What would you do, Srap Tsmaner, if somebody said that to you? — god must be atheist

You should have flagged it.

But consider the post of yours that started this little love-fest:

The greedy capitalists are NOT inciting you to drive your car, wear clothes, heat your apartment, cool the inside of your fridge. YOU are doing it, and so am I; time to stop blaming THEM, the greedy capitalists. They are not using, per head, or per capita, more energy than you and I use, and blaming them for providing us what we want and demand is HIGHLY HYPOCRITICAL. — god must be atheist

You have wrapped the argument that everyone who enjoys the benefits of living in a modern industrialized society shares some measure of blame for climate change in a claim that for them to say otherwise is hypocritical. That strikes me as kind of an odd way to frame the point. It suggests that you are more interested in whether people are being hypocritical than what they’re being hypocritical about. And okay maybe that’s a sentiment philosophers are prone to, but don’t be surprised if the people you express this view to take it personally.

Each of you have a position to argue. I do not understand why you are both more interested in talking about how appalled you are that the other has taken the position they have.

If you must argue about who’s to blame for climate change, argue about that.

The world I find myself in is the world as it is, preemptive of my considerations of it. — Mww

Well, this can’t be the first thing you say. It’s a conclusion, right? You have to have some ideas about the world and what’s in it, and yourself, and how you relate to the world. There’s just a lot presumed here. Maybe we say this later, but it can’t be how you start.

we don’t care that we find ourselves in a world — Mww

Basically, yes — at least in the sense that we might recognize a tendency to overlook the fact that we’re in a world, that in everyday life we take it for granted, and in philosophizing ... that’s a long story.

I mean, where else would we be found — Mww

But, see, that’s gold! That’s an a priori claim, right? So this is a reasonable starting point, and all Heidegger does is take exactly this and think it through: alright, so what is a world? what does it mean to be in one? why don’t we notice, since, with just a little reflection, you’re inclined to think it is an obvious truth that there’s a world and we’re in it?

if we are found in the world, then everything else we can know about must be found in the same world — Mww

And then this is the next thing — although Heidegger keeps fiddling with the order in Being and Time, because reasons. Are the things we find in the world “in” it the same way we are? How hard is it to see that the answer has to be “no”?

When Wittgenstein mentions the possibility of writing a book called “The world as I found it,” he intends to make the point that the “I” in the title can’t be in the book. But we just agreed that it’s perfectly obvious we find ourselves in a world, so what gives? The natural thing to say is just that we’re ‘in’ the world in a way that is different from the way things that can go in the book (the proverbial tables and trees, say) are ‘in’ the world.

This is all Heidegger is doing in Division I of Being and Time, working through the consequences of these thoughts.

when we really want to know what constitutes the world that we’re in — Mww

And that means not just considering the things we find there, but also what makes the world we find ourselves in a world. One maneuver here is to, shall we say, ‘situate’ the confrontation between subject and object: he notes, almost in passing, that the sort of paradigm case for philosophers — looking at a table, that kind of thing — is actually a specific behavior, and a little odd, and shouldn’t be assumed to be representative of how we deal with the things we find in the world. He’ll flesh that out by giving his analysis of how we do usually interact with things, at length.

At the very least, there’s the simple point that the universe does not consist of a philosopher and the table he gazes at thinkingly; there’s the whole rest of the world around them and they’re each in it.

Any of this seem sensible to you? My Kant-fu is weak, and I’ve only lately been reading Heidegger again after many, many years, so my Heidegger-fu is similarly limited. I’m explaining as best I can as I go.

Hmmm....is it correct to say, then, that Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology is a priori? — Mww

It’s at least partly correct:

The question of Being aims therefore at ascertaining the a priori conditions not only for the possibility of the sciences which examine entities as entities of such and such a type, and in so doing, already operate with an understanding of Being, but also for the possibility of those ontologies themselves ((here he probably means Kant)) which are prior to the ontical sciences and provide their foundation. — B&T, H 11

But what do we mean by ‘a priori’? What did Kant mean? What does Heidegger mean here?

The way we got into this was the question of the relationship between philosophy and psychology. It’s a question I have been puzzled about for a very long time. Part of what Heidegger means here is that philosophy is not a kind of anthropology or psychology. What does that mean?

Science, as I understand it, sees the world as a result. An explanation of why people behave as they do, or why trees grow and die as they do, or why there are galaxies with stars and planets, provides a framework that, given some input (cosmology is a bit different), predicts that we will observe what we observe. That’s one sort of understanding, what we might call ‘genetic’, how the world comes to be as it is. Insofar as you do this sort of thing in philosophy, you are doing proto-science.

The other possibility could be summed up by a phrase from Wittgenstein’s great burst of a priori thinking: “The world as I found it.” Eventually he will say, in so many words, that philosophy must strive for pure description and nothing theoretical. Phenomenology pursued a sort of pure description. In working through his troubled relationship with Kant, Strawson hit upon the phrase “descriptive metaphysics” to summarize his own project of keeping the ‘good bits’ of Kant. What all such descriptive projects have in common is the idea that we may theorize the world as a result, as science does, but we do not find the world as a result.

It’s mildly paradoxical that pure description lands in the not-empirical-science bucket where we find a priori theorizing, since description must be description, you know, of something, and that means of something already encountered or experienced or cognized. But insofar as you describe not this or that encounter of something in the world, but the nature of all such encounters, then I guess that’s what we take ourselves to mean by ‘a priori’. And that’s very much what Heidegger is up to: before you can do the sort of ontology he attributes to Kant, as a way of grounding the natural sciences, you need to write “The world I find myself in”.

No matter how you slice it, this here is a minority game. Yep, nature loves to be a big tease. I don't know why, not like she cares. — Manuel

But we do, and not just philosophers. People do care about and want to understand their own lives and their world. Philosophy can be understood not as an obscure academic enterprise, but as one way of doing that. Art is another. Trying to be a good person or a good neighbor or a good citizen, those are others.

Not for nothing, but Heidegger specifically notes that understanding is something we chase, that nature seems to be teasing us, that it’s as if ‘the answer’ is hiding from us, and he makes that a central component of the analysis.

Ramsey again:

Where I seem to differ from some of my friends is in attaching little importance to physical size. I don't feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens. The stars may be large, but they cannot think or love; and these are qualities which impress me far more than size does. I take no credit for weighing nearly seventeen stone.

My picture of the world is drawn in perspective, and not like a model to scale. The foreground is occupied by human beings and the stars are all as small as threepenny bits. I don't really believe in astronomy, except as a complicated description of part of the course of human and possibly animal sensation.

Philosophy must be drawn in perspective. Kant and Heidegger each in their own way are exploring that this is so and why and what it means for the doing of philosophy as a way of caring about and trying to understand yourself and your world.

Frank Ramsey’s version (I think he was talking about aesthetics, but it’s tempting to apply it, shall we say, more broadly):

Philosopher A: I went to Grantchester yesterday.
Philosopher B: No I didn’t.

But there’s a serious question here: what does it mean for a philosophical point to depend on a matter of fact?

One answer, and I have some sympathy with this answer, as I think we all should, is that you must be doing science not philosophy because philosophy is a priori. Some of us may not really want to say the last part out loud, but it’s there nonetheless. That way of putting it distinguishes philosophy positively, but in our time I think it is mainly understood negatively: whatever the methodology of philosophy is or could be, it’s clearly not the same as whatever scientists do — whether we’re happy to call that particular ‘not the same’ a priori or not.

Another answer is that we don’t have the option of starting from nothing. Something is given to us as we begin doing philosophy, whether that’s a conceptual scheme, or a language, or something else. We can think of ourselves as studying that, or we can think of it as where the hermeneutic process just happens to begin. Austin, for example, is explicit about this, when he says that ordinary language may not be the last word but it must be the first. Philosophy has to begin not at the beginning but in the middle.

But there’s one more answer, and that’s to note that we already know what’s in the second answer. We know that we will begin from something given to us, whatever that is, and we can spend a little time thinking not just about that — not focused only on our categories, our concepts, or our language, say — but also about this given-ness, and this process by which we take an initial understanding and transform it into another, something we are evidently unable to avoid. If you notice that this very process is itself given, then you close the loop and have found something really worth thinking about. Above all what’s given, as we begin doing philosophy, is that we will start somewhere and go on from there.

That has something of the flavor of an a priori investigation about it; it doesn’t sound like empirical science. But on the other hand, everything I’ve said points at what we could reasonably think of as facts: that something is given, that we start somewhere, that we know we do, and so on. That’s a curious thing, then, that in one sense this approach is as dependent as could be on fact but not dependent in the way empirical science is.

That’s my pitch for what I understand to be Heidegger’s pitch for phenomenological ontology. Sounds to me like it’s worth a shot.

If you wanted to do the research, I am confident that you would find — Michael Zwingli

Not only would such “research” not be probative — you’re telling me you haven’t even done it? You haven’t even googled to support this spurious point?

We’re way off topic now, so that’s a good excuse for me to be done here.

Feelings and cognitions are irrefutably separable, not because of affects they have, but that upon which the affects are directed. — Mww

I’m honestly thinking of changing teams though. The preferences & expectations (our old friends, passions and reason) model has run its course for me. Anyway, I’m in the mood to try something else.

I also think that to think the something else is a kind of psychology misses the point entirely!

I don’t have a position to defend, though, so I can learn more by listening.

Kant’s metaphysics is telling a causal story. — Joshs

Huh.

From here it looks like there is, for you, no real distinction between philosophy and psychology, or you take philosophy to be a sort of ‘theoretical psychology’, as we talk about ‘theoretical physics’, meaning ‘not quite ready for the lab’.

Odd place for this thread to end up...

causal — Joshs

But Kant, for instance, isn't telling a causal story about cognition.

hypothesis — Joshs

And that story isn't open to experimental disconfirmation. If Damasio's theory doesn't hold up in the lab, you have to change your tune, but Kant can ignore the whole process.

Every object I see either fulfills or fails to confirm my prior expectations in some measure. This validation or invalidation is felt, and the feeling doesn’t follow the perception , it is simultaneous with it. — Joshs

This is a fair sample of your approach, I think.

The question is whether "fulfills" is fully describable in conceptual terms such as @Mww would use, sans affect.

You expect something, for reasons describable in affective terms -- even for Hume -- something about goals and preferences maybe, what *matters* to you. Then action and new data.

That the feeling of success or failure is "simultaneous", that's a tough sell, but suppose it's true: does that mean you have a double response to new input? One conceptual and one affective? Or is it two aspects of a single response?

It still looks like @Mww can grant whatever you want on the affective side, since goals and preferences get updated too, but he can also stick with the conceptual side and it alone being cognitive.

So long as affect is just something that accompanies or directs cognition, even if it always does so, @Mww can ignore it for his analysis of cognition. You have to destroy the presumed conceptual apparatus, or make affect constitutive of it, to make what you're saying more than psychological obiter dicta.

I stand by that suggestion, and think it obvious. — Michael Zwingli

I don't. Intelligence, to start with, isn't one thing, and certainly isn't the same thing as academic success.

Besides that, I don't think it a secret that law enforcement tends to attract a certain type of domineering personality, though this is by no means universal within the ranks. — Michael Zwingli

More armchair sociology. I think there are some studies about "type A" being overrepresented in the military, but there are a lot of subcultures in the military. Mostly they're ordinary people.

I do not see any necessary connection between either intelligence level or a dominant persona and racial prejudice, do you? — Michael Zwingli

I just wondered why you were so comfortable sketching out the psychology of the typical citizen in uniform (not too bright, likely a bully) but suddenly felt a pang of intellectual conscience at attributing racial bias without some very specific sort of evidence (statistics showing disproportionate use of force, for instance, don't count, it seems). Why so skittish just on this point?

We have no basis to make such a judgement, since we do not know the minds of said particular cops. — Michael Zwingli

This after your speech about how stupid and thuggish police officers are?

That fictional sentences may be true within the fiction? — Banno

Maybe? It's just hard to be sure what we mean by this.

Broadly, I'm not opposed to some kind of analysis that distinguishes internal and external frames of reference, however you do that, but it's not perfectly obvious how to do that formally.

What's more, people freely cross that boundary: "But in Chapter 3, Harry said ..." That sort of thing makes me suspect the "internal" frame of reference might actually just be shorthand for the external, just a condensed manner of speaking.

But I'm not wild about that approach either. For one thing, whatever analysis we arrive at for fictional objects ought to be able to support the fact that people care about fictional objects very nearly as if they were real. (At least as far as psychology is concerned, that suggests we're using some of the same machinery for understanding fictional worlds, and their furniture, that we use to understand the real one.)

Absolutely we expect fiction to be largely logical, except when it deliberately isn't. (William Burroughs, say.) That's a chunk of Mark Twain's critique of Cooper.

I guess if I really wanted to do this, I'd assume fiction is a type of counterfactual, so you get your extensional semantics via possible worlds. Your nonsense category will show up as impossible worlds, I guess. That doesn't solve crossover problems directly. Doesn't Kripke write about this somewhere? How there can't turn out to be a "real" Sherlock Holmes, for instance.

Can you see a future in the US where police officers carrying firearms is unusual? — I like sushi

Not until there are far, far fewer guns in the hands of the public, so never. It is true that there has been a militarization of police departments in the United States, but it was already true that it would be hard to find any place on earth, outside of a warzone, where so many people are so well armed.

For the logical analysis of literature, I would start here.

Do you think of Kant and Heidegger as psychologists?

In classical logic, to make the inference you would have to presume the predicate "... is a leprechaun". How you understand that predicate remains moot; and one can play on that ambiguity.

This is the ambiguity ↪bongo fury apparently traded on in the Being thread.

If one supposes that all ∃(x)(Lx) says is that something is a leprechaun, one need not conclude that one might meet a leprechaun walking down the street. That there are leprechauns says nothing more in this context than that we can predicate being a leprechaun to something - fictional or otherwise.

Some folk see this as problematic. Seems to me to be just an ambiguity in the use of "is". That Shamus is a leprechaun does not imply that you might meet him in the pub. — Banno

What?

You are claiming there’s an ambiguity to avoid existential quantification meaning exactly what it says and what everyone agrees it means. @bongo fury wasn’t trading on any ambiguity; sentences found in fiction are literally false, and that’s fine. (Lawrence Block wrote a book about fiction writing called “Telling Lies for Fun and Profit”.)

If you take away existential import there’s no way to put it back just when you want. “There is something under the bed” will just no longer mean there is something under the bed.

Also, what is “presuming a predicate”?

When we are "busy "being" (coping, interacting with, engaging with, "on the way to," etc)" is it not always now that we are doing that? — Janus

What is our life: it’s looking forward or it’s looking back. And that’s our life. That’s it. Where is the moment? — Glengarry, Glen Ross

time exist because cycle exist — Nothing

cycles exist because of time — Mww

Suppose we did not live in an environment of natural cycles, no sun rising and setting, no moon waxing and waning, no predictable seasons. That’s presumably how we first measured duration. Would we have even formed such a concept as ‘duration’ without an obvious and always available way to measure it? Without natural cycles, life might be somewhat more dreamlike, chaotic, and it could mean time would also be experienced quite differently.

Jus’ speculatin’.

No, not the Kant, which doesn’t mean much to me.

I think it was something about the phrase “occur in a certain mode of our being,” which is terribly vague, but I found myself thinking about how mathematics could be seen as something we add to our own world, and that can mean not that mathematical objects have our mode of being, but that they can be part of it. It’s a funny thing, the way we make sense of the world in part by furnishing it with the things we use to make sense of it, all of which have a sort of human feel about them, although it can be hard to notice with mathematics. Those things we make can form a sort of fabric that holds the rest together.

Maybe it just clicked for me while you were standing there!

I think what it tells us about their being is that they occur in a certain mode of our being -- call it an abstract or linguistic mode, of which I would include mathematics and music. Quantities and geometric shapes are human phenomena. This is a Kantian move, really, but with the "subject" and "time" as interpreted differently. — Xtrix

That’s helpful for explaining what you’ve been trying to get at. There’s more to do, but I could definitely see preferring to start here.

So mathematical objects (expressions, theorems, etc.) are not ‘timeless’ but are perfectly repeatable, either because they’re unbound by the context of their use, or because they’re meaningless. At least the idea of repetition gets time in there, so I’ll think that over.

BTW: turn off autocorrect or proofread your posts.

asking how long it takes for a number to be a number is meaningless — Xtrix

Yes, well, that’s the point of saying that mathematics is ‘timeless’, but you and @Joshs keep wanting to say something else, only I don’t know what it is.

I can see the argument that mathematical objects are present-at-hand, and connecting that to a conception of permanence and so forth. I don’t happen to know if that’s how Heidegger talks about them, but it’s what I would expect.

Numbers -- and words -- are products of the human mind, of the human being. — Xtrix

And? What does their being the products of Dasein tell us about their being?

Mathematical objects are locked in a permanent now because we have made them so. They cannot be what we intend them to be unless they are ‘timeless’ in this way. Is there some reason we cannot so intend?

By hand, it might take you a minute or two to work out that 357 x 68 = 24,276. A calculator or computer will do it faster, but still take a measurable amount of time. But how long does it take 357 x 68 to be 24,276?



I think I would be okay with saying that time in mathematics is truncated to an eternal and unchanging now, and that this is what people mean when they say mathematics is ‘timeless’; and indeed the very idea of ‘now’ derives from a certain way of conceiving time, certainly.

But that’s addressing the content of mathematics — which I have no objection to, even in this somewhat oblique, conceptual way — rather than arguing that whatever is true of mathematicians is true of mathematics. Pierre de Fermat was French but his theorem was not. Andrew Wiles, unlike Fermat, continues to breathe every day, but his proof of Fermat’s theorem has never drawn a breath.

Mathematics is a human activity. Humans do indeed exist “in” time (or, better, “as” time). When we think in symbols, we’re thinking in a certain moment in time.

Mathematics does indeed presuppose time. — Xtrix

This is like arguing that mathematics presupposes oxygen.

Hence we have definitions of "is" (existence, being) which are not dependent on time. — Banno

There’s another way to look at this though: whatever understanding of being is implicit in logic (classical logic, Frege’s logic) and mathematics is an understanding appropriate to unchanging, timeless — i.e., eternal — entities. Whatever sort of being we have, or anything else we’re familiar with has, it’s not like that.

Nor does formal logic presume that individuals persist over time. — Banno

It's timeless, because it was designed for mathematics. That's why Frege's logic is missing modality too.

I would have said rather that he showed there was no question here - that the notion of being was not the sort of thing that might be subject to further analysis, but just the sort of thing that has to be taken as granted — Banno

It's hard to know what to say here.

Wittgenstein doesn't always and unconditionally give in to the temptation to say "here my spade is turned". He dissects many things other people are happy to take for granted. And some of what he says looks enough like an explanation that people take him to be advancing some doctrine or another, despite his protests to the contrary.

He spends twenty years or so on the new project, trying over and over again to explain why there's nothing much to say, or trying not to explain it but just show that it is so. It is possible that something was going wrong there, that he was himself in a fly bottle he could not find the way out of. And the result is that those few remaining philosophers who care about Wittgenstein argue endlessly over what he meant. Why is that?

Wittgenstein and Heidegger are, in part anyway, barking up related trees: what it means to be in an interpreted and interpretable world. (Anscombe and Searle, I can't speak to.) And Wittgenstein's story is precisely that classical logic lacks the resources needed for such an account. (He tried.)

what is taken as granted in our conversation — Banno

That's not a terrible place to start, although you might have said in our lives rather than our conversations.

I think the question is, can you give an account of what "taking as granted" is? How does it work? How is it possible?

Logic, by design, has nothing to say here: existence and truth are taken as primitives, and are *prior* to logical operations. (Originally Frege included "judgment" as well.) You can continue to add on formalisms like model theory, but to specify a domain of discourse, you'll need a "membership" primitive as well. (You'll also need membership to treat predicates extensionally.)

Logic, like math, gets along fine without defining its primitives -- that's rather the point -- but that's not to say we do not in fact bring to logic and to math an understanding, some kind of understanding from somewhere, of the meaning of those primitives, or that there's no reason to give them some thought.

Give me a paper to read. — Banno

Past the Linguistic Turn?

I think this may have been his inaugural address on becoming Wykeham Professor of Logic.

I haven't read Grice, is his work worth exploring? — Janus

Grice fits in this little sub-discussion because he was unwilling to renounce his theoretical ambitions, so you get a very different version of some of what you find in the late Wittgenstein, some things that look enough like full-fledged theories in fact that they’ve been taken up variously in linguistics.

A quick point and my lunch break is done.

The best scientific theory tells you not just that earth in fact goes around the sun, but why it looks like the sun goes around the earth. That one might be straightforward, but not every case is.

What proof — Banno

I don't have a text on front of me, but from context I thought he was talking about 'proof of the external world', that sort of thing.

And his response is almost exactly Wittgenstein's.

Srap Tasmaner was looking for something more in the analytic tradition — Banno

?

Sorry, I thought both passages were clear enough.

The word that jumped out at me in the first passage was "decision". I remember reading this sort of thing as a young man and deciding immediately, as young men do, that I was an existentialist. This sense that your very existence is something you have to decide what to do with, and to understand what it means to have the kind of existence that needs to make those kinds of decisions -- that was thrilling stuff. A whole generation read Heidegger as helping them frame exactly the question "How should I live?" and take some steps towards answering it. The translation I'm quoting is by an existentialist theologian.

I'm not sure there's much to say about the second bit. As I just noted above, you can see the hermeneutic approach here: why our understanding is muddled is also interesting and part of what needs explaining.

Does that help at all?

I would say the "method" of philosophy is really phenomenology — Xtrix

One thing I really like is Heidegger's hermeneutic approach: you start from the asking of whatever question, and you don't skip right over how the question is asked, and why, and by whom, and what they think they're up to, but start there, with that vague understanding. And it's fascinating to see how he treats this not just as methodology but as part of the essential structure of the world: we ask vague questions about things we kinda already understand because some of what we understand or could understand is hidden, and that's part of what we investigate too.

Wittgenstein never quite seems to manage that unifying of method and subject matter, so to speak. The explanation of why, say, we're misled by language never really comes, and is never really brought into focus. Here we're misled or tempted or whatever, he'll say, and that's it. But his talk of reminding us of what we already understand could obviously support the hermeneutic approach.

My favourite amongst these is "What ought I do?". — Banno

Furthermore, in each case Dasein is mine to be in one way or another. Dasein has always made some sort of decision as to the way in which it is in each case mine. That entity which in its Being has this very Being as an issue, comports itself towards its Being as it ownmost possibility. In each case, Dasein is its possibility, and it ‘has’ this possibility, but not just as a property that something present-at-hand would. And because Dasein is in each case essentially its own possibility, it can, in its very Being, choose itself and win itself; it can also lose itself and never win itself; or it can only ‘seem’ to do so. But only in so far as it is essentially something which can be authentic — that, something of its own — can it have lost itself and not yet won itself. — H 42-43, M&R

It’s not like it’s an accident that Being and Time birthed existentialism.

One more note on philosophy as clarification.

We do not know what Being means. But even if we ask, ‘What is “Being”?’, we keep within an understanding of the ‘is’, though we are unable to fix conceptually what that ‘is’ signifies. We do not even know the horizon in terms of which that meaning is to be grasped and fixed. But this vague understanding of the meaning of Being is still a fact.

However much this understanding of Being (an understanding which is already available to us) may fluctuate and grow dim, and border on mere acquaintance with a word, its very indefiniteness is a positive phenomenon which needs to be clarified. An investigation of the meaning of Being cannot be expected to give this clarification at the outset. If we are to obtain the clue we need for Interpreting this average understanding of Being, we must first develop the concept of Being. — H 5-6, M&R

So Heidegger’s your guy on both counts.

they place one thing at the centre of philosophical discourse before the discourse begins — Banno

Except that’s exactly what Heidegger did not do. He comes to phenomenological ontology as his rethinking of Husserl’s phenomenology, and the argument he makes in the beginning of Being and Time is that this is the only methodology which can support a properly scientific philosophy.

Better to look at what philosophy is in terms of it's method - critical analysis that seeks clarification - than in terms of this or that content. — Banno

Which is exactly what Heidegger did, but without the parenthetical claim that we already know the right method for doing philosophy.

Not for nothing, but Timothy Williamson, in his role as defender of the project of philosophy as a theoretical science, has relentlessly attacked your claim that philosophy is just conceptual clarification.