm more trying to encapsulate the difficulties of physicalism than present the creed for adoption. It's dead, but it continues as a zombie to consume life. — unenlightened
In a world with actual physics and cosmology, psychology and neuroscience, sociology and anthropology and linguistics, what philosophy has to offer on the nature of reality or thought or human social life is, shall we say, quaint. — Srap Tasmaner
Blueness and pain are qualia. They are unnecessary subjective experience. and unexplained. — Patterner
It is certainly odd that people so often forget that the scientific version of colour is also the product of experience - that's what "empirical" means. — Ludwig V
I think I agree with you, only I'm not sure what you mean by "this image" (which image exactly?). — Ludwig V
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sellars/#PhilEnteImagHumaWorlPSIM describes what Sellars sees as the major problem confronting philosophy today. This is the “clash” between “the ‘manifest’ image of man-in-the-world” and “the scientific image.” These two ‘images’ are idealizations of distinct conceptual frameworks in terms of which humans conceive of the world and their place in it. Sellars characterizes the manifest image as “the framework in terms of which man came to be aware of himself as man-in-the-world” (PSIM, in SPR: 6; in ISR: 374), but it is, more broadly, the framework in terms of which we ordinarily observe and explain our world. The fundamental objects of the manifest image are persons and things, with emphasis on persons, which puts normativity and reason at center stage. According to the manifest image, people think and they do things for reasons, and both of these “can occur only within a framework of conceptual thinking in terms of which [they] can be criticized, supported, refuted, in short, evaluated” (PSIM, in SPR: 6; in ISR: 374). In the manifest image persons are very different from mere things; things do not act rationally, in accordance with normative rules, but only in accord with laws or perhaps habits. How and why normative concepts and assessments apply to things is an important and contentious question within the framework.
Scare quotes for "the mind" because it seems to imply a universal generalised 'realm of ideas' in which your mind and my mind float ethereally in a universe of ideas, supping on the nourishing philosophies that abide there and remaining essentially disembodied. — unenlightened
My judgement of what caused these phenomena may be mistaken, in that I may think the postbox is red, but this would be an illusion, in that the postbox is actually emitting a wavelength of 700nm. — RussellA
So my argument is not that the universe doesn’t exist sans perspective, but that any meaningful sense of existence entails a perspective, so it’s a mistake to take it as an invariant truth, as a truly ‘observer-independent reality’. — Quixodian
I think this is a good OP. I'm going out soon, (it's 5PM Saturday evening here and I'm off to a "vinyl revival" two turntable DJ-ed reggae dance party) so no time for further conversation right now. I look forward to seeing some responses from others tomorrow. — Janus
You did mention in another thread you’ve been reading Husserl, right? Your penultimate paragraph is phenomenological through and through, in its guise as embodied cognition. — Quixodian
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/help/mean08.htmThe proposition that the finite is ideal constitutes Idealism. The idealism of philosophy consists in nothing else than in recognizing that the finite has no veritable being. Every philosophy is essentially an idealism or at least has idealism for its principle, and the question then is only how far this principle is actually carried out. ... A philosophy which ascribed veritable, ultimate, absolute being to finite existence as such, would not deserve the name of philosophy; the principles of ancient or modern philosophies, water, or matter, or atoms are thoughts, universals, ideal entities, not things as they immediately present themselves to us, ... in fact what is, is only the one concrete whole from which the moments are inseparable. — Hegel
That’s getting close to what I’ve been trying to say. It’s the tendency to forget that ‘scientific realism’ still relies on an implicitly human perspective. — Quixodian
(Which is very much something Husserl was saying, isn’t it?) — Quixodian
We carried out the last series of our deliberations chiefly with respect to the physical thing pertaining to the sensuous imaginatio and did not take due notice of the physical thing as determined by physics, for which the sensuously appearing (the perceptually given) physical thing is said to function as a “mere appearance,” perhaps even as something “merely subjective.”
Nevertheless it is already implicit in the sense of our earlier statements that this mere subjectivity ought not to be confused (as it is so frequently) with a subjectivity such as characterizes mental processes, as though the perceived physical things, with respect to their perceptual qualities, and as though these qualities themselves were mental processes.
Not can it be the true opinion of scientific investigators of Nature (particularly if we keep, not to their pronouncements, but to the sense of their method) that the appearing physical thing is an illusion or a faulty picture of the “true” physical thing as determined by physics. Likewise the statement that the determinations of the appearance are signs of the true determinations is misleading.
Are we then allowed to say, in accordance with the “realism” which is very widely accepted: The actually perceived (and, in the primary sense, appearing) should, for its part, be regarded as an appearance of, or an instinctive basis for, inferring something else, intrinsically foreign to it and separated from it? May we say that, theoretically considered, this something else should be accepted as a reality, completely unknown by acquaintance, which must be assumed hypothetically in order to explain the course of mental appearance- processes, <accepted> as a hidden cause of these appearances characterizable only indirectly and analogically by mathematical concepts?
Already, on the basis of our general presentations (which will be greatly deepened and undergo continual confirmation by our further analyses), it becomes evident that such theories are possible only as long as one avoids seriously fixing one’s eyes on, and scientifically exploring, the sense of a physical thing-datum and, therefore, of “any physical thing whatever,” a sense implicit in experience’s own essence — the sense which functions as the absolute norm for all rational discourse about physical things. If anything runs counter to that sense it is countersensical in the strictest signification of the word; and that, without doubt, is true of all epistemological theories of the type indicated.
...
The perceived physical thing itself is always and necessarily precisely the thing which the physicist explores and scientifically determines following the method of physics. — Husserl
Well, the fossil record tells us they did, and if the Universe is older than the human race then it follows that it existed prior to us and our points of view. — Janus
This is why I have always found Aristotle's definition of truth to be the most compelling: "Well, falsity is the assertion that that which is is not or that that which is not is and truth is the assertion that that which is is and that that which is not is not" (Metaphysics, Gamma 7, p. 107). Truth seems, by my lights, to be an act of uncovering and lies to be the act of covering up what was already uncovered; and this depends on there being both a subject and object.
What do you all think? — Bob Ross
I also think that there is a scientific attitude, a characteristic way of approaching problems. — Quixodian
Plenty have philosophers seem to have become quite invested in the idea that materialism is what allows them to look the void in the eye and scream their power into it. How can we be Nietzschean overcomers without a void to overcome? How else can we congratulate ourselves over being good when there is no Good? What is the point of the Marxist struggle if we get a greater reward in the afterlife? — Count Timothy von Icarus
Scientific practice ideally consists in unbiased and (as much as is humanly possible) presuppositionless inquiry. The abandonment of belief in what is merely imagined and what seems merely intuitively "right" with no other supporting evidence seems to be the essential element of scientific method, and what distinguishes it from speculative practices that existed prior to the advent of this new kind of scientific practice and which of course still exist today. — Janus
Does anyone still believe a “method” of science really exists, and that it essentially defines and differentiates science as a sui generis human endeavor?
Shouldn’t we abandon this idea? Is it not both old and obsolete? — Mikie
On this I am simply unable to tell what fits. I find both 'I think' and 'I am' problematic. Even Merleau-Ponty's account seems to require a kind of faith. — Tom Storm
We can choose to describe our reality any which way we want and hold these accounts as foundational axioms - dualism, monistic idealism - or your equiprimordial, phenomenological construct above. — Tom Storm
Quick question: I can see merit in this and have a modest interest in phenomenology, but could it not be argued that this account is just words used as a kind of magic spell? — Tom Storm
The truth is that the mind actually 'brings the world into being' in some fundamental sense - not that things literally go into and pass out of existence depending on the observer. — Wayfarer
Over three days I became pretty out of touch with reality due to this shouting match going on in my head.
It took a year for me to get over the fear of being in that mental state and reach the point that I was willing to risk allowing myself to think about such things. — wonderer1
About six months later (36 years ago), in a manic state that scared the shit out of me, I intuited an explanation for a lot of idiosnycratic things about myself (including social issues), in terms of hypothesized variations in low level neural interconnect structure. I only recently found out, that some years back evidence that fit my hypothesis well has been found. — wonderer1
that intuition was sure as hell right, but that was the best three months of my life. — wonderer1
That was what I thought you were taking issue with. — Wayfarer
How thing have changed, eh? — wonderer1
I wonder about trust. Barb and I had known each other for years. Meri, being a great observer of people, I'd guess she recognized Barb's trust in me while we were in the bar. I hadn't asked for her number or anything at that point though. On one hand, I think it was rather bold of her to assume I would step in. On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if she 'knew' I had her covered. — wonderer1