he present ( primal impression) isn’t indeterminate, it’s specious, complex. Retention and protention (anticipation) belong to the present. They are a part of the immediate ‘now’.

Gallagher(2017)writes “primal impression, rather than being portrayed as an experiential origin, “the primal source of all further consciousness and being” is considered the result of an interplay between retention and protention. It is “the boundary between the retentions and protentions”

The primal impression comes on the scene as the fulfilment of an empty protention; the now, as the present phase of consciousness, is constituted by way of a protentional fulfilment. — Joshs

Indeterminacy is what you get when determinacy is out the window. All claims that exhibit a determinate designation of time possess a baseline indeterminacy due to a collapse of determinate language. One says she is in a room. Is this sustainable as a knowledge claim if she does not know where the room is? Yes, if the conditions of the proposition are settled entirely within the conditions of being in a room and no more (as, say, an electrician might want to know only if the power outlet is in a room of outside, and no more than this). But no if inquiry is taken to its limit.

I can see that Gallagher would be right about this as well as I can see that psychologists are right about short term and long term memory, and that Kant is right about time's structure being apodictic. But the point I want to make is more simple. The immediate now has no meaning if not played against a past or a future possibility. But these possibilities reduced to immediacy are instantly contradictory: what is immediate is impossible to conceive without temporal dimensions, that is, having a beginning and an end, but such a structure analyzed in these time words suffer the failure to produce instances, "observable" either intuitively or otherwise demonstrably, of past of future. These collapse into indeterminacy, I am saying, because no determinacy can be made about them at the most basic level.

I believe you are correct. It is about "reality." But "reality" is a difficult subject → that most people do not want to address. It requires a very careful vocabulary. — Rocco Rosano

Or, it requires a clear reduction. It is not a furtherance of theory we are looking for, but a clearing of theory. What it is about the world that intimates "reality" is a clutter of historical metaphysics. But beneath this, one would ask, isn't there something intuitively foundational? E.g., when we speak of God, but deliver the concept from its fictions, is there not something undeniably there that necessitated the fiction in the first place? This is the "essence" of God, one could argue. The concept is only as meaningful as the meaning it possesses.
Being careful about vocabulary is right, but it also has put metaphysics IN language, the ALL of cognition, as Rosenzweig put it. But the language of the world is indeterminate.

I think it would be better if Metaphysics was thought of as the study of reality. It would be difficult to mention something that might not be entangled with the fundamental of reality. — Rocco Rosano

But then, this is just what I have been talking about, reality. What else?

Exactly. You gave no argument. — Jackson

Trust me Jackson, 180 Proof is clueless about Kant. His Wiki is the full extent of it.

I don't think it is such a hard job, because something like religion of philosophy, with spiritual exercises, was already practiced by the ancient Greek philosophers: Pierre Hadot has shown us this. Today there are several movements, like philosophy experienced as life, secular spirituality, atheist spirituality, postmodern religions, atheist Christians and so on. I think they just need to clarify their positions, to gain awareness of what the core of their tendency is. I think all of this can be fruitfully embraced by the umbrella term "spirituality", once it is cleaned from its confusion and ambiguities. — Angelo Cannata

I would bow at the alter of the phenomenological reduction!

The harm principle is an important principle, but there are a number of problems with it. First it is overdetermined. If every harm done was unjust, then self defense would be unjust. However, in many legal systems (All I now of in fact) self defense serves as a justification, not only as an excuse. So some harm must be just.

Then again, it is also underdetermined, because sometimes one's action (or inaction) might not directly cause harm, but are still considered unjust. You do no harm when you do not save a drowning child because her drowning is not caused by you, but we might hold you acountable for not aiding nonetheless. This is more controversial, but I think it is relatively uncontroversial to think that when you can prevevent big damage by sacrificing very little one ought to do so.

You might well end up with the harm principle as an important principle after you complete your via negativa, but it is not the bedrock of justice, unless you define it so broadly that it totally covers justice. (envery injustice is harm and every harm is injuctice, that renders the principle meaningless). — Tobias

Do no harm IS general and nondescript. It is also the default defeasible position of ethical/just actions. IF you are looking to cancel over and under determination, then you will have to do away with principle making altogether, for principles are essentially general, dismissing the accidental features of a particular case. This is the final stopping place for apophatic inquiry about ethics, and all things, really (which is why it is relevant to religious enlightenment). But you're right, it really doesn't take one to a place where theory can move forward, that is, unless one is interested in looking at the affective underpinning of ethics/justice.

Apopahtic inquiries work like dialectics: what IS the case plays against what is not, and from this something emerges (unless you're a Hindu or the like; then "nothing" "emerges"). An innocent man is put in prison, and this is unjust. See what Strawson has to say about this: there is that collective resentment that responds to this. Is this the kind of thing you are looking for?

I see no real difference between ethical issues and those of justice. The latter rests on the same values, the same principles essentially the same arguments; the only difference is the context, that is, issues of justice are often involved with legal entanglements.

Not clear about doing no harm by not saving a drowning child because the drowning was not one's doing. Holding one accountable for harm and that one doing harm have no discernable difference regarding ethics/justice. Why else accountable?

I like the inclusion of love, that draws us to the analogy of love and law. So, is there something loving about law? I think there is, but that is difficult to articulate. Staying on the path of the negative, law is not love, but is it then a kind of love, what relationship may there be between the two? — Tobias

Love, empathy, compassion, on the positive side; then resentment on the negative side. These are affective, not argumentative. Interesting, the dialectical interplay here: we are livid that a woman, say, strangled her child, but then the case comes out and we find she was severely mentally ill. The resentment lingers, but there is no one to pin it to, and we are forced to relegate it to the amoral, "ajudicial" bin of natural events where resentment sits, "unconsummated" if you will. The dialectic: anger, a sentiment well grounded and established in the collective regard for such things, then meets its nemesis, a failed justification. But the anger is repressed, collectively, and we do not appreciate this. We want, so it goes, Justice! there is no synthetic resolution here, and we all just have to live with this, the rotten things happening to good people. This is part of our foundational ethical relation with the world. We are ethical being, but the world is not ethical at all.
Even the most heinous criminal behavior loses its connection to justified resentment when the the cards are genuinely played out, and motivations replace freedom.

So Kant's categorical imperative should have resulted in his being a Utilitarian since the hedonistic principle of Bentham was synthetic a priori? — Hanover

Bentham was not doing metaethics. He simply accepted the premise that pleasure could be quantified. Very hard to do, but there is something in the attempt: better to be a pig satisfied than a philosopher unsatisfied, or not? Quantifying the "good" of experiences, addressing the claim that Beethoven is better than rock? One would have to "observe" the aesthetics to compare, and most would say this can't be done, or, shouldn't be. But the ethereal against the "hard", this is not an impossible question.

Anyway, what Bentham was dealing with, value, generally speaking, is, if you want to talk Kant, synthetic apriori. It is there in the midst of the world (though Kant's idealism remains an open question) yet, and this has to be carefully considered: the joy of being in love or the agony of torture, are not contingent. The "propositional" putting it forth IS contingent, for language is interpretative and its contingency lies with meanings bound to other meaning to make meaning. But the non-propositional experience of agony is not contingent.
As I see Kant, there are two problems. One is the indeterminacy of the universalized maxim. I mean, should I steal? No. But wait, the "principle" in question is not about stealing in general. it is a bout stealing under conditions x,y, and z. What are these? This question so relativizes the principle that it vanishes altogether: the choice before one is a completely unique entity of impossible complexity to distill into a principle. The ought, in other words, meets reality, and is reduced to a homily the universalization of which is nor more than a heuristic.
the other problem has to with duty: Is not one motivated to do one's duty? One must "desire" this, no? There is no such thing as rational disinterest.

You are making an impossible distinction here, arguing that there are two definitions of terms (1) the absolute meaning and (2) the contextualized meaning. All actually fall under category #2. — Hanover

That is right, and it is a big issue.

But think of it as Kant thought of reason. All rational affairs are given to us embedded in experience in the world, the actual content of which is, as he calls it, sensory intuition. Add to this the bulk of the living experience teaming with affectivity, etc. and you have all that Kant wants to dismiss, for analytic purposes, in the effort to discover the apriori form of judgment. He calls his foundational concepts 'pure'. Now, there are no pure concepts, really. This is an abstraction from the actual experienced world which is messy. But, it is not as if there is nothing in this actual world that aligns with Kant. This is logic. Again, there is no "logic" in the world; it is an abstraction from judgments we make. But the logical structure of thought is a feature of the lived experience. There is "something" in experience that is rigid and uncompromising, like modus ponens, in deductively structured thought.

Here, the issue is not logic and pure reason, but affectivity, or value. It is given to us in all of the messiness of lived life, yet analysis recognizes in this a feature which belongs to it, to the contextualized affairs of everydayness. The analysis doesn't obfuscate the quality, it simply brings it out and reveals it. Affectivity is already "reified", if you will, for it is discovered, not made (something Richard Rorty doesn't deal with well, if you've read him), so there is no chance of inventing it. Kant is essentially describing! the world's structural features. Here, I make this same claim: it is not about they way the world is interpreted historically in religion and so forth; It is about a descriptive feature of the world that is there for analysis.

The question then turns to affectivity. We have to look to the way it is experienced to discover what it is (and thereby discover what the world is). Music, art, being scalded and burned, falling in love, getting a splinter, you know, the various and sundry afflictions and blisses we deal with. These kinds of things saturate life. And it is here I claim we discover this "absolute" presence. That it is discovered IN the world cannot be understood as a a deflationary reduction to the mundane interpretations of everydayness. Just the opposite: It is found IN the world; this makes the world something that is just this.

There is no essence to the term "yellow." "Yellow" means however it is used, and there is not a Platonic form that represents true yellow from which to measure. You're arguing essentialism, which isn't a sustainable position. — Hanover

Not that. the term essence is ill advised, so if I used it, I invited ambiguity. Yellow as presence, is all I mean. You may argue that presence is also an embedded term, but this would lead to arguments of higher complexity. It is being understood as a "pure" phenomenon. The language that gives us this is and interpretative indeterminacy, but the presence is not. A tricky issue.

If one holds to hedonism, pleasure is good by definition, but that position isn't universally held. — Hanover

That pleasure is, call it apriori good, is my position. Pleasure qua pleasure cannot be other than good. It is apodictically good.

But I'm saying sometimes we ought to harm and that your view is idiosyncratic, but you just keep telling me it's obvious we shouldn't harm. — Hanover

I'm telling you that do no harm is a foundation that gets entangled with complex affairs in which things are brought into competition and contextualized, relativized, and it is here doing harm becomes ambiguous. But harm itself carries an absolute proscription. Consider the color example. It remains what it is, most emphatically and without exemption, an absolute one might say (though this term is difficult); yet it can be taken up is countless ways that compromise this simplicity. Generally speaking, pleasure os good. But there is that exam on the horizon, so now it is bad to simply indulge and fail to study. This has no bearing whatever on the good of pleasure, though. That caviar Hitler had as he ordered thousands to a horrible death was no less delicious.

The idea that love is undisputably good is a most Christian sentiment and is understandably a sentiment that might be thought of as universal by someone immersed in Christian society, but, believe it or not, Judaism finds hate a virtue when deserved, drawing a sharp contrast against the Christian virtue of turning the other cheek.

"Regarding a rasha, a Hebrew term for the hopelessly wicked, the Talmud clearly states: mitzvah lisnoso—one is obligated to hate him." — Hanover

I take it to be neither Christian nor anything else. For me, it is simply observation, nothing more. It is a reflex to assign a metaethics to some familiar institution, I know. But do consider it to be entirely independent of any of these contextualizations. Look at it as a phenomenon, a pure phenomenon, as you, say, luxuriate in the thought of the beloved, sitting in a meadow. All judgment and relativities in abeyance. The feeling simplciter is simply there.
Ethical issues are often hard, obviously, and Jews and their nazi tormentors are among the worst cases. Strawson argued in favor of resentment as part of the social morality, and I suppose it is. As long as we see that when we draw up these ideas, there is a foundation upon which this sits. Do no harm. But why not? Because harm hurts. What is wrong with something hurting? And then, what is right about something happy and pleasant? You see how these questions answer themselves?

But, once we clarify that spirituality is not a belief, but rather philosophy practiced as a whole human experience, the language of spirituality is automatically set in the context of philosophy, and philosophy has in itself a long and strong tradition about cleaning language from confusion. — Angelo Cannata

Well yes, something like this I would agree with. The devil is in the details. Hesse's Siddhartha imagines a world where every young boy wants to be a sadhu, just run out to the forest and meditate and find God. No more than a nostalgia, now. I suppose for a society to take philosophical religion (??) seriously, it will require serval cultural revolutions. Perhaps when AI delivers us from all labor, or Skinner's Walden II catches on. Who knows.

Not trying to be difficult here, but the idea that there is universal agreement on what is good (or not good as the OP suggests) and we just need to talk it out to see what it is so we can arrive at this naturally understood goodness necessarily assumes Attila the Hun and Adolph Hitler don't get a seat at the brainstorm session. On what basis do we exclude them? — Hanover

It's a merely descriptive matter, like the color yellow. One can imagine the color yellow being worn by fascists, the favorite color of a serial killer, and so on. But yellow remains yellow. Context relativizes. Then, there are the two kinds of love, aren't there? One is an exaggeration, perhaps, as, Freud loved cigars. Then there is being IN love. The latter serves the point best, but the love of a cigar, exaggeration or not, is still inherently a good thing, whether it is Stalin smoking it or Jesus (and we all know Jesus loved a good cigar!).
It does get confused when love becomes entangled with other affairs, and even the loving, liking, adoring, and so on, can become ambiguous, as with masochism: how much is he genuinely enjoying this? Not so cut and dry as a school boys romantic affection. But when it is good, it is not contingently good, is the point. The "goodness" is there on the sleeve, so to speak, and unalterably so, unless it becomes entangled in a competition, a comparison, and then, it is problematized.

No, that is not the principle I seek. Sometimes harm is needed for the greater good. Punishment, afterall, is harm. So, would you abolish all of criminal law? What about self harm? How far would you take harm? For instance drug addiction harms yourself but harms society as well, because of the costs of healthcare. When I am talking to a pretty girl or man, I might harm you because you wanted to talk to her / him instead. So no, unfortunately the harm principle sensible though it is, does not cut it. — Tobias

But your approach is apophatic. This leads you to foundational things. Do no harm is THE defeasible default principle. It is arrived at, not in the complexities that stir the pot of ethical issues; there is nothing apophatic about this. After all of the "not this, nor that's" of apophatic reduction, do no harm is simply what is left. 'Harm" is exceedingly general, but it covers all possibilities for what justice COULD BE about. No harm in the balance, then no issue of a justice nature.
Of course, once IN the actual world of human affairs, the harms of the world get entangled and indeterminate. But prior to this, harm carries its own injunction NOT to do something; it is inherently wrong, bad, evil; it is the existential basis for anything at all being wrong.

Silence however... prhaps there is a deep insight here. The claims to justice might do more harm than good. So, perhaps, one of the first insights of the via negativa on justice is that one should not impose one's conception of justice on others... — Tobias

I think justice is a subcategory of ethics, and ethics is has an existential essence: the bad or good of actual experiences, like scalding water on living flesh, or falling in love. These are absolutes. One does not argue about love being good. It always, already is. This means that it survives apophatic inquiry, the kind of weeding out what isn't necessary, or is merely accidental. Love cannot be bad. It is as impossible as a logical contradiction.

Too bad that in my question you don't recognize Joseph Campbell's question. He wondered how it is that one can tell whether one has indeed had a religious/spiritual experience, or whether the feel good feeling one has is simply due to having had a good meal. — baker

But this just begs the question: what does having a good mel have to do with the qualitative nature of experience? Certainly there can be a causal relation between the two, but this says nothing about WHAT the experience IS. Looks as if you are looking some kind of reduction of experience to physical brains states, such that a brain chemistry's analysis can yield up what an experience IS. This is obviously not true; the worst kind of question begging: how does one know what brain chemistry is? Why, through brain chemistry!? You should see that this is one way to approach the justification for a phenomenological approach.

Some "spiritual practices", "tips & tricks", consumption of intoxicants, altered states of mind due to physical exertion readily produce in one's mind a feeling, feeling x. This, however, doesn't yet mean that one is x. — baker

Same problem. An experience due to exertion, the light headedness, the runner's "high" and the like, are seen to be causally related to the exertion and it effect on physical systems like the brain's, but talk about this, even at the detailed chemical level says nothing at all about what the elation itself is. It tells you nothing about the nature of value. You will have to deal with the Tractatus here: the good feeling of a runner's high is entirely transcendental. Of course, all experience is, at the basic level, transcendental. We, e.g., think before we commit to ontology. Thinking is a structured experience, so the ontology can be no other than someting that issues from this structure, and since we have no access outside of this, we are committed to a general indeterminacy in all things--THE foundation to our existence is indeterminacy.
So what I claim is that experiences need to be assessed and understood for what they are, as they "appear" for appearance is all one ever has. And this is not to invoke talk about "representations" and their objects that do not appear. The world "appears".

For example, one can read some productivity literature, hype oneself up, put some of the advice into practice, and then one feels more productive. But whether one is actually more productive or not is something that yet needs to be measured. — baker

This raises the issue of making an error in judgment. Certainly this happens all the time, as when my dogmatic Christian neighbor insists the gay couple down the street is going to hell for eternity. But this is not about unjustified beliefs. It is descriptive, merely. Go into a strong effective meditative state, control the breathe, especially the release, out and slow, and at the end when the breathe cycle is complete, linger. It is a remarkable experience of control.

Serious meditation is not an easy thing to account for. One must, I hold, see that it is not about the brain, even though there is science's strong causal claim in the background. The brain is just another phenomenon, and it has no more relevance here than knitting. The brain is a phenomenon, and its causal relation to experience is phenomenally acknowledged. So, one simply witnessed the breathe, the intruding thought or feeling, the dismissal. the breathe is simply this rising and falling and the work one has is about controlling this, for the breathe is a most insistent attachment. After all, we yield to the breathe's insistence as we do to a thought or a feeling. The calm that issues from this exceeds familiar calm, and the world "settles" in such a way that one actually stands on the threshold of a sublime stillness, and the concepts of existence and reality take on an extraordinary meaning.
Look, I can't convince of the validity of this. But if you're going to criticize it, you should know something about phenomenology. A medical diagnosis is inherently pathological in its judgment, and this implies a standard of what is normal that issues from everydayness. In serious meditation, you are not in everydayness at all! Meditation is the cancellation of just this.

One can make oneself "feel the presence of the Holy Spirit", through prayer, going to a church, using intoxicants. But that alone doesn't yet mean the Holy Spirit is indeed present.

There is a difference between feeling safe, and being safe.

There is a difference between feeling that one has overcome egoic thinking, and actually overcoming egoic thinking.

And so on.
Feelings are easy enough to conjure up. Facts that can be measured, not so readily. — baker

But all of this talk belongs to a world of assumptions one gets from high school text books. Here "all schools are in abeyance" says Walt Wittman. You have to go there. I live in a world of dogs and cats and shopping just like everyone else, but I also read Kant through Derrida, and I have learned that this everydayness is a fraud, at the level of basic questions, lacks reflective justification altogether. Facts? Are these Wittgenstein's facts, on the logical "grid"? These are free of value content. So then, what IS nirvana? The most extraordinary value experience.
One thing Witt did was he took value off the table for discussion by claiming to be transcendental and unspeakable. This gave analytic philosophers the license to ignore THE most salient feature of our existence: affectivity. The meaning of life is not about facts; it is about the depth and breadth of affectivity.

Strange that the Buddhists say the Noble Eightfold Path and the Four Noble Truths. — baker

Heuristics! That is all this is. Sitting under that fig tree is not at all about the four noble truths.

I am afraid I do not understand you. Yes, Rawls offers us a cataphatic approach; under the veil of ignorance we would necessarily choose a system in which advantages for some are only justified when they also benefit the least well off. However, why would he need God? It is just the light of reason. Anyway, my approach would then be to look at cases which we find unjust and see whether we can distill such a principle from it, instead of resorting to reason under the veil of ignorance. — Tobias

A reduction, then. It is there already, from Mill and before: do no harm. This is the principle you seek. Not so much apophatic, which is reductive to a vanishing point, like the eastern notion of neti neti, which leads to a vacuity where one finally discovers that it was language and the world of particulars that was obstructing insight. Apophatic inquiry leads to "silence".

I highly suggest the entire video though, even if you're familiar with the concepts. I'm curious to see what people think. — Philosophim

Not that causality is more fundamental than time. Causality IS time. You have to put Einstein on hold: time is the condition of the perceptual apparatus that is available to Einstein so that he could make observations and think at all. First perception, then science, is the order of analysis.

For example, let’s think about the faith in God that is in Christianity. In this context, God cannot be conceived but perfect. The only alternative, in order to conceive God as not perfect, would be to conceive God entirely as a human creation. If God is not a human creation, then he must be perfect. If God is a perfect being, he is exposed to all the contradictions implied by perfection, that are, in a synthesis, all about being not human. But we, as humans, need something human. This is the problem of all religions: they have depth, profoundness, they are revelatory, but they lack humanity, exactly because they need to be based on something conceived as perfect, otherwise, if it is not perfect, it cannot escape being a human fantasy. — Angelo Cannata

But philosophy's job is avoiding the devolvement into fantasy. I take issue with it "all about being not human". God is constructed out of what is human. The issue is to avoid the enlightenment philosopher's talk that misses that misses the side of the barn by parsecs. See what Rorty says in a footnote:

All that I (or as far as I can see, Derrida) want to exclude is the attempt to be no propositional(poetic, world disclosing) and at the same time claim that one is getting down to something primordial--what Caputo calls "the silence from which all language springs."

See, he wants to commit to idea that the whole of our world, the logical grid of the tractatus, the being-in-the-world of B&T, Levinas' "totality" (which he gets from Heidegger and this probably comes Husserl somewhere), simply has no metaphysical foundation. My thinking is that it is ALL metaphysical, but not the extravagant Platonizing; just the, as Levina put it, realization that the desideratum exceeds the desire and the ideatum exceeds the idea. That is, our indeterminacy at the level of basic questions.

Anyway, the missing the barn door is here: it is not "the silence from which all language springs," as Caputo put is, but from which all affectivity springs! Language is nothing without affectivity; it is simply an abstraction. We are beings bound to a world of caring, of music and art, loving and hating, and on and on, and this is what cries out for meaning beyond the totality: it is that ethical/aesthetic dimension of our being. E.g., why are we born to suffer and die? And have blisses and miseries and horrors, and so on.
Non Christian philosophers almost Never go here. Metaethics has been theology and affectivity, well, a matter of "taste".

but which tells us nothing about the world in-itself or its meaning.

But Wittgenstein would never put it like this. The world-in-itself? This is Husserl talk. Tractatus-Witt would say this is just nonsense. The world is the totality of facts, not of things; and facts are in "logical space" and logic does not permit talk like world in itself.

So, I have a deep confusion about why philosophy sees this disconnection between logical necessity and physical causation. It seems to me computer science relies on the connection between the two - microprocessors basically comprise chains of logic gates to effect physical outputs. And more broadly, the link between logical necessity and physical causation seems fundamental to science generally, and even to navigating everday life. — Wayfarer

But if you are in Witt's world, causality is going to be understood as a logical concept. An odd idea, if you ask me: Kant on this is apodicticity: I cannot even imagine my cup moving by itself. It is intuitive, not logical; but logic is intuitively received, yes, but it is qualitatively different in the intuition.

Similarly we can translate the approach to the philosophy of law or ethics. — Tobias

But then, God IS ethics, an embodiment of ethical indeterminacy. That is, at the end of inquiry regarding what ethics is about and the search for justice and redemption, we face our own nothingness, the nothingness that shrouds our existence: indeterminacy. So your question about ethics and politics is really about ethics, or metaethics. Take Rawls' thinking on justice: if you're going to go apophatically on this, the call for the most advantaged to address the needs of the least advantaged is essentially an ethical obligation, and so rests with ethics; so then, what is the apophatic indeterminacy of ethics? God, that is, meta-God (delivered from the incidental cultural and political BS).

Not sure if gathering knowledge follows a program. — Haglund

It's forward looking process of programmed responses. If......then..... is essential the structure. This reflects the basic structure of experience itself as it engages the world. What is a coffee cup? It is one of a number of this structures. If I hold it and lift, then the cup will rise, enabling access to the mouth, and so on. There are presumably an infinite number of such "programmed respo0nses," variations of such things, and on and on, in our relationships with the world. What is anything at all? Well, IF......THEN.....What is nitroglycerin? If it is thrwon with a certain velocity.....THEN it will impact in such and such a way.
We are all of us living laboratories, confirming hypotheses and theories about what the world is. The "is" of this is pragmatic.
Of course, this is just a construct. Our actual relationships (???) is pure metaphysics.

Are you claiming belief is a physical object? Explain. — Jackson

Pull back from this, whatever it means. All things that are known to be can be analyzed as known in a knowledge relation. This relation bears analysis. Don't get hung up on object classifications.

This presupposes there is such a method to arrive at knowledge. But is there truly? Wouldn't we be able then to write a computer program, feed it with sensory data, and run the program? — Haglund

I believe that would be the algorithm.

Notice I said, physical. Physical object. — Jackson

All knowledge relations

Philosophy does not require a reference to physical objects in order to discuss an issue. — Jackson

Philosophy discusses the presuppositions of knowledge relationships. No object, then nothing to discuss.

I am not saying philosophy is a science. But consider taht language itself is an application of the "scientific method", the hypothetical deductive method: I see an object, but what is the event of its recognition? It is a temporal event that has a beginning and an anticipation and a "success" in the satisfaction of this anticipation. The cat walks and behaves just like I anticipate her to do, and this happens so seamlessly and spontaneously, I think I am in a direct relationship with the cat, only I am not. The past rises up constantly in the stream of events of experience, and is met with confirmation in things turning out exactly as anticipated, as when you put your foot down on the pavement and having the resistance and forward motion all come to pass as it should. Dewey thought like this, I and think he was in the right ball park.
Of course, this all gets very interesting further on.

I do not think philosophy has anything to do with science. — Jackson

The aim of the Meditations is a complete reforming of
philosophy into a science grounded on an absolute foundation.
That Implies for Descartes a corresponding reformation of all
the sciences, because in his opinion they are only non-selfsufficient members of the one all-inclusive science, and this is philosophy. Only within the systematic unity of philosophy can
they develop Into genuine sciences. (Husserl, Cartesian Meditations)

The history of philosophy shows changes in the issues philosophers take seriously. — Jackson

Granted. But it can be argued that all of the elaborations and elucidations in philosophy are far more determinatively based that literature. The latter is the broad and inclusive world of engagement, the body of which is the body of literature. Philosophy is the aloof observation, closer to science, really, which is why philosophers often place themselves within the same rigor of standards of validation: it is specialized, like science, and has focus.

Having said this, philosophy as an historical discipline is at its end, or it will be, as soon as it completes its housekeeping duties, the "cutting out" of Occam's razor, of the legacy of religion and its language and the "bad metaphysics" that so entangles basic questions. I think Husserl points to the residua that remains once the coast is clear.

Literature is messy, in comparison, like life itself, allowing insights to emerge from the original fabric, but more poignantly. A great philosophical value of literature is that, not only does it not dismiss the affectivity of our lives, it highlights them. Rorty understood this.

Isn’t actually metaphyisics a quest for a system of ideas that is expected to work with absolute perfection? I cannot conceive a metaphysics of something imperfect. — Angelo Cannata

Not perfect systematizing of our affairs, but perfect happiness. The former is an entanglement, and the confusion take place in thinking the logical grid "upon which" the world sits and is divided (thinking of Wittgenstein's Tractatus here; but also Kierkegaard before him) is a model for human perfection. Such is the plight of rationalism). Call nirvana? But really, closer to home, think of Wordsworth and childhood. Was there not once a time when the world was almost perfectly realized? The trouble was, we were infants, we were, if you will, nobody, no reflective agency to realize the significant depths of the what was happening. Language and culture make this happen: in the evolvement of a human being there is that Heideggerian moment of geworfenheit (Kierkegaard called this posting spirit; Husserl's epoche is clearly in this-- I'm sure he had read Kierkegaard. Something of a profound moment, for me, anyway, this existential line that is crossed where all things recede in their implicit knowledge claims that possess everyday affairs, and the world is shrouded in mystery, Heidegger's "wonder" in What Is Metaphysics? But is it the vacuity of nothingness? Or is it a liberation?)
Is Emerson simply passé and naive? Certainly that "transparent eyeball" is an amusing image, but that walking through a bare common, glad to the brink of fear...curious at least. Is religion, essentially, just about systems of organizing our thinking about metaphysics? Or is it revelatory, and deeply profound?

All modes of culture, including the sciences, literature and philosophy, are evolving concepts which move ‘with the times’. This is why historical movements such as the Classical period , Renaissance, Enlightenment, Modernism and the Postmodern are defined by the inseparable interrelations among these cultural modalities. It’s meaning less to say that philosophy always asks the same questions if the sense and meaning of the questions changes with the times , which it does. If philosophy really asked the same questions over and over, it would come up with the same answers. — Joshs

Just two things. One is that lack of signified. The self effaced signified is meaning self deconstructed. That is, deconstruction is self deconstructing, what Meister Eckhart was looking for is his plea to be rid of God, the way to apophatic affirmation. The other is ethics and value. It may be that the spectral analysis of star is bound to context for its meaning, but being in love is not. When we put words to it, certainly, but it HAS an altogether mystifying stand alone presence (knowing full well that my utterances here about this are contextually bound).
Sartre called it the superfluity of existence--this is really about the superfluity of value or affectivity. The philosophically the human situation is grounded in value, not vacuous signifiers. Another word for the lostness of signifiers-in-play is metaphysics (not the ridiculous kind), and this is no less than the palpable presence of affective meaning.

No, it's more systematic than that. Can't you tell? — baker

Just the obvious point that one tells the different between experiences according to their, well, differences. Clear as a bell; so clear one wonders why the question is raised at all. Surely you know the difference between being in love and lasagna. You're grasping at straws. Curious.

Killing oneself in a public place for a political reason is not a sign of a noble attainment. — baker

Do better. It is not the killing oneself that is in question nor the noble attainment. It is the inner state of mine that made such an act possible; to suffer so little, or not at all, inspires the wonder that perhaps there is such a thing as nirvana and its perfect detachment. So then, what IS nirvana? Not simply happy as a child, but removed, distant from engagement, the manifesting of something profound and beautiful. One has to take this kind of think seriously, and no summarily dismiss it. Buddhism is certainly NOT about a "noble attainment" in the usual sense, the term 'noble' being a social and ethical concept.
Again, a bit obvious. Oddest yet: no respect for someone who almost without argument did the most extraordinary thing one could do.

So it is with shooting heroin up your veins. — baker

A little juvenile.

I'm averse to hocus pocus and to shallowness being masqueraded as depth. — baker

And yet you toss around such terms as if you know what they are. Is kriya yoga hocus pocus? Well, my goodness. Sorry to trouble.

If after all this time, you still think that ... then go fuck yourself. — baker

Couldn't help but notice. Hope things improve with whatever is troubling you.

We cannot say what philosophy is before doing philosophy. What philosophy is is determined and evolved in the course of doing it. What the most basic questions are is determined and evolved while we deal with those ones we think they are.

I think that now philosophy is more and more realizing that the basic questions are about humanity, how to be human, rather than trying to understang how things work to master them, that is metaphysics. — Angelo Cannata

Not a new era of nuts and bolts metaphysics. Religion is philosophy's new task. Popular religion did not survive the Enlightenment (as we witness its violent death throes today), but the issues that religion was there for on the first place are now exposed and open. Metaphysics is now REAL metaphysics: the encounter with the foundational ethical/affective deficit of being human minus the narrative and the faith. This deficit is of course an epistemic one, that is, we don't know, but the knowledge sought is not more of the Same (Levinas).

Yes, yes, about humanity; but humanity at the threshold, not the ethical nihilism of Rorty (see Critchley's critique of Rorty's private ironist). I think you are in this boat, committed to ethical nihilism, for what is this if not the refusal allow philosophy is proper place: as THE new "religion". Metaphysics can finally be purified, if you will, freed from God, freedom and and soul and useless metaphysics. What IS metaphysics, asks Heidegger? What is that primordial wonder? One thing: it is not a vacuous metaphysics. Why did Kant HAVE TO talk about noumena? Because it was there in the midst of phenomena, only he missed the grand point, didn't he? Phenomena revealed noumena because phenomena IS noumena.

I think we need to be always careful in proclaming the end of things such as philosophy, literature, art, cinema, that I have seen proclaimed in several contexts: we should, more humbly, talk, if anything, of end of one kind of of philosophy, not of philosophy as such. It is the end of philosophy meant as domain over concepts, things, but actually, surreptiously, domain over people. In this context, the choice to teach literature, be interested in poetry, or in politics, can considered a symptom of need for a new way of meaning philosophy. The way Kierkegaard talks about time or eternal present is not a metaphysical way, is not a language organized in a dominating way; he talks in an existentialist way.
After realizing that we need a weak philosophy, we need to build a good relationship with metaphysics, because the things of the past cannot just be put in the bin and forgotten. I think that a good relationship with metaphysics should be in the form of a dialogue, rather than adopting passively metaphysics as if it was contraditions-free and well working to get domain over things, reality and people. Metaphysics can be helpful to tell literature and poetry that, even if we have a certain human ability to shape and even create reality, nonetheless we cannot ignore that we need to face humanly humiliating experiences, such as suffering, death, contradictions, inconsistency, forgetfulness. At the same time, we cannot be just pessimistic, because weak or postmodern philosophy, as well as art, literature and a lot of other human experiences, are able to show that we can make miracles, unpredicted wonders.
In this context philosophy ceases to be the place where people look for conclusions, answers, solutions, formulas, that is all stuff to exercise domain, and becomes instead perspective to work, do research, open dialogue, plan comparisons, explore horizons. When we realize this, we can see that philosophy is far from beind ended, there is lot to do and to work on, and it doesn’t need to retrieve any disguised metaphysics or masked realism to gain reputation or to keep afloat. — Angelo Cannata

That was perhaps off putting what I said, but philosophy is not going anywhere ELSE as I see it. As you would have it, it would devolve into the "philosophy of" this and that. For me, philosophy's world is the most basic questions, and these face foundational indeterminacy. Where Joshs says, "Derrida is no sceptic, and he never argues that knowledge is ‘impossible’, only contextually embedded," I say, this is simply putting basic questions on a par with auto mechanics, and you can't do this. Philosophy is that "undiscovered country" dimension of our actuality, not some theory that can be argued away. Heidegger's What Is Metaphysics was very Kierkegaardian, sans the religious fixation. This is the "existential" margin or threshold, and it affects different people in different ways. For some it is not an intellectual impasse, but momentous encounter with the Other of our existence. Levinas, Marion, Henry, et al, and their so called French theological turn explore this.

See Caputo on Derrida. I agree with this: Derrida brings us to the death of philosophy, where to speak at all is to put forth distance. We tend to treat our basic indeterminacy as something familiar, we "totalize" it, as Levinas would say. What is it not to totalize? See Husserl's epoche, for a start. From there, one stops asking, like the Buddhist, the answers are revelatory.

THE foundational insight is not intellectual, which is essentially pragmatic. It is affective. Rorty is right, the truth is made not discovered. But what good is truth as truth? None. This is just a confusion. Truth is, as Dewey put it, merely consummatory, and this is of a piece with the body of experience which is inherently affective. The division is analytic, merely. There is no division, really. Philosophy's real job is to "reduce" the world to its essential presence so that it may be encountered.

as if literary movements didn’t already share in the metaphysics embraced by philosophical eras. — Joshs

Literature is an evolving concept. It reflects the issues that arise and complicate our lives, and it has in this "relevance" and moves with the times. This is very different from philosophy which has its world grounded in basic questions, questions that do not change with politics, ethics and social norms.

In this context philosophy ceases to be the place where people look for conclusions, answers, solutions, formulas, that is all stuff to exercise domain, and becomes instead perspective to work, do research, open dialogue, plan comparisons, explore horizons. When we realize this, we can see that philosophy is far from beind ended, there is lot to do and to work on, and it doesn’t need to retrieve any disguised metaphysics or masked realism to gain reputation or to keep afloat. — Angelo Cannata

That is a lovely obituary.

Then you referred to an established meaning: how can we realize that it is established, since our mind is part of all the things that are subject to change? — Angelo Cannata

I think you have your finger on something here.

How do we know that all knowledge experiences are hermeneutical if the same hermeneutics applies to itself? How can logic say what logic is? How can permanence ever be discovered if impermanence lies within the very asking? If impermanence is presupposed in the very concept of permanence? It is here we have reached the end of philosophy, which is why, I am sure, Rorty simply gave up and started teaching Literature. He knew Derrida and Heidegger very well, and, I suppose was inspired by Heidegger's privileging of poetry and its special power to ironize the world and thereby make new meanings, determined the answers to such questions were "made not discovered".

But this issue if change is about Time, the "existence" of time, I might put it. Time is change, Kierkegaard's repetition that does not look back and recall, but is forward looking, ever forward looking. The is a lot of Kierkegaard's "Concept of Anxiety" in Heidegger. If you want understand the reconciliation between Heraclitus and Parmenides, as I see it, it lies not in Plato, but in Kierkegaard, and his nunc stans, the eternal present. Wittgenstein was a BIG fan of Kierkegaard.

One also has to keep clear: there is no past nor future. These "are" presence"s". One has never witnessed a past or future event. Of course, this problematizes the present as well, it meaning vanishes without past of future to contextualize it. Is this the way to some apophatic affirmation?

Thanks, I'll read it this weekend, perhaps.

Do tell how you distinguish between
on the one hand, religious/spiritual/philosophically deep/profound experiences or insights,
and
on the other hand, the feel good feeling you get after a good meal, or the experience of hypoxia, or what comes up when under the influence of intoxicants — baker

How do you distinguish the influence between the good feels in general? One simply does. Keep in mind that hypoxia is a term that belongs to pathology, that is, assuming something's wrong. How would Thích Quảng Đức.the Buddist monk who immolated himself in 1963 be pathologically assessed? The answer? Very easily.
I push kriya yoga to its limit. Pays off. It's only a pathology if you are on the outside looking in.

Such "stepping out of texts" is, for all ordinary practical intents and purposes, impossible.
What you're doing is just ditching standard religious texts, and firmly embedding yourself in other texts. — baker

Which is saying, there is no stepping out of text, and if you were Derrida, I would know what you mean. But read Caputo on Derrida, his Radical Hermeneutics. You may be averse to unorthodox approaches, but you should know where orthodoxy itself has it end. It is like this: Try any interpretative reduction that is possible, any at all, and you will end up in the contingency of language, aka, deconstruction. Deconstruction is all pervasive, because language itself is its own indeterminacy. For me (and you are free to read his Structure, Sign and Play, Of Grammatology, and others) it translates into a perceptual indeterminacy (not unlike Sartre's Roquentin and the chestnut tree, if you've read Nausea), not merely an abstract theory. Look at the world and realize the object you behold is NOT possessed by the language that claims it, and does so with the powerful grip of familiarity only. This is Husserl's epoche at its perfect realization. This is what Buddhism is all about, I would argue: for language has its "grip" deep into the conditioned psyche; a lifetime of socializing that began in infancy.

Digression - isn't it the case that Rorty is controversially a part of the pragmatist tradition? I know he is described as a neo-pragmatist, but isn't he more of a post-modernist? — Tom Storm

Yes, that sounds right. But he followed Dewey, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Kuhn, and Derrida and on the other side of the fence there was Davidson and others ( I can't keep up with him, clearly. I'm just an amateur). Dewey shared with Heidegger the idea that when we enter into, call them knowledge environments, we have this pragmatic relationship with the things around us, what Heidegger called instrumentality, ready-to-hand, like the chair, the latch on the door, the floors and lights and so on. These are NOT to be conceived spatially in the usual sense, but temporally, and this is Rorty's pragmatism. I think of it in the terms of the structure of conditional propositional (the essence of the scientific method): IF I reach out and push up on the switch, THEN the light will turn on. This is foundational for our knowledge relationships with the world. I hold that language itself is a pragmatic phenomenon. What Heidegger calls "presence at hand" far more interesting.
There is a lot more to it, obviously, but this idea that we make the world through these internalized pragmatic structures of relating to it is essentially pragmatic. Beneath this (all the greats have layers!) there is, of course, indeterminacy. My view is not to dismiss this as an unmade future waiting to be realized by my "free" creative acts, but to pull down
Rorty gave me my favorite turn the tables question to "realists" (whatever that could possibly mean): how is it that anything out there can get in here (one's head)? This is the way of materialism, and if you're going to be a materialist, then you will find this single impossibility that undoes your thinking.

What does "phenomenology" or "pragmatism" or "Rorty" have to do with anything I've argued? — 180 Proof

Derisive comments about Kant, and adoring ones about Peirce, et al, but then Peirce did have his "long run" views). But the traditional pragmatists are in their foundational views committed what could be called a pragmatist ontology. They could talk like naturalists, as did Rorty, James, Dewey and even Quine, but, well, to put the matter in a popular vein, tree falls in the forest, etc.? No sound, no tree, no falling, no forest. I call it pragmatic phenomenology, and the first great phenomenologist was Kant.

Look, no analytic philosopher worth her ink is going to think foundationally like a scientist. None do. Because they have all read Kant, at least, and know, not that the solutions to the issues will one day be achieved, but that they cannot be achieved because the matter goes to the structure of thought and experience itself: idealism cannot be refuted unless you move to language philosophy, which really is a radicalization of idealism, but certainly drops dichotomies and dualisms of the traditional sort.

Once you start asking real questions about basic epistemic problems, you find some form of Kantianism is staring you right in the face. Kant's problem was synthetic apriority. Dewey's experience" is similar, only it is not the presence of mind in space and time, it is pragmatism (in space and time?). Rorty's post modernism is obviously not Kantian, but what did Kant do?: he looked at judgment of the everyday kind and discovered it had form that could be analyzed. He was, arguable I suppose, the first language philosopher. Post modern thinking begins with this.

See Robert Hanna's KANT AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY for a well thought out argument.

No really. Ask yourself, what is a pragmatist's ontology? Why pragmatism, of course. Truth is "made" not discovered. Surely you don't think Rorty is a naturalist at the basic level?