While I didn’t technically ask a question, I was querying Tim, as to how he thought the one grounded in the other. The quote merely relates to Tim’s assertion, as a preliminary reference. — Mww

Yes, I see. But you did "ask" an implicit question of Time Wood, with "I shall await your exposition as to how the one might be grounded in the other," which is, "How can the one be grounded in the other?" Sounds more like a clear, if impilcit, question.

One hears the same sort of thing from those who explain what supposedly keeps us from accepting Jesus as our Savior. — Ciceronianus

Certainly no argument should be determined ad populum. But then, consider that when it comes to Jesus, the standards are quite low, and often ridiculous. Heidegger commands the respect of generations of philosophers, is a seminal thinker which changed the face of philosophical thought. I mean the body of post Heiedggerian thought is staggering.

And btw: you don't think Jesus is our savior? This entirely depends on how this is interpreted.

Maybe I missed the issue coming in as I did. I took it that your question as to how the one might be grounded in the other referred to how an analysis of reason and judgment could be a ground (a general notion) for practical affairs in light of the fact that prior to any formal exposition there is first the "everyman" acting spontaneously, not thinking analytically, and so, any analysis of thinking as such would not come to bear on the practical end of things.
I read through your discussion quickly, so I could have missed the mark.

This shouldn't be required. He's not God, after all (though it sometimes seems some think he is). I'm not obliged to break the "Heidegger Code."

I can understand quite well (I think) what you've written about this essay or article and what you believe it says. If it says what you believe it says, however, he could simply have said it much as you did. The rest is mere mummery--the use of ancient Greek, Aristotle, ascribing human feelings to chalices and wood mills and hydroelectric plants, vaguely suggestive phrases, etc. — Ciceronianus

You find this an issue with everyone who has their education, from elementary school onward, grounded in empirical science. Heidegger cannot be accessed through this; one has to begin at least with Kant, who had jargon of his own. Then Hegel, who is ridiculously counter intuitive vis a vis common sense. I mean, all continental philosophy is like this. But if there is one who is both accessible and prerequisite for reading Heidegger, it is Husserl, from whom Heidegger derives a great deal of his basic thinking (certainly not all). Cartesian Meditations, Ideas I open doors.
As to the weird language,, I am told it makes more sense in the original German, but then, German and English are very close languages. He intentionally wants to use new language because he realizes that old usages and contexts reinforces the errors of the past. One must break away, and this has to occur at the level of basic vocabulary, which is always given to us with assumptions built in. the only way to escape the old narratives is to construct new meaning with novel use of language. He finds this in the Greeks.
What can I say, one has to follow through. I looked at Heidegger, Rorty and others with a desire to know, no matter what, and if I had to read Kant first, then so be it. There is a reason Heidegger is considered a giant, the the only thing that stands in the way is oneself, and one's rationalizations for not making the considerable effort.

Kant must have attributed to reason three fundamental conditions, for there are ....DUH!!!....three critiques, to wit:, theoretical (CPR), judicial (CofJ) and practical (CpR). Everydayman thinks more about his actions than about how he comes up with his actions, which implies practical reason has more importance overall than either of the other two conditional forms of reason. Nevertheless, given the two basic kinds of reason qua reason, pure and practical....

“.....To this question we have given a sufficient answer; for we have shown that, as the former stands in a relation to a different kind of condition from those of the latter, the law of the one does not affect the law of the other and that, consequently, both can exist together in independence of and without interference with each other....”

....I shall await your exposition as to how the one might be grounded in the other. — Mww

Hmmmmm, a question: Of course, this division between the practical and rational is subsumed under conditions that make thought even possible at all. One has to think through the categorical imperative and practical matters in general, that is, synthesize representations. to determine what to do, so the Critique of Pure Reason is analytically presupposed by the practical, one could argue. If the matter is "the law" of the one not affecting the other, then the matter rests with what is meant by "affect" which requires contextual clarification.

First there's a cat independent of your experience. Then there's no room independent of your experience. Where does the cat live?

Just as shrugging off the private language problem is no answer, so it stirring up dust and contradiction. — Cuthbert

The cat lives in the room, of course. But what is a room? one needs to ask, at the level of basic questions. It is a thing of parts. There is the concept, the perceptual act that, were these to be absent, there would be no room. Is there a ?place" all the same? Well, all "room" meaning is absent. All sensory intuitions absent. Where is the basis for the room still being there?

The only conclusion has to be that the affair of the cat in the room was localized in my head, but strangely, there is the abiding "whatever" that is "there" all the same. To talk about it is impossible. The cat, as with all things, abide in metaphysics. As I type these words, I am sitting at a desk and all familiar things; but I am also, and in finality, "in" metaphysics. No contradictions, just deduction.

You speak for philosophy and you know what it cares about. But listen more carefully to philosophy itself. It has on occasion shown concern for the ways in which words carry or fail to carry meanings. — Cuthbert

An idea I have carried to its logical end in this very matter. "Listening" to philosophy? Interesting. The idea would refer to the understanding. So, what is you understanding telling you regarding the cat and that which I wrote in the paragraph just above this one?

By slowing down. Clarifying the questions. Checking each thing you write for absurdities. Listening to objections. Yes, it's the long hard slog. — Cuthbert

By slowing down. Clarifying the questions. Checking each thing you write for absurdities. Listening to objections. Yes, it's the long hard slog. — Cuthbert

Long hard slogs call for accountability in reasoning. So by all means, reveal yours regarding that cat.

I just tried to read The Question Concerning Technology again. Technology is a "revealing." The silver chalice is "indebted" to the silver of which it's made; it "owes thanks" to it. Modern technology "is a challenging which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such." And much, much more. He may as well assert that modern technology poisons the purity and essence of our precious bodily fluids when he makes such claims, for all they can be said to mean anything without a friendly, improbable and generous interpretation. — Ciceronianus

Had to see where this was coming from, and reading The Question Concerning Technology is an extraordinary engagement. You see, Heidegger takes the matter of philosophy to a more basic foundation of analysis, which is why analytics philosophers don't understand him, for it takes a withdrawal from culture and its familiar interpretations to go where Heidegger goes, and analytic philosophers are bound to the clarity of science, and therefore never taking an analytic of being human to its foundations. Existentialists look at the entire breadth of "experience" as Dewey does, but the difference is that Dewey never takes the matter to its foundations: Pragmatism is a proper characterization of human knowledge (forward looking utility), but not of human meaning.
Having said that, the question turns to meaning, and it is not simply the utility dimension of meaning, but the qualitative distinctness of standing in the world in full openness; only here can one overcome (see Nietzsche's use of this term) alienation. Alienation is a principle theme of this philosophy, and others (Marxian alienation, e.g.), and it comes from Kierkegaard, a "religious writer" Heidegger called him, but then, he owed him a great debt: where Kierkegaard concluded we are alienated from God, Heidegger turned to language, the "house of Being", and essentially secularized Kierkegaard, holding that technology rising to dominate our relation to the world has come to alienate us from some primordial original condition. In this discussion, I think of my cat, sitting in the window, very content and there is no trouble, like some foolish metaphysics telling the cat about sin, about how awful the world is and our need for redemption, There is this enviable, untroubled unity there in which everything is well, an "openness" that simply accepts, that my cat experiences. We "had" this, once, and lost it, and now we are scrounging for redemption.
So, in the above, don't get too hung up on the language, which is not German, and Heidegger uses language to construct meaning, not to simply denote and deduct.
Indebtedness? Heidegger is simply giving analysis to the traditional concept of cause, for he wants to move on this toward a clearer idea of technology. Don't see any basis for complaint in this. It is important, no, essential, to see that to understand Heidegger requires one to meet him on his terms. It is a world of original thinking that has as its underpinning, Being and Time. Nothing is as it seems, at all. All hinges on phenomenological ontology, which needs to be taken up as an enterprise, not as a this and that quotation.

As to the "unreasonable demand", the principle term in this is "stored as such". It is a bit like Dewey's complaint against they way the art world puts art on a pedestal and "stores it" in museums. Art thereby becomes restricted to the few, enabled artists, which is a perversion of art which belongs in our lives enriching in the actual making of things. Something primordial has become an estrangement. And just as Dewey is not suggesting all art museums be torn down, Heidegger is not saying all "standing reserve" causes alienation. It is standing reserve comes to dominate our idea of who we are and what the world is that is the danger. Essentially, Heidegger is claiming that the world has lost its original (and this is certainly from Kierkegaard) wonder and awe that we feel when we encounter the world freely, as if, I would argue, a child again. I certainly agree with this.


Let's take a look at what is meaningful for Dewey? It is defined as a "consummatory" experience, that is, a completion whereby something is "wrought out" in problem solving that is successful, and meaning, the aesthetic, the cognitive, all issue from this event. What is counter to this? The rote experience that moves statically, automatically, smooth and clear, free of obstacles.
Note that in Dewey's view, an object made is defined, identified, in terms of a pragmatic compound of experiential aspects, this makes the object's meaning identical to the pragmatic self that produced it. That object's meaning is the agency's consummatory pragmatics. Language is just this as well. All meaning is bound to the consummatory conclusion of some problem solved, from infancy onward, and this is, to me, the great merit of his thought. To "know" is a matter of mingling thought, affect, moods, in short, experience, with the given.
Not how Dewey and Heidegger are closer than one might think, here: Dewey makes the "consummatory" affect of an object made, bound up with cognition, so the thinking is inherently poetic, so to speak; inherently aesthetic, and I think he is right about this. Heidegger in this essay, could be saying, there in this consummatory experience, an abiding sense of well being, of unalienating satisfaction in the world, just being there. In a pragmatic conception, the state of rest is this settled sense of problems solved generating its own foundation of well being. Heidegger doesn't talk like this, but then, he does say our aesthetic (poetical) meanings are not natively apart from cognition, and these must be balanced so the original "presencing" (everything is in the present continuous tense for H because Being is an event). Modern technology presents an imbalance such that what was originally there, say in the hunter/gather's resting world, has been lost, and this resting state is primordial to being human. Treating people like things, the world like "standing reserve" creates this imbalance.

I just tried to read The Question Concerning Technology again. Technology is a "revealing." The silver chalice is "indebted" to the silver of which it's made; it "owes thanks" to it. Modern technology "is a challenging which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such." And much, much more. He may as well assert that modern technology poisons the purity and essence of our precious bodily fluids when he makes such claims, for all they can be said to mean anything without a friendly, improbable and generous interpretation. — Ciceronianus

Hold on. I am reading it.

Yes yes yes. Heidegger is great, Phenomenology is great, Pragmatism isn't great, analytic philosophy is most emphatically not great, even bad. You've made your feelings quite clear. — Ciceronianus

Why not just read Heidegger and be done with it. Dewey was great, though I don't follow him religiously because I find he is out of touch with post modern thinking, which is amazing.

It's been some time since I looked at it, but I'm referring to his essay featuring the monstrous hydroelectric plant, cruelly commanding the river to serve our purposes (as if we haven't been "commanding" rivers for thousands of years through irrigation, and harnessing their flow for thousands of years using water wheels), and our evil proclivity to store sources of energy (was it coal?) and use them by destroying them when we see fit (as if we haven't been storing and using sources of energy like peat and wood for thousands of years). All this being hideous compared to the simple peasant who lovingly placed seeds in nature's bosom (not to mention the back-breaking and constant labor that entailed). Only a god can save us from technology (well, that was in Der Spiegel I think). That sort of thing. — Ciceronianus

Well, that only god can save us idea was rather cryptic, and in the same interview he gave Buddhists a thumbs up, which is less cryptic, one might say. But this opens an issue where Dewey and Rorty fall flat on their...ideas. I don't think the argument would be received well by a devotee of Dewey, but it is closer to Wittgenstein: first philosophy exceeds philosophy, because ethics exceeds philosophy, and this is because value, value simpliciter, or, value-qualia, or the pure phenomena of value (there are others) is the essence of ethics, and this issue of "meta ethics" cannot be spoken. A tough issue, which is why Witt. would never speak of it. The Good, he wrote in his journal, is his idea of the divine. Heidegger could have been close, but I'd have to read up.
Heidegger was observing the effects of the industrial revolution and the rise of technology on a scale never witnessed before, and saw, as Kierkegaard did a century earlier, that there was coming out of this a corruption of something very meaningful. I agree. He was influenced by Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, and shared their distaste for Christian metaphysics and the way it undermined dasein's authenticity. But he did see, one could argue, there was something deeply meaningful about being human, and here is where he is criticized, stepping beyond the boundary of what hermeneutics allows.
Anyway, of course, we've been storing peat for centuries, but things have changed dramatically in the last two centuries, and the worst has come to pass: societies are now little capable of, if you will, romanticizing the world at a primordial way.

If you can accept the conclusion that communication is impossible, why attempt it?

No conclusions are inevitable if words do not make sense, even to the user of them.

Shrugging off problems is easy enough but it's different from addressing them. The private-language problem is one that confronts the view that all we can know for certain is our own perceptions. — Cuthbert

But did you read "on the other hand"? I wrote:

But there is a big "on the other hand" to this: Obviously there is in my knowledge of my cat something that is not me, but something else entirely, and it is seems to be there, across an expanse of space. But again, one runs against Kant, who may not be altogether right in his details, but space and time are forms of intuition, if not as he explains it exactly (Heidegger complained, and many others). We are stuck with this event of me knowing my cat is on the sofa, occurring as a phenomenon, but this notion of "noumena" takes the stage again: what IS this "out thereness" that is entirely off radar in our brains? Well, many look, not to the out mystery, but the inner; after all, there is a noumenal "direct" access to the unknown X world, and that is the self, for while the "outer" ness of things seems to be altogether impossible, the "inner"ness of things is some core essence of the self. Where, after all, in metaphysics are all things? All things are impossibly grounded in eternity, or better, finitude is "really" eternity, and this applies to our inner self especially. So if one wants get intimate with with this impossible "other", one need look within, deeply, apart from the "totality" of our constructed selves.

This little bit above is part of the religio-apophatic turn in phenomenology.

The reason why the Vat matter is important is that it tells us something about the world foundationally, which is philosophy's business. It tells us that knowledge relationships cannot be explained by physical/material/causal models. Quantum connections? These will always be problematic as well, for one never can get beyond the "wall of phenomena" and quantum physics is structured by thought in a dense, opaque brain. Philosophically, it is an extraordinary advance in understanding, though philosopher, analytic ones, are out to lunch on this.

And what words do not make sense? Look, words are our interpretative medium, and if something doesn't make sense it is not the words, but their contexts. No one made up this context. It is a genuine philosophical problem. Walk out of a room, take with you all the meaning making apparatus, sensory producing apparatus,, you know, experience itself, can you say there is a room still there absent all this? this is the Brain in Vat issue in its essence.

As to private language, obviously language is a very public affair, for reasons I don't need to go into. this makes all matters public affairs, because such things have their meanings bound to language: institutions that make our economic, ideological, cultural, valuative, and so on even possible. So the whole business of being a person in the world is built out of language, and language is a social phenomenon, but when we look closely, like everything, absolutely everything, this model falls apart; and I am referring to the obvious social nature of language. Philosophy cares about issues like this, not the mundane affairs of exchanging meanings that are well familiar.

So, how does one approach this? The entirety of the social dimension of existence is placed in question.

We are biological beings before we are we linguistic and socially constructed beings. So we start from that neurological level of world modeling like any animal. Although human babies are engaged in linguistic culture and even mathematical culture from the earliest age. Rationality is being shaped just by being raised in a carpentered environment where chairs, doors, light switches and now iPads are the natural form of the world. — apokrisis

This is where the post modern turn to language steps in: no, biology is not antecedent to language. Language comes first, for it is in language that biology is conceived. If this idea is new to you, it is very unlikely you will find favor with it here, for it is a very difficult business to get familiar with. This is because it turns conventional science orientation on its head. I am confronting the world, and wish to know it intimately, I have to get into original proximity to what is there, that is, as "originary" as is possible. When I behold objects, wherein lies this generative source? It is within the perceptual presentation: a thing is a perceptual object first, a logical construction first. If I wish to move into regions of apprehending the world, like biology or knitting, then this is fine, but here I am removed from phenomena simpliciter, the "given" of the world prior to be taken up for some other than philosophical purpose. Philosophy is the attempt to maximize proximity by reducing the world to its foundational terms, and biology, for one, is derivative.

I’m not seeing anything to do here with the question of ultimate reality as a claim about the world or the thing itself. Just some hazy, culturally specific notions of selfhood and subjectivity,

So are you simply saying that ultimate reality is phenomenological and you are uninterested in the scientific method and pragmatic reasoning - the hunt for ultimate reality in that sense? — apokrisis

Ultimate reality is first given to us in language. It is not as if the world just reaches into your consciousness and declares its nature. Rather, we receive the world within a body of always already there language and interpretation. Ultimate reality is an idea first received by an active interpretative agency, and it is here meanings step forth and try to made sense of the given intuitions. These intuitions by themselves come to as language possibilities, out of which ideational constructs are made. According to this thinking, there is no pure intuition of anything, for intuitions are composites of thought. Derrida takes this to its logical conclusion, denying even the possibility of a singular affirmation, but then, consider that what this amounts to a a denial that language can speak the world, and this is what Wittgenstein talked about in the Tractatus, and in this work there is the famous, or infamous, reference to the mystical, the transcendental.
The real issue lies with Time, for our understanding is and eventful awareness, not a static "presence" but then, presence is the key to ultimate reality. See the Abhidhamma.

Well, language is the semiotic tool that constructs a self-world relation in the first place. It doesn’t get in the way. It is the way. As modern educated folk, we are generic selves, neurological selves, social selves and mechanical selves - the four levels of semiosis, using the codes of genes, neurons, words and numbers. — apokrisis

But note: to conceive of language as a semiotic tool, we need language to do this. The point is, we have the vocabularies first, and these vocabularies construct meaning. It is not that calling it a semiotic tool is wrong at all; rather,, putting language first, we move into a theoretical field called hermeneutics which denies "ultimacy" to anything that can be said because language itself is a constructive feature of the very reality that is the object of questioning. There is no terminal juncture where language ends its inquiry.
I don't really with this to its conclusion. I think there is an end, and ultimate reality makes sense, though the sense that is delivered up, is not discursive, not contingent, not bound to some novel ways to take up the world via an existing vocabulary. I think Michel Henry in taking up Husserl's epoche has it right, though I can't exactly tell you what this is and how I use it here. A rather lengthy affair.

Well at all levels, semiosis is about information being used to regulate the material physics of the world. So it is about harnessing the world in a way that works for the self - the organismic view of things. — apokrisis

What I mean is that, if numbers are to somehow hold the key to foundational meaning to, well, life the universe and everything, then numbers would have to be conceived more fully in their conception. A number simpliciter is just an abstraction. Where is the meaning, the affect? What we are trying to explain is not a body of lifeless facts, but a world of meanings, and the meta-question of which is that of metavalue: not quantitative, but qualitative. The first question we encounter when asking about ultimate reality is, what is there in reality that is being called ultimate? Here, in our midst, we find the most salient presence to be qualitative experiences, like falling in love, being tortured, haagen dazs and tonsillitis; you know, joy and suffering. The basis for what is ultimate has to be conceived on these terms, not in abstract structures.

Well not if my science-informed view is claiming the asymptotic approach is instead towards the Cosmos’s Heat Death. And that mid-era complexity in the form of life and mind arises as a clean-up squad for lumps of free energy that the universe wants degraded back to background heat as soon as possible - as part of its grand project of eternalised expansion-cooling. — apokrisis

But again, this talk about science is derivative, resting on something else, which is the phenomenological description of matters prior to being taken up in science.

Sure. Peircean semiosis warns us that the self is as much part of any modelling as the world that stands as its “other”. So we can’t develop views of either poles of being without understanding them as pragmatic co-constructions. — apokrisis

Of course. And Peirce had read Kant thoroughly, and understood the Copernican revolution that underlies this. After all, concepts without intuitions are empty, and intuitions without concepts are blind; and if the entire affair is pragmatic in nature, then this is a pragmatic phenomenology. I think pragmatism is right up to a point.

The difference was Peirce could say this clearly rather than mumble indistinctly. He showed how the mechanics of logic are rooted in organismic being and so how the rational structure of the Cosmos was natural and inevitable. — apokrisis

I don't quite understand this "rational structure of the cosmos" at all. It must be the way it is put here, but Peirce was a long run thinker, and he is criticized by some for his view that truth is what emerges in the long run. Don't recall well about this though. But I take issue with this phrase as you state it. After all, the structures revealed to us are inherently pragmatic, and any conception of the cosmos is, as you say, a co construction. Nature does not reveal itself apart from this doubt moving to belief equation.
I read Making Out Ideas Clear and his Fixation of Belief. I'll read them again.

The ultimate level of reality description for him is pansemiotic. Which is why I highlight the degree to which science has arrived at a pansemiotic model of the physical universe - one involving things like dialectical symmetry breaking, law as universalised habit, quantum potential as a logical vagueness, etc. — apokrisis

Oh. I see. Well, a pansemiotic model is not going to be some "ultimate" or absolute description. That would be impossible staying within the bounds of pragmatic truth and epistemology. Truth is made, not discovered.

I've mentioned this more than once in this forum, but the philosopher Joseph Margolis supposedly asked Dewey to read Heidegger. He did (I don't know what he read). Margolis asked Dewey what he thought after reading whatever of Heidegger's he read, and claimed that Dewey responded "Heidegger reads like a Swabian peasant trying to sound like me."

Dewey was by all accounts I've read not a man inclined to sarcasm, but usually mild and gentlemanly, so I have my doubts about this, particularly the "Swabian peasant" reference. But the similarity of their views in some respects has been noted.

My problems with H aren't limited to the fact he was an unrepentant Nazi and made some preposterously worshipful claims regarding Hitler. I see him as unduly romantic and something of a mystic. I'm thinking of his The Question Regarding Technology, which I think is sentimental and anachronistic, and of course such things as his rhapsodic statements regarding The Nothing and the unique superiority and destiny of the German language and people.

Dewey was criticized for his emphasis on practical experience as knowledge by such as the aristocratic Santayana, who felt Dewey neglected the higher, better aspects of reality and Nature. Dewey didn't claim that only a certain kind of experience was significant, or that true knowledge was limited in some sense. That seems to have been what his critics felt, in fact. — Ciceronianus

Heidegger didn't sound at all like Dewey. He was working in a vein of thought that moved from the Greeks, to Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, and many others, but certainly not American pragmatism. To say he tried to sound like Dewey makes, truly, no sense at all. And I mean absolute zero. Heidegger's Being and Time hangs close to Husserl, and there is nothing even remotely Husserlian in Dewey. Hermeneutics is alien to Dewey.

Heidegger was miles ahead of Dewey, but thematically, they can be seen to move along the same lines. Pragmatism, this essential idea that our everydayness is epistemically an instrumentality defined as a temporal sequence of events, this forward lookingness of experience (a Kierkegaardian notion first, nearly a hundred years before Dewey. See his Concept of Anxiety for a thematic summary of existentialism. K started it all, of course, standing on the shoulders of Kant and Hegel. All roads, Dewey's as well, lead back to Kant, not in full content, but in the phenomenological structure of Time). An attempt to deliver back to philosophy the entire experiential reality, the rejection of rationalism, and perhaps more. Heidegger probably baffled Dewey, which happened quite a lot. Analytic philosophers don't read him, nor did Heidegger read them. Their problem is that they are bound to positivism, that call for clarity over meaning, and they end up being monumentally boring.
Rorty understood.

Unduly romantic and the position on technology? Are you referring to his claim that technology turns people into useful objects, and nature becomes a utility reserve. THIS anachronistic? Have you not been paying attention? Heidegger was right. Just a note, this was a time in the early 20th century when Talorism and time management concepts were popular. And Dewey was outraged.

Heidegger was NO metaphysician, though Derrida did accuse him of the very thing he criticized Husserl for: the metaphysics of presence. Interesting discussion on this in Caputo's Radical Hermeneutics and Rorty's Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (a must read).

What is the "perceptual apparatus" you speak of? The person? In what sense is a person similar to a hammer, or an apparatus? Regardless, neither the person nor the hammer is removed from the world nor are they in a different one. Why think they are? They moved to a different location in the world, but how does it necessarily follow that the room disappears or becomes something else unless you think of the room as in a different world than the person? — Ciceronianus

Hmmmm You're not really dealing with the previous thoughts, just prior to this. Oh well.

Of course, which is evidenced by asking questions such as, "How do the scientists know they are not brains in vats, themselves, being controlled and experimented on by other scientists who could also be brains in vats?" You wouldn't be asking this if you wouldn't think that inside vs. outside is a meaningful distinction. — baker

Outside/inside certainly is a meaningful distinction, but it is articulated within the unity of phenomenology.

The problem of knowledge exists because it is assumed that there is a knower in general, who is outside of the world to be known, — Ciceronianus

Just a follow up: in the natural setting, call it, it is not absurd to note that when a person leaves the room, then s/he takes away all of the pragmatic meaning possibilities, just as when I remove a hammer from the tool box, I remove the possibility of hammering in some setting. Why is it that talk about the hammer is not nonsense but talk about removing perceptual apparatus is? Clearly this latter makes sense: here I go, out of the room, and what is behind me is no longer a room, for the term 'room' is a pragmatic construction, and just left bringing this construction with me.

What happened to the room? Simply, it became metaphysics, something still "there' but unspeakable. There is your division, and I don't think pragmatism is slippery enough to avoid it.

The problem of knowledge exists because it is assumed that there is a knower in general, who is outside of the world to be known, and who is defined in terms antithetical to the traits of the world. With analogous assumptions, we could invent and discuss a problem of digestion in general. All that would be required would be to conceive the stomach and food-material as inhabiting different worlds. Such an assumption would leave on our hands the question of the possibility, extent, nature, and genuineness of any transaction between stomach and food.

But because the stomach and food inhabit a continuous stretch of existence, because digestion is but a. correlation of diverse activities in one world, the problems of digestion are specific and plural: What are the particular correlations which constitute it? How does it proceed in different situations? What is favorable and what unfavorable to its best performance?—and so on. Can one deny that if we were to take our clue from the present empirical situation, including the scientific notion of evolution (biological continuity) and the existing arts of control of nature, subject and object would be treated as occupying the same natural world as unhesitatingly as we assume the natural conjunction of an animal and its food? Would it not follow that knowledge is one way in which natural energies cooperate? Would there be any problem save discovery of the peculiar structure of this cooperation, the conditions under which it occurs to best effect, and the consequences which issue from its occurrence? — Ciceronianus

Take it bit by bit. I don't assume there is a knower outside the world to be known. Assume the world and I are one. Then in this unity there is a divide that has to be explained. If it cannot be explained, it may be that there is in this unity something that is occurring perhaps requires a new assessment of what the unity is. Look, there are differences all around, in fact, if not for differences, no affirmation is possible: what is an affirmation without differences? (see Saussure) Anyway, what this brain in a vat suggests is that perhaps there is a primordial division in this unity, that is, a division that isn't about the phylar distinctions in some taxonomy, but about something at a fundamental level? How do scientists handle differences? They make a science out of them. That is what phenomenology is: the science of phenomena. It takes the world at the basic level, where experience (to use Dewey's language) takes up things and generates meaning, value, and everything else, at the generative level, where thing first "appear" and asks how should we understand this? Of course, Dewey answers this question in terms of pragmatism: all knowledge is essentially pragmatic. What does this mean? It means knowledge is forward looking and meaning is generated out of the consummatory product of problem solving. He of course, is a evolutionist, as am I, and when I think of a pragmatic concept of knowledge, I think about our personal and collective history out of which language issues, and I think about the structure of a thought as well as the ontology of the thing the thought is about: I see my cat, but how do I know it is a cat? I learned this term, of course, long ago, as it was modeled by others. pointing to that furry thing, I "made" the association, started using it myself, was encouraged, and it became knowledge of cats in various contexts in my world.
I would need to read a lot more of Dewey to draw on his ideas to make this point, but to be a pragmatist, you have to have a pragmatist theory of knowledge, and this reduces meaning and understanding to the essential thrust of a problem solved.
You may not like Heidegger, but he is certainly close to Dewey. What is a hammer? It is ready to hand; it is the picking up, the hammering, and the possibility of these there, when I turn to the hammer and "know" what it is, what I "know" is this future looking possible event, this "IF I approach the hammer, THEN it presents possibilities, which are x, y, and z and so on. There is for Dewey no of the mystical apprehension of a cat "out there". The cat's meaning and knowledge possibilities are bound up in what works, nd that's it.
BUT, what are the consequences for this? Dewey has to be a pragmatic phenomenologist. This is the only possibility, for if what I know is all about pragmatics, then knowledge is a synthesis the problem solving agency (not to put any metaphysical significance to this) and what comes in as the "givenness" of things.
This kind of thing makes questions like the brain in a vat into nonsense if applied to actual world, as Wittgenstein told us. It is an error in reasoning to conceive of an "in the brain" and "outside the brain" in this way, to ask what are things without the participation of a pragmatic agency/perceiver. Pure impossible metaphysics. This is the way of Dewey, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Rorty, and on and on. Not all pragmatists, exactly, but they agree, this is nonsense.

I say, well, this is one way to get rid of metaphysics: just pretend it is nonsense. Well, it is and it isn't is the only answer to this. No time to go into this, there is alot on this. My principle thought are about ethics and value. Another avenue has to do, not with the out thereness of things, but the "presence" of phenomena. And so on.

How do we deal with the problem of private language? If naming-words refer necessarily to internal phenomena - all singularly private and mutually incomparable - then we cannot communicate. 'Yes, I understand, you are saying things are like such-and-such!' - But 'such and such' can be neither like nor unlike anything shared between us, for nothing is shared. Worse, we cannot distinguish one phenomenon from another even in our own case. If the distinctive criteria for some experience make sense to the person having that experience, then those criteria have a sense that can be explained, communicated and shared between us.

If your view is true then necessarily you cannot explain it to me. Your explanation is a kind of accompanying music to a phenomenal film that is playing in your mind. And my understanding is whatever I might be hearing. — Cuthbert

Let the conditions unfold then. I don't think we are bound to this phenomenological singularity because I think it makes all problems go away. I simply ask the question about basic epistemology, and find this inevitable conclusion. How move from here is another question, but one thing remains very clear: on a materialist model of causal relationships, one cannot explain knowledge of objects. Causality does not deliver epistemology, for one thing. For another, all explanatory possibilities are inherently phenomenological. How does one ever get "out" of this?

But there is a big "on the other hand" to this: Obviously there is in my knowledge of my cat something that is not me, but something else entirely, and it is seems to be there, across an expanse of space. But again, one runs against Kant, who may not be altogether right in his details, but space and time are forms of intuition, if not as he explains it exactly (Heidegger complained, and many others). We are stuck with this event of me knowing my cat is on the sofa, occurring as a phenomenon, but this notion of "noumena" takes the stage again: what IS this "out thereness" that is entirely off radar in our brains? Well, many look, not to the out mystery, but the inner; after all, there is a noumenal "direct" access to the unknown X world, and that is the self, for while the "outer" ness of things seems to be altogether impossible, the "inner"ness of things is some core essence of the self. Where, after all, in metaphysics are all things? All things are impossibly grounded in eternity, or better, finitude is "really" eternity, and this applies to our inner self especially. So if one wants get intimate with with this impossible "other", one need look within, deeply, apart from the "totality" of our constructed selves.

This little bit above is part of the religio-apophatic turn in phenomenology.

But language systems can be mathematical. Ordinary language is speech from some social point of view - developed to (re)construct the society that is speaking it. And now - through the practice of metaphysical-strength reasoning - modern humans have constructed a culture of technical speech that is rooted in the habits of logic and arithmetic. We have language that is designed to transcend our social being and so move towards some conception of "ultimate reality" - as the limit of this new displaced and third person point of view. We "see" the world through the "objective" eye of axiom and measurement. — apokrisis

A provocative set of ideas. First, I should say that the reason I want to give rationalism some presumption of favor is that individual identity insists. The self, even the most basic, reduced self in, say, some deep meditative state in which thought has been suspended altogether, is still constitutively a rational entity, not a blooming and buzzing infant. To sit, and make a dramatic move into the "eternal present" (Kierkegaard, Buddha?) free of what Husserl calls predelineated determination (memory) still requires an implicit language world that is always, already there, making, stabilizing, normalizing all things. This language structure is not something that can be put down, for one would have to put down "the world". Of course, languages are each one arbitrary, but the logic that makes it even possible, this is my interest here.

Metaphysical strength reasoning? What would this be if not the dialectics, about which one has to be very careful, as Kant was pretty good at explaining.

So Hegel got that to the degree he developed a logic of dialectics. This was the intellectual project that got modern rationality and science going back in Ancient Greece. Hegel tried hard to update it in the age of Newtonian mechanics. But he bent his arguments away from the third person and back towards the first person to the degree he placed God, spirit or goodness at the centre of his metaphysical scheme. Too anthropomorphic. Although that was an understandable cultural response in an age where the pendulum had swung too far from the very idea of points of view - Newtonianism being understood as the view from nowhere ... rooted in the nothingness of a void, rather than in a plenum of possibilities. — apokrisis

This rootedness in the plenum of possibilities sounds Heideggerian. I hold that such words as God, spirit or goodness are dialectically unfinished, or better, reach their end in the confrontation with actuality. Clarity is challenging here because philosophy, if allowed to follow its internal course, leads only to one place, and that is the eternal present. Wittgenstein followed Kierkegaard on this strange bit of metaphysics, but it is, by my lights, the coveted brass ring of philosophical endeavor. Our world is structured in time, so called. Of course, one could fill a library just on the way this single idea has been worked out in the past two centuries, but I say, deep meditation does much to undo the world's most familiarizing features, and when familiarity falls away, philosophy becomes revelatory. BUT: revelation is structured revelation, or, requires a structured self to receive it, assimilate it with the rest of the implicit composite self, and this is where Hegel has his place. Experience at all requires native logic.

It is important to remember that all of our vocabulary is hermeneutic, and when we use a term, any term, like 'logic', we are taking up some part of the world AS, as Heidegger put it the intended object; our language's vocabulary does not stand for things in the world, it "stands in for" things (and then, this "standing in" gets diffused in "difference" but never mind this).

This expression "nothingness of a void", I would add, is simply a hermeneutical place holder, a way of abstracting something that is manifestly there, in the world. As to goodness, well, what is this? Ethical/aestheitic goodness or contingent goodness? God? Spirit? These are not terms with no existential underpinning. I claim argument bears this out.

And then mathematical reasoning and scientific method arose out of the development of a new metaphysical language - one that ends up speaking in numbers rather than words, and dialectical logical structure rather than an everyday causal grammar based on a narrative tales of who did what to whom. — apokrisis

Perhaps. But there is the inevitable "goodness" question begged here" What if there were discovered some Pythagorean harmony of the spheres (reminds me of an interesting, if creepy, movie named "Pi" in which a mathematical genius was chased down by religious zealots who thought he possessed mystical insight). Any way, if such a thing were determined, then so what? This revelation would have value only if it were attended by a valorizing agency. Hume once wrote that if reason had its way, it could annihilate the world with no regrets (so to speak); facts have no value and logic has no value conceived as such. Reason has to be conceived, not in terms of "pure" reason, logical or arithmetic, which is an abstraction, but in some kind of reason/value matrix of experience.
Speaking in numbers? If so, these numbers would have to be valorized, have meaning beyond the number, just as with plain language.

There is a proper way to talk about ultimate reality. Or at least the relevant community of inquirers have agreed much about the current state of the art in this regard. Nature is symmetry breaking and thermodynamics. A dialectic of constraints and uncertainty. Or as Peirce said, synechism and tychism. — apokrisis

I really don't have a complaint abut this in a qualified way, though I do recall that positivist ideal in which all meanings were reduced to their essences, and language simple, what, mirrors to reality. This kind of thinking has grave flaws.

The problem here is that there is no point just swinging the pendulum between the dialectical extremes of the third and first person point of view. — apokrisis

Right, you don't think there is ever some asymptotic approach to God's self realization, if as recall Hegel. I didn't used to think this either, and I don't now, really. But any intimation of a deeper sense of the world is bound to the logical construction of experience, and, as Wittgenstein told us, it is nonsense to think otherwise. I simply understand that reason is an essential part of the construction of the meaning, and it is possible that its depth is beyond contingency.

I am looking at that question, and the answer I see is "it has no worth". — Banno

I see. No greater motivation for joining a philosophy club, eh? Analytic philosophers are in it for the "fun" of puzzles, and are generally bound to clarity and logic. But Continental philosophers can be quite different, sincere and intuitive. Trouble is, Continental philosophy is hard to read, though here is the foundation of basic inquiry as to the issues of the self, meaning, value, reason, and so on.It is unfortunate that important things are so difficult. Oh well.

I feel bad that I haven't responded before this. I really like talking to you. I think we share a common outlook, an openness, on many of the issues we're discussing. It's just that you are playing on a piano, maybe a pipe organ, and I am playing on a three-string banjo. This old banjo is just right for the song I'm trying to sing. — T Clark

If you read what I wrote and find agreement, then by all means, feel free to disagree here and there. "Play" as you please.

We don't need phenomenology in order to explain how a prism works. Indeed, it adds nothing. — Banno

It adds nothing in terms of explaining how a prism works. Nor does it explain how a prism is taken up as an amusement for a child, or how rainbows inspire or romanticize, or how the gaseous content of stars produces different spectral analyses, and so on. Looking at matters such as these are not the "how" of philosophical analysis, which is, as with all the above mentioned, distinct and assessed according to a different set of standards.
The question you should be looking at is, What is the standard for assessing the worth of phenomenological philosophy? Prior to this, one has to look at philosophy itself, and inquire as to where the value lies here.

If Heidegger invented the light bulb, I'd use it. It actually has a use, and a beneficial one, apart from its inventor. But I don't read him merely because he was a loathsome man. — Ciceronianus the White

But he is a beneficial one, philosophically. It's just easier to turn on a light than it is reading Heidegger. This is the essence of the matter.

Perhaps it is, and what you are doing isn't.

Either way, this stands:
You take this as implying that light is manufactured in the brain. That's an obvious mistake. — Banno

This is pure flippancy. And arbitrary. If you put something out there, then you have to explain it. I mean, go into it, and don't be shy about it. Either way it stands???? How so?

You claim it is a phenomena; I claim it is stuff in the world.

I can explain how it bends in a prism.

Can you, using only phenomenal analysis? — Banno

But this is not philosophy's job. Obviously.

No it doesn't. Light is not phenomenal. It's a thing in the world, not a sensation. In so far as phenomenology treats things that are not phenomenal as if they were, it is wrong. — Banno

So tell me how it is not a phenomenon.

You take this as implying that light is manufactured in the brain. That's an obvious mistake. — Banno

It depends on your level of analysis. A five year old will not understand the idea at al but simply talk about light i a natural way, but then, material reductionists talk like this all the time. Phenomenologists will say both are right, but rightness and wrongness depends on context. They do think, however, there is one context called phenomenology that looks at light as phenomenon, an eidetically formed predication. Here, one is not using light in the "naturalistic way" as in "turn off the light when you leave" but rather as reduced to its features as a phenomenological presence. The more reduction, the greater the presence, says Jean luc Marion.

I've read enough of Everyone's Favorite Nazi to satisfy me I'll not benefit from reading him further, and enough Kant as well. As for the others, I fear that if they focus on what you describe to be the purposes of philosophy, they'll have little to say about us as living creatures in the world in which we occur and how we actually live our lives and should live it. So, I'll pass. — Ciceronianus the White

A flimsy rationalization for not wanting to do the hard work of reading perhaps the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. If you found out that Edison was a child molester, would you simply stop using light bulbs?

In the utmost respectful way possible I find Søren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche philosophy teaching in my personal opinion outdated. It was probably more applicable to that generation and culture of there time. — SteveMinjares

You have not, I suspect, read Kant? to understand existentialists, one has to understand phenomenology, this requires Kant. Of course, existentialists are not rationalists, but, you could say, post rationalists, and in some ways in opposition to rationalism. To get this, you go from Kant, to Hegel to Kierkegaard to Husserl to Heidegger, and others along the way. Then the move can be made to post modern thinking like Derrida, and beyond.

Analogies work like metaphors, so if you say my mother is a tiger when she gets angry, there you have my mother and then the borrowed quality of the tiger, hence, a functioning equation. However, when such devices are applied to the metaphysical, there is no object to which the borrowed trait applies.

Is Infinite Reason, Infinite Thought, or Infinite Spirit (as per Hegel) simply a biased form of abstract anthropocentric terminology being used to try to humanize a transcendent reality which, in fact, may be better described as being nothing more than a completely non-rational, thoughtless, blind Will-to-Live (as per Schopenhauer)? — charles ferraro

But to speak at all is an anthropomorphic attempt, which is the point. You are close to Wittgenstein, are you not, in suggesting that to speak of foundational matters is nonsense, for such things are not among the facts of the world, states of affairs. Reason as an absolute? Well, that would require something other than reason to determine, but then, this other would require something other to ground it, and so on. Will to live? What can this language be about if it were, well, the way things "really" are? And how would one establish this; what would give, in turn, this new verifying language its validity? No, this would require yet another dimension of determination.
So you can see there is no way out of this impossibility of affirming in language something that is not language. Language, its signifiers, can only be self referencing. UNLESS: Reason really IS grounded in some impossible ultimate language reality, like Hegel's. If this were true, and it is not impossible that it is, then what we say and think could be significant in the Hegelian way. But how to go about this, that is, at least giving this idea the minimal presumption of "truth"?
Only one way I see: Take the Kierkegaardian motion of the eternal present (Witt approved), and consider that even here, standing, if you will, in the light of a phenomenological reduction, and all schools in abeyance (as Walt Whitman put it): this present, I submit, is undeniable, notwithstanding post modern, post hermeneutical objections, yet there we stand, eidetically aware! Question: Is this actually happening? Is it a finite event? Or is it infinite.
I could continue, but only if you are interested in this strain of thought.

Even 'metaphysical idealists' are only speaking in analogies when they speak of "ultimate reality". — 180 Proof

Heh, heh...analogies for what?

A common line of reasoning against God's presumed omnibenevolence goes like this:

If God was omnibenevolent, there wouldn’t be ... any earthquakes, tsunamis, droughts, floods, wars, children with genetic dysfunctions, ... and in general, there wouldn't be any suffering.

But why should the absence of these things be evidence of God's benevolence?

Based on what reasoning should we conclude that the presence of those things is evidence that God (if he exists) is not benevolent? — baker

Quite right . We invented that the issues of theodicy by imagining a God with all powers, like a person, only unqualifiedly more. These notorious "omni's" create contradictions, but they are no more than logical constructions: manufactured ad absurdum.

I know you dislike empirical science, or at least its pretensions as alleged by some. But when you ask what makes physics or any science possible I don't know what you mean. Are you asking a question about we humans--what is it about us that caused us to create science, or how we did so? Are you asking a question about the universe--how it came to be subject to scientific analysis, investigation, with predictable, testable results? Are you asking about both? — Ciceronianus the White

I love empirical science, and took enough courses in college to know well what it is. But it is not philosophy. A scientist asks, how do we understand a fossil according to the applicable classifications? Philosophy asks, what is the structure of the thought that perceives at all? How is knowledge possible? What are concepts qua concepts and what is their relation to things? What is this substance that comprises all things?
Before you even get to science questions, you have more basic questions about what science takes up as a world. For example, look at experience and its structure: When I talk about a star's spectral analysis, I am talking about light. But any high schooler knows light as a phenomenon is manufactured in the brain. You know, visible light is part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and some parts of this are reflected, some absorbed, and the reflected parts are received by the eye, and there are cones and rods that process for color and intensity, and this goes to the brain that manufactures the phenomenon in clusters of axonally connected neurons. So it goes. The scientist will of course admit this, because what is " really" happening "out there" is not color, but waves; but then how do waves get internalized and what is this internal event that allows us to "know" what is out there?
Consider further that when a perception occurs, it occurs in Time, and this makes a perceptual affair one with a temporal structure: I "see" light but then, I am not a feral entity, nor am I an infant, whose world is "buzzing and blooming". When I register the seeing, it is learned language and its logical operation that makes this a knowledge event, and without this, there would be no understanding of light; and this knowing is predelineated, it issues from memory. This makes an actual present matter one that is not present at all, but a construction in time,with a past and a future; in deed, this is right up Dewey's tree, because this temporal dimension is the forward-looking nature of a pragmatist's theory of knowledge. Pragmatists, the old school, are necessarily phenomenologists.
Etc., etc. To really go into an analysis like this, look at Heidegger, Husserl, Kant, and so many more. There was a century of post Kantian philosophy, which turned into existentialism, which became post modern thinking with its deconstructive post structuralism. It is a massive enterprise. Rorty thought Dewey, Heidegger and Wittgenstein the most important philosophers ever, and all three were, in some way, phenomenologists.
All of which science has little or nothing to say because this is not its job. Scientists are not philosophers.

I'd ask you the same question. I suspect my confusion results from my lack of familiarity with the mysteries of phenomenology. I'd apply to an appropriate hierophant for admission, but have my doubts it would be worth the effort. If initiation is required, we may well use words differently or mean different things when we use them. — Ciceronianus the White

Phenomenology is what existentialists are.When theories of natural science break down the the level of basic questions, one can only turn to phenomenology and hermeneutics for foundational thinking. This latter insists that knowledge is inherently interpretative, that is, language which is the medium for understanding the world, does not, at this level of analysis, simply observe this world, it literally constitutes the world. So it is not as if there is the world there, that tree, those shoes on the floor, and so on, and there we are to take in its nature as it informs us as to what it is; rather, there is no world at all until an experience constructing agency is there to make it. BUT: it is not as if there is nothing at all whatsoever there prior to this agency making an appearance; but rather it is not "a world". It is entirely other than a world, and I want to say for obvious reasons.
So talk about the world, philosophical talk, is talk about this very complex horizon that is reducible to phenomena. These are considered foundational because beyond this kind of talk is ismply more hermeneutics. Derrida calls this "difference": an endless system of deferred meaning in which one concept is contingent on others, and so there is NO affirmation apart from this.
And so on. For Rorty, this foundation of interlinguistic (wd?) reference is pragmatic, grounded in what works. I think this right.

We participate in the world by being part of it, but also by living. Living isn't merely beholding. By living we eat, drink, reproduce, think, feel, see, hear, create, make things out of other things that are in the world--we do everything we do, and interact with other constituents of the world, things and creatures. We shape the world and it shapes us in this fashion. Cats participate in the world as well; they do what they do, and so interact with us and other creatures and things of the world. Cats and people participate in the world. There's nothing remarkable about this. We don't ask how we get in the brain of a cat; why ask how a cat gets in ours? — Ciceronianus the White

I agree with everything you say, except for one: That there is nothing remarkable here. It all gets very remarkable at the more basic level. You say we it is where we eat, drink, and so on, but I ask, what are these things?, and you think I've lost a marble or two. But it is here where centuries of philosophy BEGIN. It begins with the father of phenomenology, Kant and his Critique of Pure Reason. Once you have read this, you will see what all the fuss is about, this "Copernican Revolution" of philosophy.

There's nothing lying between us and the rest of the world--no sense datum, or whatever. We're just creatures of a particular kind. We experience the world as humans do, given our physical and mental characteristics; cats experience the world as cats do, given their physical and mental characteristics. The world we live in isn't different from the world cats live in; we're just different from cats. — Ciceronianus the White

What you have here is empirical science's view point. I wonder why. All of this has an underpinning of presuppositions, and philosophy's job is to expose these and analyze them. What makes physics even possible? Do you think the logic that identifies things in the world is actually IN the world apart from the perceptual act?
The greatest philosopher by analytic standards, not phenomenological, is Wittgenstein. Yes he was a phenomenologist, of sorts.

The BIV scenario takes for granted that there is an outside and an inside. — baker

Does it? Keep in mind that the scientists are supposed to be the truly real, but then, the purpose of this challenge is to insert doubt into this very idea. How do the scientists know they are not brains in vats, themselves, being controlled and experimented on by other scientists who could also be brains in vats? This makes the BIV a metaphysical problem, for there is nothing foundational presented. See the difference here between this and say some standard problem where doubt has asserted itself, as when you turn the key and the care doesn't start. Here, the assumption is not questioned according the premises of the condition given, for once the doubt is relieved and the battery cable secured, there is no metaphysics to deal with.

I agree, but is that all of philosophy or just metaphysics, including epistemology? — T Clark

That is pretty much what philosophy is about. But it is, in my view, very important to know that in doing this, philosophy is an existential matter, and not merely an abstract logical exercise. The world is literally made of thought and habits and the familiar, and the nameless intrusion that gives rise to all of this is utterly transcendental. Ideas are not abstractions, but are as real as any sensory intuition. So, when we talk about truly basic assumptions dealing with the truth, reality, value and ethics, and so on, we are restructuring reality. As I said earlier, in a letter Husserl once wrote that his readers, many of them, were inspired to turn to religion because his "epoche" had an existential enlightenment dimension to it. Husserl himself didn't seem to get it, and few do, for it is after all, strangely, well, mystical. Wittgenstein knew this, as do the current French post modern theological thinkers like Jean luc Marion and Michel Henry.
This kind of thinking is generally something confined to the mystical arts of Eastern thought. I read through much of the Abhidhamma arguing with Baker in another thread, and was taken as to how the Buddha could be seen as the ultimate phenomenologist.

Thoughts are, to use a metaphor, the threads of the living fabric of the world, and hence, when we think, we do more than interpret or define' we "make" our world, and the epoche takes one into its core (though always keeping in mind what Derrida says about the text. Tough issue to discuss here).

I like this. I might even agree with it. I'll think more about it. Except, for me, there is no "givenness of the world. — T Clark

Such an interesting thing to say, for it places you right in the middle of a very important, post modern debate that deals with has been called the "metaphysics of presence". It is a long historical argument, but the entire affair rests with Time: To see and know is an historical event, the past and all of that language acquisition moving into the "present" to define, interpret, make familiar, and so on. How can one ever affirm a present in the midst of all this? All of this that is essentially anticipatory, forward looking in the structure of knowing itself?
But then, take a lighted match and apply it to your finger. Is this an interpretative matter? "When" is it? Is there not a present that itself intrudes into the stream or conscious events? So much going on here. Derrida says we are stuck in "difference".

The idea of "qualia" does not match my experience. This is my objection to much of western philosophy, even phenomenology, acknowledging my limited knowledge. Philosophers say it's from experience, but it's not. Not directly, anyway. They take experience and cover it with jelly and syrup and marshmallow. Rational jelly and syrup and marshmallow I guess. It obscures true experience. — T Clark

Qualia is tough because when w talk about it, it vanishes, which is why Derrida writes "under erasure". You find the same thing in Wittgenstein who in the Tractatus insist he is speaking nonsense in drawing a line between nonsense and sense. We find ourselves at a crossroad where actuality and language "meet" and we cannot speak of it, but cannot deny actuality. Buddhists tell us to put the entire enterprise down, and "ultimate reality" will step forward (Abhidhamma).

Spooky. But there is something to this, I know. Something powerful and sublime about being a person, and it hangs there just beyond the threshold of our everydayness. Try to think it, and it slips away. I think, again, that language is pragmatic, and cannot hold actuality (Kierkegaard).

I'm not sure how to respond to this long paragraph. It feels like the Constance philosophy train has switched tracks and is headed off in a different direction than mine. We probably were on different tracks to start with. — T Clark

I thought you mentioned religion and how your views were not expressed in something I said.

I think most of what we know, understand, use is not knowledge of facts or propositions at all, i.e. justified true belief; Gettier; etc. I think there is a model of the world built into each of us. The model is built up from our interactions with the world, our parents, language, education from the time we are babies. It probably also includes factors that are hardwired into us. I feel this model of the world in myself very viscerally all the time. I recognize it as the source most of my day to day decisions both consciously and unconsciously. I guess you would call it intuition. Generally, new knowledge has to get incorporated into that model before it is used. That is vastly oversimplified. — T Clark

You are in Heidegger's world now. He calls it dasein. Being and Time takes your thoughts here and gives them hundreds of pages of penetrating thought. Hardwired is a problem, but cannot explain Heidegger here. All is hermeneutics.

I took two courses in philosophy in my first try at college back in 19(mumble, mumble). The first was "The Mind/Brain Identity Problem." I remember thinking in my first week of class "This is all bullshit." And I was right. That set the stage for the rest of my experience with western philosophy. I have maintained this bias to a certain extent up till today. I found a home of sorts with Lao Tzu and Alan Watts. They were talking about things that really did match my personal experience of the world.

Since I've been on the forum, I've met several people, yourself included, who've convinced me that western philosophy can be a powerful tool to understand what is going on. I've found some of the discussions moving. People have showed me that they have the same goal I have always had, but their paths have been a little different. In some cases, I've felt that philosophy saved those people. Gave them a ladder out of confusion and despair. It's hard to argue with that, even though that path definitely doesn't work for me. — T Clark

Analytic philosophy is very bullshitty. Smart, but entirely outside the substantive issues. Gettier problems? Barn facsimiles and severed heads?? Such a disappointment. Continental philosophy is profound, but it takes work (what doesn';t?). Being and Time might just convince you.

You assume that we're somehow apart from the world, and then ask why we seem to be a part of it. That's an unfounded assumption, to me; it's not something we can we merely take as a given. — Ciceronianus the White

I don't mean to complain, but I find the above suspiciously unresponsive. If you are clear in your position, why not just tell me what it is?
Apart from the world? What is it you mean by "world"?
As to my assumption, I merely raised a question, not an ontological thesis about different kinds of being. It may turn out that judgment about the epistemic distance between me and my cat is perfectly compatible with not being apart from the world. But I don't know what you mean by world, nor what you mean by being a part of it.
Of course, not everything is the same, and things certainly stand apart from other things, like dogs from cats from Chinese pictograms; I mean, things being what they are rests with difference, so I'm at all sure what not being apart is about.

If you accept that we're part of the world, our brains aren't outside the world. What we think is part of the world. What we know is part of the world. Our emotions are part of the world. There's no outside world except in context. In other words, no one speaks of or thinks of a cat as being "inside us." We think and speak of it as "outside us." It doesn't follow that we're not in the world with the cat and everything or everyone else. We're not inside looking out, in other words. Dewey criticized what he called the "spectator" theory of knowledge. That theory uses the metaphor of vision, of seeing, as the model of knowing. Knowing becomes passive, objects known are "out there" and are impressed on us in some fashion which must be explained. But we're not spectators. We're participants. — Ciceronianus the White

But then, what does it mean to be a participant? Of course, no one thinks of a cat being inside us. This idea is just a way of showing what it might be like if knowledge and the justificatory conditions for knowing actually were about things that were independent of phenomena. That "aboutness" would have to stretch to the thing in some unimaginable way, like spooky "action at a distance". I mean, if you can't say in any way that the cat I perceive is beyond the phenomenological presentation, then you might as well just say so and call yourself a pragmatic phenomenologist. As I am. As Rorty was, though Rorty misses the boat in ways I won't go into (pragmatism is not descriptive at the most basic level of apprehending the world).
Frankly, when you say "in the world with the cat and everything and everyone else" I think you nailed it. But if this kind of thinking issues from an empirical scientist's "world" then no; in my view it all gets very peculiar: I do see that there is this "otherness" that is presented in and among the phenomena of the world which cannot be explained on a simply physical model. Putnam argued with Rorty on just this, saying when he looked at his wife, it is simply patently implausible to say all that is there is a pragmatic phenomenon. There is this very mysterious Other, other people, things, things NOT me that have a presence that is unquestionably "out there". Don't really know how far Rorty went, but his idea of ethics and pragmatic truth simply fails utterly (Simon Critchley argues) . THEN: how is it that we explain knowledge of this OTher? This metaphysical OTher? There must be, as you say, an underlying unity of all things that does indeed connect the world in unseen ways, One thing the Brain in a Vat counterexample to knowledge does is it makes us aware of the metaphysics of ordinary affairs.

You have a point and I detect pragmatic undertones in your approach. Why bother about noumena at all; after all we can never know them (epistemic distance is for all intents and purposes infinite).

However, ontologically, we're not warranted to dismiss noumena - we may doubt it à la Descartes & Harman but we may not assert that noumena don't exist. — TheMadFool

The other way to look at this is through the concept of time. This is front and center in phenomenology, for apprehensions of the world are temporal events, which is why pragmatism is good way account for things: there are no "things", just events, with beginnings, middles and ends, and so the "real" is sought in the reductive "eternal present". This gets way over the top but it is THE principle ontological claim of 20th century Continental philosophy.
All roads lead to phenomenology. And the quest for truth in phenomenology leads, I claim, to one place: meditation, an existential destruction of the world whereby language as a dogmatic perceptual determination is annihilated. This sounds very weird, I know. But did we really think the world was not a weird place at the level of basic assumptions?

I see it as a problem of identity. You are “wired up to receive the world”, which is presumably hidden beyond your vat, the skull. In this story you identify as the brain or some locus within. If you expand your identity to include the rest of you, you’ll find that you are in direct contact with the rest of the world. From there “essential epistemic connection to make out there come in here” falls apart. — NOS4A2

so are you saying the solution lies in this expansion? And I would say the world is what we experience, not what is beyond this. We are wired up to something, but then, this something is beyond the language we can use to talk about it. So where does this put "wired up to receive"? In this matrix of experience, "wired up" makes sense, but to talk about things that are outside of language, logic and sensation, and beyond time and space? What is the basis any meaningful statement?

I understand that all we have to work on are phenomena but that doesn't mean noumena don't exist. That's like saying the only philosopher I can understand is Wittgenstein; ergo, the only philosopher there was/is is Wittgenstein. — TheMadFool

Well, it is not that there is nothing, its just that this is entirely beyond conceiving, because it is supposed to be outside of experience. Forget Wittgenstein, because we don't need him to tell us that two things in the world cannot have an epistemic nexus between them. To me, it is as simple as the opacity test. Just how opaque is a brain? I give it a 10, and a zero for transparency. All who object to this avoid the simplicity of it, and I think it is because there is a blind assumption in place that to know a thing is as plain as a thing can be, which is true, until the question is raised as to what and how. Then it falls apart instantly. What do we usually say about such things that have no explanatory basis? It is not that we simply doubt them. that would be like doubting the earth is round. No, we flat out dismiss them.
I am convinced that the epistemic distance between me and my cat is infinite at the level of basic analysis, that whatever that is is completely Other.

What does this mean, really? Why even speak of the cat "getting into" the brain?

You seem to assume the existence of something in the brain, which we are to be addressing. You seem to believe that "thing" must be explained. This appears to distinguish the brain and the things within it or which are a part of it from everything else, or at least in this case from the cat or whatever it is, if anything at all.

Why do you believe there's a cat-thing in the brain? It would seem to me you must establish that there is such a thing before demanding an explanation for it. — Ciceronianus the White

But how does one explain knowledge? this idea of getting the cat in the brain is just a way saying how absurd it would be if such knowledge were possible. Simply put, according the language of neuroanatomy, a bunch of neurons connected by axonal fibers firing together is not a cat. But it goes further than this: in order to even conceive of neurons firing, one has to have other neurons firing to do the conceiving. So, even on this model of neurophysiology, knowledge about the "outside" world doesn't even begin to make sense. What is "outside" anyway, but phenomenon generated by brain matter? But again, to call something a brain is no more foundational than calling something outside, for both are equal as phenomena. There IS no "out" to this if we follow the very simple and accessible logic here.