This may be an imprecise question - but in your view how difficult is it to obtain a useful reading of Heidegger? How would a student begin a process of understanding his work (outside of academe)?

I tend to find death-facing machismo a significant ingredient in the early Heidegger. — green flag

I find it unreadable so I can't comment, but I am interested to obtain a general understanding of his themes and subjects. An awareness of different readings and interpretations is engaging in itself.

Is there any humor in Heidegger?

I think most of us don't feel this terror very often. — green flag

Yes, it seems absent amongst my social groups and me personally. Of course people might 'cheat' and say that it's an unconscious fear that animates all aspects of our lives, etc.

Is childhood a largely forgotten magical world full of monsters and queens ? — green flag

Could be.

The terror of being a dying animal is foregrounded, along with various responses to that terror. — green flag

Do you think this terror is ubiquitous?

What do you mean? — Darkneos

If you don't believe in capital T truth then by definition all value systems are perspectival human artifacts.

Which means that values comprise of individual and community agreements (and disagreements) and they are still of immense significance since they organize and delineate culture and society.

There is a tendency to polarize ideas of human nature; either it is a Good Thing (Rouseau) or a Bad Thing (Hobbes). But either view is mistaken. — Ludwig V

I don't think this is relevant to my example and certainly not how this person would view human nature. I was trying (badly) to describe an aspect of Aboriginal spirituality as informing the man's view. No need to provide exegesis on it since the account is flawed and incomplete. :wink:

What you describe is classic Western dualistic thinking and this bifurcated view of reality is, I agree, unproductive.

Value is always subject to a criterion or scale and is generally contextualized though personal experience or a community. Like anything human 'value' is an artifact or perspective we employ to makes sense of and manage our environment. If one harbors no preconceptions of 'ultimate reality' or 'absolute truth' (themselves value systems), I don't find any concerns.

It is funny when people say: there is no evidence that God exists, what do they really mean? — Raef Kandil

Many contemporary atheists would not say that. There's plenty of evidence, from The Koran to personal experience. As an atheist I would simply say the evidence available has me unconvinced that there are gods. Most believers in one god use the same tools as atheists do to dismiss all the gods of other religions and perhaps to jettison belief in the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, alien abductions or ghosts.

The question of god/s existing is not about physicalism, or what we can create using our imaginations, it's about whether we have sufficient reasons to accept the proposition or not. Generally this will be tied to specific versions of god and the concomitant scriptures and traditions of belief.

For me the debate should switch focus from whether there are gods or not, to the question why should we care if there are gods? Which gods and for what reason?

There is no contemporary philosopher who has delved into the nature of affect, feeling, mood and emotion more deeply than Heidegger. Check out this paper from Matthew Ratcliffe: — Joshs

I'll check it out and thanks but I suspect it will be too impenetrable for me. :up:

I don't fully understand this question. Based on what criteria of value or against whose scale could you possibly measure such a question? The glib answer, of course is that no one deserves anything; but do we deserve not to exist? What follows from a 'yes' or 'no' answer? And what is the word 'merely' doing in front of exist? Do you mean to point to existence, with no additional attributes, like being happy or healthy?

The theological answer is given because most are not philosophers. They need answers and one that they cannot understand is better than no answer. And one that has the appearance of intelligibility and is the work of a god is even better. — Fooloso4

That made me laugh.

I think Heidegger was attempting to evoke a sense of wonder that there is anything at all, but it seems like mystification — Fooloso4

:fire: Interestingly the words of progressive theological thinker David Bentley Hart frequently come back to the 'wonder of being' or the 'surprise that there is anything at all'.

Coming outside of philosophy, I find the notion of being fairly uninteresting. No doubt there is rigorous and serious scholarship behind Heidegger's work, but it often sounds like high end bong talk. :wink:

The metaphysics of presence is a key preoccupation of the post-structuralists like Derrida.

Wiki has it like this, although I am unsure of the reading.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysics_of_presence

I'm curious to know what a " 'transcendent' aspect of improvement built into human spirituality' would look like to your friend — Janus

Fair point. It's likely to be Aboriginal culture/spirituality, which I don't pretend to understand but it is hinting at human nature having an openness to goodness as a dimension of how we were created. This is put together from longer conversations.

wouldn't social justice and universal prosperity (and the other benefits that go with those) be in common, with the differences being more in the way of how to get there? — Janus

Yep. I think many human problems come down to how we get there. Just as morality is not a theory, it is what we do.

Would many people deny that progress in the sense of social betterment, fairness and justice and greater prosperity for all is desirable? — Janus

I think the problem is that progress is hard to define and aligned with worldviews. Hence the internecine battles between 'progressives' and conservatives.

From some ethical and aesthetical perspectives, there is certainly something ugly, something degraded, about capitalism — Janus

No arguments - but I was putting the view without wanting to explore this as a separate point.

The question is whether he meant to say that he believed in the ideal of progress — Janus

I think the notion of the ideal of progress was not overtly a part of his worldview. But he did feel there was some, shall we say 'transcendent' aspect of improvement built into human spirituality.

I was merely pointing out that there is a distinction between the defeatist attitude that it is impossible, the optimistic attitude that it is possible, and the complacent attitude that it is inevitable. — Janus

Interesting. Attitudes are central to this. I've been debating this idea of progress (mostly badly) for decades. Not as a philosopher but more simply as a reflection of my culture, here in Australia.

I think where people sit on this has a lot to do with their aesthetics and politics more than anything. For instance, it seems that there are many people who have an understandable critical antipathy towards capitalism and though this lens it is almost impossible to see a version of the world that is not one of ceaseless exploitation, degradation and suffering.

Pinker as an evidentialist seems to bracket the world and describe or isolate progress as a series of calculations that speak for themselves. It's a kind of progress positivism. Not sure what I think about this.

I was talking to an Aboriginal man I know who (like most First Nations people) can look back at his family and culture as a kind of history of white oppression and genocide. Families torn apart by deliberate social policies, not being able to vote as citizens until 1967, deaths in custody, racism, etc, etc. I asked him if he believed in progress. "Fuck yeah!" he responded. 'But we're only part of the way there.' Progress is situational, specific and reversible and never completed and can't be understood as some kind of Hegelian process.

The endless and fruitless search for foundations of knowledge certainly looks like a misapplication of an idea like the format of Euclid's writings about geometry. — Ludwig V

Could be. It's probably down to the notion of god which has historically been posited as the foundational grounding of human knowledge. So we get the inevitable question - how can knowledge be true or objective or foundational if god does not guarantee it? And then you get arguments like the evolutionary argument against naturalism by people like Alvin Plantinga.

The guiding question of metaphysics, “what is being?” has reached its end with Nietzsche. With its completion the grounding question, the question of the essence of Being, can once again be taken up by Heidegger. — Fooloso4

Great, thank you. I note you said this earlier:

Like many, I sensed that he had something mysterious and important to disclose. That thinking plays an essential role in to bringing being to presence. In time I came to think that pursuit of the question of "Being" is like chasing the wind. An oracular prophet without a revelation. — Fooloso4

Is this your view about the question "what is being?" more generally, or is it your view of the Heideggerian approach?

Is this question still pursued or relevant in philosophy? I note Derrida's early interest in Heidegger and his formulation of being as presence.

Does this count as ambivalence? :wink:

Heidegger comes along and says that there is a system where the system has not been competed yet. Nietzsche would have produced it if he had lived long enough. All of those ideas by H are laid out in the Lectures I linked to. — Paine

That's a tantalizing notion. Thanks for the context. Do you agree with Heidegger?

Can you explain to me why Heidegger viewed Nietzsche as the last metaphysician? How does one read Nietzsche this way?

Do 'properly basic beliefs' or 'basic beliefs' mean anything in contemporary philosophy? I'm assuming they come out of a foundationalist epistemology? Personally, I would tend to lump them into a kind of 'brute fact'' argument of the kind Russell mentions when talking about the universe... 'it's there and that's all.."

Problematically there are religious thinkers who would say god is a basic or properly basic belief - I guess it's the 'foundation' from which all other beliefs are built up from. In your view is it possible to not hold any such axioms as a foundational starting point? Personally, I don't see how we can argue that god has the same epistemic status as the universe. The latter is hard to doubt, but the former, it seems to me, can only be arrived at though intellectual calisthenics...

We cannot doubt everything, because doubting requires a background against which the doubt is formulated — Banno

And perversely such doubting has become a form of certainty.

Dumb question but is Heidegger an important figure in philosophy?

The decentralization of knowledge is a paradigmatic moment history will remember. — NOS4A2

That's an interesting phrase - is that your own formulation?

To summarize: you only know something when you have perceived it undoubtably through your senses. — Bret Bernhoft

The issue with this is that people perceive things with certainty through their senses all the time and yet are mistaken in their conclusions. Given this, I am skeptical that we can readily identify how we can tell when someone knows something this way. Something else needs to be present.

But one has to acknowledge that experiences of God are overwhelmingly important to their subject and seem to be self-certifying. However, it also seems pretty clear that not all such experiences are actually from God, and that validation of them by others should depend on what comes from them in everyday life. — Ludwig V

Yes. Can we point to a single verified example of someone having an experience directly from god? I know you are not saying this, but I don't see how a person's own feelings of certainty can assist us with this.

So you see Trump as a kind of necessary disruptor and as such a harbinger of change? What legacy do you envision?

:up: Interesting observations about the engineering process.

That's why Lao Tzu means so much to me. — T Clark

I'm always envious of people who have models or texts they admire and are guided by. I've never really had that. I enjoy essay writers, but mainly because of their capacity to use language, not so much as a guide or inspiration.

Nice. Thanks again.

I think a key issue of our time is that we no longer know who should be in charge and we no longer draw easily from reassuring metanarratives. Many of us have retreated into 'lifestyle' or identity politics as a source of meaning. Foundationally many seem to be without a place to stand - a kind of paralysis of relativism. Now, some people might see this as good or as a necessary stage towards some better, more nuanced reconstruction of culture and society.

Richard Rorty argued that cultural politics has replaced reformist politics, meaning that multiple groups are now engaged in their own preoccupations about rights while the larger concerns of class, like housing, employment, healthcare no longer engage broadly as they should. Personally the primary thing I am aware of is that society seems so atomized and divided that substantive reform seems ever harder to achieve. Which probably suits powerful interest groups pretty well.

I use personal introspection as one of the sources of my knowledge. — T Clark

Can you outline what you have in mind here? Do you mean using experience to make assessments and decisions?

I don't think we ever really try to achieve certainty in our knowledge. — T Clark

Does this depend on the area? Surely certainty is important to logic, math and in your game - engineering? I have never understood math of any kind so for me it is like an arcane type of mysticism. :wink:

On the conservative side, there are those who read him in close proximity to Kierkegaard , Levinas and Wittgenstein. Some associate him with critical theory types like Adorno, and then there are the poststructuralist readings which I favor ( Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida). — Joshs

Thank you. That's what I was wondering. My understanding is that Dreyfus' reading is now considered somewhat limited, is that your view? Would you class him as a conservative?

As an aside, is there any particular reason to use poststructuralist over postmodern? Is it the role of language based theory over the broader philosophical exigencies (of the latter)?

Out of interest, and briefly, how do you personally describe a figure like Trump? From your perspective, what kind of President was he and what did he represent?

Is post modernism a critical aspect in obtaining a better reading of Heidegger?

Thank you.

There are counterexamples. I am certain, for instance, that this post is in English, and my certainty is not a theory that I could revise if further evidence came along.

I'd just say that if we counted something as knowledge and later it turned out to be false, then we were wrong, that it wasn't knowledge, and we have now corrected ourselves. — Banno

I get you. I believe I recall you saying that you found the approach of fallibilism problematic. Although from my perspective it seems we often have no choice but to operate in much this way holding tentative accounts of 'the world' which are based on the best available evidence or reasoning, but are subject to revision over time. I question how useful the word knowledge is much of the time.

Would it not be the case that as we go about our business we generally do struggle to achieve knowledge of the sort you describe (the certainty that this sentence is in English)? We seem to spend most of our lives in belief-land - some more than others.

We find people who say they have knowledge of god though direct experience - how would you describe this type of claim? A belief? To call it a false belief would imply that we already have decided that knowledge of god is not legitimate. Or it begs the question that we can tell if someone has knowledge of god.

Thoughts?

In 1969 Stanley Rosen published "Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay". It can be described as Plato against Heidegger. Rosen said:

Nihilism is the concept of reason separated from the concept of the good. — Fooloso4

It's a nice quote but I'm not sure I fully get it. Can you expand?

How you decide to believe that Cream was formed in 1966 is over to you - you were there, your friend told you, you read about it on the back of an LP, you recall it from somewhere but are not sure where... — Banno

Do you use the term justification for this process?

First i think there are two questions that sometimes get conflated; the first is, what does "...is true" mean? The second, how do we tell if some sentence is true? — Banno

Got it.

"P" is true if and only if P. so "The kettle is boiling" is true iff and only if the kettle is boiling. It seems to me that this account brings together the coherence, correspondence and redundancy of truth, ideas to which philosophers keep returning. — Banno

Does this privilege forms of truth involving empirically verifiable matters? How do we deal with issues such as, for instance, the band Cream was formed in 1966?

This is where the distinction between what is true and what is thought to be true comes into play. Whereas truth is monadic, being about some sentence, belief is dyadic, being about both some sentence and a believer. That is, the kettle is either boiling or not is about the kettle, while that one believes the kettle is boiling is about both the believer and the kettle. This is of importance because idealism and anti-realism work by denying this distinction between truth and belief. For them something is true only if it is believed (or perceived, or whatever) to be true. — Banno

I'll need to mull over this.

I hope it is clear that I do not think there can be what I've called an "algorithmic" account of truth, and hence of either what we should believe or of what we can know. — Banno

I think this is clear.

"How do we identify truth?" becomes a normative, even an ethical question, being much the same as "What ought we believe?". It is about our place in a community, especially a language community. So despite my rejecting the antirealist move against there being true statements independent of the attitude we adopt towards them, I do think that what we say is true or false is to a large extent bound to the way we are embedded in a society. I agree more or less with their conclusion, but not with their argument. — Banno

Jeez, there's a lot bound up in all this. But you wouldn't subscribe to a 'intersubjective community of agreement' style account of truth that has 'truth' shift about in a relativistic manner across different world views and value systems as per post modernism, right?

OF course, I might be wrong. — Banno

Ha! Well if it gets back to anyone, you said it..

Thanks for this.

I think it's pretty fashionable to be pessimistic about the notion of social improvement. If progress means to move forward or onward to more advanced conditions (less suffering, more opportunity) then I believe there is progress. The fact that there may also be disadvantages or a shadow side attached to some instances of progress does not mean progress in false. It just means there are also drawbacks. And some countries are more progressive than others. And some people are better positioned to benefit from progress. But I would, for instance, definitely prefer to be born a woman in the West now, than in 1923. The safety of childbirth, the life choices and education options available, shit on what was on offer then.

Much of these discussions depend upon what you consider progress to look like in practice. I personally don't consider progress to be part of a utopian model of reality, where humans are on journey to a specific end point of social perfection. I'm more of a progress minimalist. :wink:

Philosophy is, generally speaking, a lot harder than it perhaps seems. — Banno

This is an important point for me. What you write about knowledge is thought provoking and reminds me that I am an outsider to philosophy.

Presumably, a perfect definition would give an account of these three species of knowledge. — Banno

Would you say that knowledge then is similar to truth in that it is not a property which looks the same in each example? (sorry for the clumsy wording)

And it's not hard to see problems with defining knowledge as "useful information". We all know stuff that is not useful, unless one is going to specify utility in such broad terms that anything is useful—at which point being useful becomes moot. And there is useful information that is false - Newtonian physics, for example. — Banno

Indeed. I generally hold to the 'is useful for certain purposes' and while some would possibly call this a type of pragmatism, I consider it more of a lazy, 'common sense' construal of knowledge that is certainly fraught for reasons you describe.

Given these variables in our understanding of knowledge, if you had to provide a brief working description of knowledge, is there one you could contrive on the fly or a basic account you could recommend?

The following three questions probably best represent why I entered this site in the first place

How do we identify truth?
What is knowledge?
Are there moral facts?

What should not be overlooked is how much of what the snake said is the truth: — Fooloso4

The snake is the hero in this story.