Yes. And that's a way to show Heiddy's relevance... — creativesoul

Right. Heidegger, indeed. But (and I hope you'll agree) not on his authority but rather on his successful unconcealment of the phenomenon. Since I've been exposed to Heidegger, I find myself discovering his insights in less explicit form in Hegel and Feuerbach. How does language exist? The basic insight seems to be that we are social on a deeper level than we are individual. So analyses that start from an isolated subject gazing at pure meanings, while possibly illuminating, are also trapped within a tradition obsessed with an epistemological problem while neglecting an ontological one.

What say you?

But are those in fact our gods? They're more the gilding of a god dauntingly out of reach. — ZzzoneiroCosm

I think I agree with you here. 'Fame' and 'money' are masks in a certain sense for some impossible enjoyment. In a narrow context, though, there is no time for serious thought, since time is money. Or rather time is understood in terms of exchange value.

To be sure, most of us offer a partial resistance to this. It's always the others who worship fame and money. We know better, but we must act as if we don't. This action is the 'truth' of the ideology, and others do our believing for us. Or that's one idea I've heard which has perhaps a grain of truth or value.

there is a fundamental craving in all of us for a peace-girding wisdom. It's what draws me to the Stoic pursuit of noble-mindedness and the Skeptic recipe for ataraxia. — ZzzoneiroCosm

I feel that draw too.

In my mind it's crucial to draw a distinction between philosophy-as-position-making and philosophy-as-pursuit-of-wisdom. The former has nearly consumed the latter - no doubt the source of your dis-ease vis-a-vis the well-scoffed, cartoonesque abstractiphaster. There is nothing cartoonish about a sober devout pursuit of wisdom. Philosophy is banal insofar as it excludes it.

Wisdom and intellectual peace are still valuable and valued. — ZzzoneiroCosm

I agree, and I think that's a valuable distinction. For me, philosophy as self-sculpting pursuit of wisdom is primary. At the same time, this seems connected to position-making, though not in the vain sense. Earnest position making is an attempt to further disclose reality or clarify existence.

Right now we are clarifying one of the difficulties of modern life, which is too knowledge with not enough credibility. I can ask myself sincerely: should I stop reading the news? Do I need to know about the sensational murder far away? Does a wise man read the news? At the moment I still read the news, wise or not.

The notion of being well-informed has gotten almost inscrutably complex. — ZzzoneiroCosm

Indeed. We are forced to trust experts, but only an expert can distinguish between a genuine and fake expert. There is too much human knowledge. The headless machine can somehow run without anyone grasping the totality of its operation. Those comfortable in their place in the mechanism are perhaps even happy that being well-informed becomes more and more difficult. Some are served by the general passivity and skepticism. But knowing this doesn't instantly cure one of that same passive skepticism.

In this climate of information crisis, better to be over- than under-critical. — ZzzoneiroCosm

I'm tempted to agree with you. But I do have concerns. The collapse of trust only emphasizes our passivity. The 'decapitated machine' of capitalism doesn't need anything from us but our mindless conformity to the usual buying and selling.

But I don't have any easy answers. I've just been thinking of this 'headlessness' and how it connects to the spectacle and the banalization of philosophy. My doubts are 'useless and unprofitable.' A short-term prudence dictates that I 'forget all that' and just gather coins. As long as fame and money are our gods, the philosopher is a comic figure, a cartoon.

Self-criticism should be as pointed and unforgiving as criticism of others.

A dovetailing or synergy of other-criticism and self-criticism can serve to purify and personalize our understanding of a difficult point or position. — ZzzoneiroCosm

Well said.

I just thought I'd add that I think that gods function as emotion-generating community-binding symbols. The temptation for many is to somehow take religion literally and be scientific. IMV this results in awkward attempts to prove God's existence as a physical object of some sort.

What does 'God is a spirit' who 'must be worshipped in spirit and in truth' mean? Well it's a text that remains endlessly open to interpretation. But I read 'spiritual' in terms of intersubjectivity and culture. What values drive a society? To what degree are a society's deities a reflection/project of that society's idealized self? If God is understood as radically distinction from nature, then how does this connect to a society's attitude toward nature (perhaps one of demystified utility.) In short, gods have a kind of psychological reality, not unlike the spectral being of justice or rationality. Indeed, as deities become abstract (mere concepts), they are more spectral than ever. I can't find rationality with my telescope, but I believe it exists.

Thanks!

The universe is a collection of quantum particles. Again: What causes a collection of completely unpredictable particles to exhibit highly predictable behavior? — GeorgeTheThird

I think the way forward here is to investigate the ideas of causation and explanation. We sometimes say that we've explained something when we have fit it into a pattern or law. Often enough these 'laws' are 'true for no reason.' That's just how things happen.

It seems to me that humans will always end up against principles or patterns or laws that are true for no reason, brute facts. What do you make of this? And how do notions of God/god fit in with this? Can the idea of God be more than another 'true for no reason' terminus for inquiry?

Trusting clocks is not always automatic, to be as clear as possible. — creativesoul

I agree. It's an intermediate phenomenon. But trusting language (as you did when you wrote the sentence above) is usually at least as automatic as trusting a clock usually is.

Being-in-a-world and being-with-others is (in an important sense) prior to the subject that examines her mind and questions her beliefs. We live in a world with others of spoons, stairs, books, and clocks. They don't exist primarily as objects for ratiocination but as 'transparent' tools-in-use through which we see our thousand worldly purposes. Language, I'm claiming, has this tool-in-use kind or mode of being.

Along these lines, our 'blind' know-how concerning words like 'know' is prior to our retrospective attempt to define 'knowledge' so that the definition fits our intuition.

hat is rather my point - maths with its definition of a point having zero extents - flaunts its own rules - there is an insistence in maths that both of the following are true:

1. 1/0 = UNDEFINED
2. There is an infinite number of points on a line segment length one

That equates to a belief in both of:

1. 1/0 = UNDEFINED
2. 1/0 = ∞

You see that obviously both [1] and [2] cannot hold at the same time... unless UNDEFINED = ∞ ... which is my belief. — Devans99

0 has no multiplicative inverse, hence 1/0 is an undefined or meaningless symbol. That's true.

That there are an infinite number of points in a unit line segment is true but ambiguous.

The cardinality of a set depends on the notion of bijection. But this is quite different from the measure of a set, which is a generalization of intuitive length. A measure (like standard Lebesgue measure) is a countably additive set function (among a few other requirements). Hence the measure of an uncountable union of points is not the (uncountable?) sum of the measures of the individual points. Indeed, this would lead to a contradiction, as you note, and assign a line segment of positive length (in the intuitive sense and in terms of the measure) a measure of 0.

Banno is frustrated because, well, mathematicians know their business. Any of us can give one of them hell about their philosophical interpretation of their professional discourse (if they bother to have one), but it's highly unlikely that a non-expert will catch them in a genuine contradiction. Mathematicians are experts when it comes to finding and using contradictions.

Math isn't philosophy. It's isn't metaphysics. 'It' can always retreat to formalism and utility.

No. That's precisely the point. You already believe it is, otherwise you could not possibly trust it as a means to tell the time. — creativesoul

I think he's making a useful distinction. While I understand the temptation to interpret trustingly reading a clockface as 'belief,' the event is so automatic that denoting it a 'belief' has a retrospective artificiality.

Do I believe that there is an external world? Do I believe that my words have meaning? Do I believe that I know what 'believe' means (or how to use 'believe')? At some point doubt becomes unintelligible.

In short, I see what you mean, and it's reasonable. But the gap between automatic trust and conscious belief seems important.

I don't think assumptions count as beliefs. After all, if you look at a clock to form a belief about the time, are you really checking to see if the clock is working? Don't we check it because we expect it to be working?
And how about its accuracy? Do we check its accuracy? How do we do that? Do we check with a verifying source -- another clock? And, then, I may ask, what source you used to verify the accuracy of the first verifying source -- and so on ad infinitum. — fiveredapples

This is a good point. We can extend it. We don't check the meanings of the words we use as we use them. All our conscious decision making depends on unconscious/automatic/embodied skills of staggering complexity. Even much of our language use is effortless. This sentence (this one now) is immediately intelligible. In theory we could check every sentence in a simple text again and again to make sure that it said what we thought it said. Am I sure that I read and speak English?

I am sorry, but the passage in and by itself is nonsense. At least I see no sense in it. — god must be atheist

I should have mentioned that it was from 'Existentialism is a Humanism.'
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm

Is the human being radically free? Is it the human being's nature to have no [other] nature? As I suggested, I can't follow Sartre here, though he thinks that our radical freedom follows from atheism.

Man possesses a human nature; that “human nature,” which is the conception of human being, is found in every man; which means that each man is a particular example of a universal conception, the conception of Man. In Kant, this universality goes so far that the wild man of the woods, man in the state of nature and the bourgeois are all contained in the same definition and have the same fundamental qualities. Here again, the essence of man precedes that historic existence which we confront in experience.

Atheistic existentialism, of which I am a representative, declares with greater consistency that if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it. That being is man or, as Heidegger has it, the human reality. What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards. — Sartre

IMV, humanism is (to oversimplify) the 'religion' or post-religion of most atheists. Also, something like a transcendental subject is implicit in the notions of critical thinking and science. The 'image of man' I mentioned earlier is, as I see it, an ideal or target image of man. That helps makes sense of the categorical imperative.

It is categorical in virtue of applying to us unconditionally, or simply because we possesses rational wills, without reference to any ends that we might or might not have. It does not, in other words, apply to us on the condition that we have antecedently adopted some goal for ourselves. — link

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/#CatHypImp

What is rationality? Whatever it is, it isn't idiosyncratic. To be rational is to conform to a social norm, one that is curiously aimed beyond any contingent community ('transcendental pretense').

Awesome. We agree. 'Pragmatic middle ground' is a good phrase.

The effects of an action are, well, inconsequential. There's "something" immoral about telling untruths whether they have bad or good consequences. What that "something" is is probably unexplained but Kant had his categorical imperative rule which taps into the collective intuition on morality and never outputs an action that violates this intuition as permissible. — TheMadFool

I think you are on to something here, especially with 'collective intuition on morality.'

I connect this to Sartre.

When we say that man chooses himself, we do mean that every one of us must choose himself; but by that we also mean that in choosing for himself he chooses for all men. For in effect, of all the actions a man may take in order to create himself as he wills to be, there is not one which is not creative, at the same time, of an image of man such as he believes he ought to be. — Sartre

I think Sartre gets it half-right. We don't create this 'image of man' in a vacuum. We are always already responding to an image in place, which yet can be modified.

The radical egoist might object to Sartre, but I think that this egoist understands his egoist mission as the 'true' revelation of the image. And that's why the egoist craves a union of egoists, which seems to boil down to a free society of enlightened individuals.

Deliberate misrepresentation of one's own thought and belief. — creativesoul

This seems like the prototypical or ideal lie. Beyond that we have metaphor and ambiguity. '

'Tell me lies. Tell me sweet little lies.'

'Truths are lies that help us survive.'

But it's impractical to expect Bob to check every premise before he can justifiably make a claim. — Andrew M

Right. Roughly he can say 'I know X' when he has done what is roughly expected to justify such a claim. Since we actually use the word 'know' all the time without an 'infinite check,' we should instead look to what tends to be accepted as justification. The problems of the word 'knowledge' aren't so different from those of the word 'justification.' We learn to act and speak within a system of conventions. In this sense, meaning is exterior to the subject.

But in case you're simply asking if a false belief ever counts as knowledge, then the answer is no. — fiveredapples

I tend to agree with you. I wonder whether you'll agree with me that this follows from convention. We just don't tend to use 'knowledge' for false beliefs.

That Bob looked at the clock is what justifies his claim that it was 3pm. He didn't just guess or make something up. I think that, with Alice, we would normally be satisfied with his justification.

If so, then Bob's claim was justified even if the clock were broken and it was really 4pm. In which case he would have had a justified but false belief.

If the clock stopped exactly 24 hours prior and it really was 3pm, then he had a justified and true belief. But he didn't know that it was 3pm. Which is the Gettier problem.

Now we could raise the justification bar and require that Bob check that the clock is working first and perhaps also verify the time against other clocks. But even that could conceivably fail to produce a true belief. And, more importantly, it starts to get away from what we ordinarily require for knowledge claims. — Andrew M

I agree with all of this. At the end you hint at just how complex the problem actually is. Our 'toy' examples are great for showing the problems with 'knowledge = JTP.' To figure out what we do mean ('intuitively') by 'knowledge' is something like an endless task. This noun can be understood as a tool employed by members of a community to many purposes. Only some of our knowledge about 'knowledge' can be made explicit.

The man has successfully satisfied JTB. He has a belief. The belief is true. And the belief is justified. If you think knowledge is JTB, then you must conclude that the man has knowledge. You seem not to appreciate this fact. You're wanting to object that he doesn't have knowledge because he was looking at a broken clock. But you can't make that objection if you subscribe to JTB. — fiveredapples

This seems correct and well expressed. This JTB & clock example is new to me and illuminating.

A distinction is sometimes drawn between 'knowing how' and 'knowing that'. I am talking about 'knowing that'. — Bartricks

I suggest that we be careful with this distinction. 'I know that X' is a statement that we know how to use.

Perhaps we should also be wary of grammar. 'Knowledge' is a noun. Therefore knowledge is a definite entity?

So, it is clear to our rational reflection that having knowledge does not just involve having a true belief. — Bartricks

I agree. We use 'I know X' in a system of conventions that we mostly know 'unconsciously.' I don't think we can exhaustively catalog these conventions. That said, I'd tentatively translate 'I know X' as 'X is true and I have reasons that you'd also find convincing to believe so.'

We can also contrast 'I know X' with 'I think X.' To merely think that X is to indicate less certainty or mere opinion. It makes a lesser claim on the listener.

Metaphysics and epistemology are what you end up doing when you try to justify an argument that you shouldn't do them and should just use science instead. — Pfhorrest

I almost answered something like this. Statements that attempt to reduce the status of philosophy are often philosophical. 'Metaphysics is bunk' is a 'metaphysical' statement.

I belong to the second optioner group of type 2. I am having ball. I don't know if I could even handle a disciplined study at an institution (academic, not psychiatric or penitentiary). — god must be atheist

I used to think that I'd feel cramped in an institution by dogmatic personalities, so I studied something else when the time came. I never stopped prioritizing philosophy, though. If I could go back, I'd just choose philosophy and just deal with its dark side (which was really my dark side and unruly arrogance?)

This is mostly because I would have met more people who were equally passionate about philosophical conversation. I find myself frustrated with talk that remains on the surface of things, even if that surface is intricate and useful.

academic philosophers, whose jobs are mandates to delve into topics as hard and difficult a way as possible — god must be atheist

This one is tricky. I suppose 'difficult' makes sense in terms of intensity. If I make my living researching and teaching, then one hopes that I'm more serious and diligent than others working in their free time.
Then this extra intensity of the ideal scholar allows them to make the difficult original text as easy as is reasonable, to pre-digest the situation for accelerated assimilation by others. At the same time all of this is creative, and they express themselves as intellectuals by what they focus on and the nuances of their interpretation. One of the nice things about philosophy (which is shares with life) is that its past is not fixed. Once Z comes along, we can read X and Y in a new light. If I study Heidegger, Hobbes changes.

The type 2 . philosophers' other option is a speculative approach, which discovers for them brand new, but to the professional philosophy circles well-known philosophical thoughts. — god must be atheist

To me this describes the position of any of us born 'too late,' when 'everything has already been said.' What really matters is the insight. I grant that. Indeed, I often find that an insight clicks and then realize that that must of been what X meant all along. We seem to have to reconstruct the cognitive act in our own singular context. Sometimes philosophers help us to do this. At other times we manage insights 'on our own' that were crucial for us in an old book and feel less alone. I'd be lonely without my books, at least in a distinctly philosophical way.

I used them mainly to shoot down the ideas of the presented topic's original author. I had a ball debunking Socrates and Hobbes, and had a chance to fall in love with the ideas and mind of Hume. — god must be atheist

I relate to this antagonistic attitude. Its like the demon in philosophy that constantly tests things with a hammer. At the same time, the notions of truth and rationality are implicitly aimed at a community
of some kind. Sometimes the debunking attitude is genuinely aimed at liberation. At other times (as I see it) it's also a resistance to identity-threatening novelty.

I also love Hume, but then Socrates and Hobbes are great too.

we need to reinvent the concept of "friendship" with the virtues of past times, but accepting that it is rooted on self-interest, so that we can make the better of it. — Gus Lamarch

Note how 'we' creeps into your thought here. This 'we' is fundamental. Who am I? That's a small question, in some sense. Who are we? That's philosophy. Anyway, how do you account for this drift from self-interest into what we can do better? Do we have the same self-interest? And if not, what can your words mean to others? I don't ask idly. What is philosophy? There's a trivial answer, sure, but also an opening of something strange there.

Here's an interesting quote:

The history of modern philosophy is, indeed, nothing less than a struggle for the meaning of man, a struggle over the very fate of human civilization. And so the crisis of the European sciences is revealed to be something even larger and more grandiose (if that is imaginable): a radical life-crisis of European humanity, and of the human race as a whole. Philosophers -- the genuine ones, that is, not those fraudulent "philosophical literati" (Crisis, 17) who dominate the philosophical scene -- are the only ones suited to face up to the true struggles of our time, "between humanity which has already collapsed and humanity which still has roots but is struggling to keep them and find new ones" (Crisis, 15).

It is easy to dismiss such talk and even to laugh at it. Few philosophers operating today, surely, are able to take such ideas seriously. Dermot Moran is no exception, and so in his introduction to the Crisis in the Cambridge Introductions to Key Philosophical Texts series, he treads lightly whenever issues such as the "telos of European humanity" come up for discussion. Throughout the book, especially in his chapter on Husserl's so-called "turn" to history,[2] Moran dutifully records Husserl's deepest convictions on these matters, but he is careful to keep his distance from Husserl's more radical and controversial claims, and by the end of the book, after having played the role of honest broker for almost 300 pages, he finally allows his own skeptical take to slip out, endorsing the judgment of David Carr, who, he tells us, "has pointed out that Husserl was simply wrong to think that phenomenology, even in its most transcendental form, could save humanity" (299).
— link

https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/husserl-s-crisis-of-the-european-sciences-and-transcendental-phenomenology-an-introduction/

'A struggle over the meaning of man.' 'It is easy to dismiss such talk or laugh at it.' That's fascinating. That's where we are, according to the reviewer. And yet....isn't that nevertheless what mundane politics is still concerned with in a less explicit way?


It might be argued that Stirner is a degeneration of Hegel. One can imagine an enlightened community (not a lonely wage-earner) evolving historically to finally embrace itself as its own self-interested law-giver, but that already happened, at least theoretically if not practically.

Of course, these friendships are made of interests, of a "Union of Egoists", but of an almost utopian tone, one that lasts for years and years, seasons and seasons, and this feeling, with regret, also makes me question it: — Gus Lamarch

That 'utopian tone' (which I experience) is reason enough to drop or edit the cynical theory of interests. We love ourselves for what is most highly social in us. If I dream of being a great philosopher, I dream of giving others profound thoughts that are also true for them. So these profound thoughts, because they are profound, are not mine at all. I only dream of signing them, claiming them, with a kind of petty passion unworthy of the creative-visionary moment. If I am understood, truly understood, then I immediately forfeit the superiority of being alone with that new knowledge by sharing it. I share it to not be alone with it, to radiate as a kind of sun.

I think it's the same with writing music. It's understood primarily as a gift and only secondarily as a thing to be signed or badge of honor. And then some of my happiest moments involved conversation with trusted friends as great music played. We were in a bubble of our love and respect for one another. It was paradise (hard to sustain, of course.) This isn't to deny the value of the evil thinker.

It got me wondering how we can ever even have well defined concepts in a language when every word is supposedly replaceable by a combination of other words. At what point do we cease defining and start understanding. — khaled

This is a profound question. What is it that we tend to call understanding? We tell our child that it's bedtime, and the child 'understands' by switching off their light. If we try to describe understanding as something internal, aren't we in an awkward position? In the beginning was the deed coordinated action? How old are we when we start believing that there are 'physical' objects? In the play pen or when we learn how one uses 'physical'?

Why do we assume so readily that pure meaning is just there to be gazed on by a pure subject in a kind of obscure 'mental' realm? And doesn't the construction of this mental realm depend on metaphors grabbed from the exterior of this mental realm? 'The mind is a box of thoughts.'

This isn't to deny 'mental' experience (for which we already have a useful phrase) but only to question the absoluteness of this 'I' gazing at pure meaning as a starting point. Note, for instance, that 'mental' and 'meaning' and 'concept' are caught up in the same system of language. As you say, we define one word in terms of others. But then we learn language in order to only then become doubting subjects. I can't doubt the very language in which I express my doubt. The 'mystery' of language (intelligibility) seems central to human being. And human being is (I'd say) social being. Even if Robinson Crusoe is alone on an island, he takes his language with him. To be fully human it is necessary to know a language?

The alternative I'm sketching is anything but mine. I connect it to Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Derrida, Saussure, and others. The Cartesian subject has IMV been demolished as a good starting point for philosophy, even if it was good as a kind of fire that burned everything down to make space.

Are we talking Dunning-Kruger...? — jorndoe

I think we are. I think that knowing one's self also reveals the 'viscosity' of thought. Large changes in our networks of beliefs and desires are traumatic and rare, and this suggests/explains that intellectual growth is a kind of continuous drift, punctuated now and then by a leap one is ready for.

I connect this viscosity to identity, by which I mean how the subject is attached to seeing itself. Harold Bloom's notion of the anxiety of influence is useful here. If I am attached to understanding myself as a genius, then I do not want to discover myself to be merely repeating what has already been said. I must read a kind of 'swerve' into my own offering to rescue it from coming too late. But more usual threats to identity are the 'death of god' or the realization of 'my' complicity in that which I understand to be guilty and other.

I don't pretend in the least that these are new themes or realizations. For me 'knowing myself' has largely been about experiencing the force and aim of the words of others. In my view, philosophy is not just the isolated ego knowing itself but more like our self-knowledge. This 'our' as opposed to 'my' is IMV fundamental and constitutes a part of our self-knowledge.

Sometimes metaphysical concepts are so poorly defined it's hard to get started toward a consensus. Look at the tens of thousands of pages devoted to "being", for example. Then how about "truth"? That is why the more bizarre aspects of physics are better discussed in a mathematical setting than a metaphysical one. Math may lead to predictions of reality, whereas metaphysics doesn't seem to lead anywhere.

But I'm an old codger, so ignore me. :roll: — John Gill

You touch on an important theme here. Does metaphysics/philosophy get anywhere? If one judges by online philosophy forums, then perhaps not. But keep in mind that on forums like these that Cantor's basic results are rejected-- without being understood in the first place. (Note that this forum also has excellent members.) We can't, in short, expect a consensus on difficult topics between those who daydream or half-troll and those who are (relatively) serious about philosophy.

I mostly read 'continental' philosophy, and for me it's one long conversation in which massive progress has indeed been made. What differentiates it from math and physics and makes it so questionable is (among other things) its relative distance from technology and therefore income. Because serious philosophy is difficult, and because we live in an almost post-literate age, those who have worked at it are mostly only intelligible and interesting to one another. But Harry Potter is far more famous than Julien Sorel. People like the fun and easy stuff. To me, people are just missing out.

Technology doesn't have this problem. The shrinking size and the expanding power of our smartphones are a constant update on the incremental march of technology. That said, a person with no mathematical training would be at a loss to differentiate absurdity from good math.

Thank you for responding. It's a great book, and I look forward to hearing what you make of it.

Questioning authority is not equivalent to critical thinking. Doubt without adequate ground is not the result of critical thinking. It's the result of something else much less worthy... much less admirable. — creativesoul

Indeed, and it's usually a form of crude belief, of credulousness. As @Banno mentioned, those who don't know math nevertheless believe that they can detect massive mistakes at the foundations, somehow overlooked by people who have given their lives to the discipline.

This 'less worth, much less admirable' thing you mention is even 'the' enemy that we as thinkers primarily contend with --our own intellectual vanity. What such rebels are overlooking is that they merely enact the spirit of our times (an accidental conformism that mistakes itself as revolutionary.)

Coming from one who has come to understand that my own past critiques have sometimes been based on a misunderstanding, I would readily concur with this. It's exactly right. — creativesoul

I like your humility here. I also look back on my petty resistance to certain thinkers and theories as based on a misunderstanding that was itself based on sloth and vanity. We are haunted by the fantasy of the short cut, and 'idle talk' that shallowly misunderstands various famous philosophers only supports this. In short, (as I currently see it), philosophy hurts. The conceptual difficult is secondary to emotional difficulty.

'Critical thinking' is self-sacrificing thinking, and this sacrificed self is the petty self.

In what way is certainty linked to the notion of spirit? — ZzzoneiroCosm

In a misleading way, and not only in terms of a pursuit for 'perfect' or 'geometrical' certainty. How then? By investigating meaning in terms of a subject, of what that subject feels and thinks.

'I am certain that X' gets its meaning (roughly) from convention and context. In the same way, handshaking or saluting gets its meaning from convention and context. This also applies to 'I know X' as opposed to 'I think X.' In an important sense, language is exterior to the speaker. It is a system of intersubjective intelligibility. We cross out 'intersubjective' because this system is prior to the concept of the subject and intersubjectivity. It's only within this system that social human beings can use 'I' properly and intelligibly. This is not at all to deny what is referred to by private experience. At the same time, though, this 'private' experience is profoundly conditioned by the community in which it occurs.

If anyone is allergic to the Heidegger/Dreyfus vector, this is already implicit in Saussure, as beautifully interpreted by Jonathan Culler (his short book on S. is highly recommended.) I also recently read Limited Inc (Derrida) which Culler summarizes with clarity and discipline here: @http://www.colby.edu/music/nuss/mu254/articles/Culler.pdf

I realize that this may seem like a dodging the issue of certainty. Instead the intent is to properly frame the issue in terms of convention and context -as opposed to the traditional dead-end of an obscure subject. For me Wittgenstein became far more intelligible once I read more straightforward presentations of sufficiently similar approaches.

All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments: no, it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much as the point of departure, as the element in which arguments have their life. — Wittgenstein

To expand on my previous post, one is already able to speak the language. One is already intelligible to others before hypotheses can be proffered and criticized.

If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty. — Wittgenstein

One already knows what a tree is, what a hand is, what one expects from trees and hands. One knows all sorts of things that one doesn't bother to know that one knows. And one knows things in a way that suggests that 'know' is the wrong word here. 'Understand' is better if we stress the 'under.' One participates in a form of life. 'One' refers to that form of life as a kind of software. But where is one?

At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded. — Wittgenstein

Where I question that last quote is the framing of the background or the one in terms of unfounded beliefs. This word 'belief' suggests too much consciousness, too much language. Instead we might think in terms of habits. Even the use of language is perhaps more habitual and automatic than we might like it to be as philosophers who would like to question and secure everything.

Instead we seem to be thrown into a community lifestyle and its average intelligibility. It's only after this having-been-thrown that we can use what we've inherited, what has made us rational agents, to go back and question whether we have hands or what 'meaning' means.

The difficulty is to realise the groundlessness of our believing. — Wittgenstein

There is...something that average everyday intelligibility obscures... that it is merely average everyday intelligibility...This is what Heidegger called 'the perhaps necessary appearance of foundation....What gets covered up in everyday understanding is not some deep intelligibility as the tradition has always held; it is that the ultimate 'ground' of intelligibility is simply shared practices...This is the last stage of the hermeneutics of suspicion. The only deep interpretation left is that there is no deep interpretation. — Dreyfus

I hope readers will excuse the injection of Heidegger via Dreyfus. While I studied Wittgenstein first, I know believe that the exposition in terms of remarks is not ideal --that it is better to offer an organized theory.

Any and all interpretations and comments on Wittgenstein and On Certainty are welcome. Refereces are appreciated. — ZzzoneiroCosm

Hello, Zzz. I'd like to open with a quote.

476. Children do not learn that books exist, that armchairs exist, etc.,etc. - they learn to fetch books, sit in armchairs, etc.,etc.
Later, questions about the existence of things do of course arise, "Is there such a thing as a unicorn?" and so on. But such a question is possible only because as a rule no corresponding question presents itself. For how does one know how to set about satisfying oneself of the existence of unicorns? How did one learn the method for determining whether something exists or not?
477. "So one must know that the objects whose names one teaches a child by an ostensive definition exist." - Why must one know they do? Isn't it enough that experience doesn't later show the opposite?
For why should the language-game rest on some kind of knowledge?
478. Does a child believe that milk exists? Or does it know that milk exists? Does a cat know that a mouse exists?
479. Are we to say that the knowledge that there are physical objects comes very early or very late? — Wittgenstein

Remark #479 especially amuses me.

The best way that I have made sense of the later Wittgenstein is via 'Dreydegger.' Hubert Dreyfus offers his analysis of Heidegger's 'one' in Being-in-the-World and mentions Wittgenstein several times in a way that I found especially illuminating. Chapter 8, 'The Who of Everyday Dasein,' is a revelation. Taking Wittgenstein and Heidegger together (as Dreyfus to some degree blends them) gives us the discovery or making-explicit of the 'one' (operational background) as the heart of 20th century philosophy.

This 'phenomenological' approach gives philosophy something 'objective' to do that science is seemingly not equipped for. The 'one' or the (back-)ground is what makes science possible in the first place. I don't claim that philosophers have explained it (perhaps not an intelligible task) but only brought it to our awareness for discussion.