Seems like total agreement has no need for creative compromise. — ff0

Total agreement rules out any scope for differences of opinion, hence freedom and creativity. So that is why I would stress productive agreement - the kind of agreement that pragmatist philosophy would have in mind.

The foundation of productive agreement would be agreeing about what kind of differences don't in fact matter. And that approach to discovering truth is the opposite of seeking agreement based on starting definitionally with the essence of things - the differences that make a difference.

So I am advocating an emergent or apophatic approach to arriving at agreement. As we agree about what doesn't change things, then what does change things will emerge into view with any luck.

What is ideological about causation? About the laws of thermodynamics? What is ideological about "Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared." or Darwin's finches? or the first through fifth extinctions, now heading into the sixth? or the San Andreas or Madrid fault? or is this squirrel a hybrid or a separate species? Or climate change? What are the genes that contribute to invincible stupidity? — Bitter Crank

What could be more ideological than claiming that the facts of the world are not subject to ideology?

Such absoluteness is the very hallmark of the ideal.

of course philosophy answers the most profound questions. But the progress of philosophy ( as well as science) consists in formulating more interesting questions.

I encourage you to listen to the YouTube lecture titled 'science as ideology' by the reknown biologist Richard Lewontin. Pay special attention to his explanation of how the framework of Darwinian evolution depended on cultural metaphors from Malthus and Adam Smith.

Total agreement rules out any scope for differences of opinion, hence freedom and creativity. So that is why I would stress productive agreement - the kind of agreement that pragmatist philosophy would have in mind. — apokrisis

I think we basically agree here. I might phrase 'productive agreement' as a the friendly disagreement that wants to get something done together. But even outright war can inspire innovation. So there's that.

I like pragmatism. I think it describes pretty well the way we actually reason. We have projects. We want things. Sometimes it's a matter of getting these things, and sometimes it's a matter of clarifying these objects (well, situations) of desire. And let's throw in whatever I'm leaving out.

The foundation of productive agreement would be agreeing about what kind of differences don't in fact matter. — apokrisis

That seems like a foundation. It also seems foundational to clarify the goal.

What could be more ideological than claiming that the facts of the world are not subject to ideology?

Such absoluteness is the very hallmark of the ideal. — apokrisis

Exactly. We lust for the right angle, for the fixed simplified situation. But this leads us to ignore what doesn't fit that tempting picture.

When I speak of science as ideology, what I mean is worldview, paradigm, gestalt. Since scientists are human beings who do not exist outside of culture, a scientific theory is a framework that gets its sense form a larger meta framework of understanding that it shares with the larger culture.
That's why one can speak of medieval, enlightenment, modernist and postmodern science. These movements express the way in which philosophy of science as well as the methods scientists see as defining what they do, and the very content of science evolves in tandem with the rest of cultural achievement rather than leading it.

I don't think 'science' even tries to answer the most profound questions. Moreover, I don't see how science can provide its own foundation. Engineering and medicine earn our trust more or less by giving us what we want. But the idea of eternal, universal truth sounds pretty theological to me. In short, its foundation looks to be largely pragmatic or 'irrational.' We keep doing what scratches the itch. By putting philosopher in quotes, you are (as I see it) linking the heroic 'payload' of the words science and philosophy in an ideological way --as if the 'deepest' kind of talk humans are capable of is the defense/worship of science. — ff0

That is a very strange "think" given that science can take us back to before the big-bang and answers the question "why"?

Science does not provide its own foundation, because it has no need of a foundation. Scientific theories survive on their own merit.

On what merit? That they get things done? I agree. But that's a pragmatic foundation, a vague foundation, an 'irrational' or inexplicit foundation. I trust my dentist. I don't believe in ghosts or afterlife. But I also don't pretend that various prediction and control technologies are 'highest' things.

It's a little ungenerous, but I'm tempted to parody scientism as the worship of dentistry. Can you sincerely tell me that your life as you experience it fits into the scientific paradigm? That what it is to love and be mortal and be thrown into a particular face and body are neatly arranged by the physicists and the biologist? This seems to me like a wild and questionable hope, the hope to reduce what it is to be to the publicly quantifiable, etc. Only the peer reviewed and intellectually respectable is real. Sure. Educated common sense is the true god.

To be clear, this is not some politically hopeful cultural criticism. I don't in the least pretend to be changing the world here. I don't have the time to waste on preaching this or that gospel in that kind of grand sense. Life and the world are bigger than me, not just bigger than science. I'm just trying to make some exciting conversation.

What's the point of anything?
You are here. Philosophy is a way of understanding your condition.

Yes, and they are replaced by new theories as a result of changing world views, which bring along with them new understanding of scientific method(Baconian hypothetical-deductive, Popperian fablsificationism, Kuhn's paradigm shift, etc) A discipline doesn't have to be self-aware to be useful, but that doesn't mean that there is no more to an understanding of what a science does that what is provided in their language of description.

Did you know that the leading edge of cognitive science is just now catching up with and integrating its models with that of philosophical phenomenology? Yep, the philosophers got there first.

A discipline doesn't have to be self-aware to be useful, but that doesn't mean that there is no more to an understanding of what a science does that what is provided in their language of description. — Joshs

Good point. It may be that a certain discourse functions well because it ignores its own foundations. What we might call scientism is something like a vague distrust of any kind of thorough conceptualization or investigation of these foundations. On philosophy forums, there's usually a fear of religion at play. Any lack of reverence for science 'must' lead to some kind of religious position --because surely there's no 'rational' or intellectual reason to place science in the total context of life. For scientism, something like a scientist as priest metaphor seems to function in the background.

It also seems foundational to clarify the goal. — ff0

Of course. And the general goal of philosophy or critical thinking would be something along the lines of "arriving at the truth of reality". But even that could be disputed by those who claim it to be akin to an exercise in poetry or whatever.

Yet also, I was talking about productive agreement as being the general social goal. And society seems an exercise in creativity.

A society's goals are founded in nature - the demands of evolutionary fitness and thermodynamical imperative. Or at least those are nature's constraints on our being. They set the general limits, and within that scope, we are free to play. We can set our own goals from there on. Nature is in agreement with whatever we choose to do from the point where it thinks that any differences don't make a difference.

And so the goal of the human project is reasonably open-ended and emergent within those physical limits. Our job is make sense of the freedoms we find. Or at least that is one possible philosophical view of the foundational goals of a social creature.

But even outright war can inspire innovation. So there's that. — ff0

Yep. It is standard social science to point out that a flourishing social system depends on both competition and co-operation. So striving leads to creative advance.

But also, it is a balance. The implicit question here is whether a good war creates more than it destructs in terms of long-run social and intellectual capital?

So it is not a paradox that conflict is productive. It is the balance of strife to harmony that gets judged in the long-run as both are forms of productivity. Stability must be tempered by plasticity, etc. It's all part of nature's dialectic.

Of course. And the general goal of philosophy or critical thinking would be something along the lines of "arriving at the truth of reality". But even that could be disputed by those who claim it to be akin to an exercise in poetry or whatever. — apokrisis

That's a pretty good description. But we might also speak of attaining a kind of emotional equilibrium, of making peace with death or 'evil,' etc. Of living and dying well. The phrase 'adaptive doing' comes to mind, where doing includes thinking. As far as poetry goes, I think it's fair to include the pleasure we take getting some truth down. It's not just the ring of truth but the quality of that ring. The King James translation is great English, for instance. The same ideas in a lamer English don't ring the same way. As I see it, we are more Kirk than Spock.

I generally agree with the rest of your post. But perhaps you neglect the position of the mortal individual with a particular history. You mention the individual pole in passing, but don't have much to say about it, which is fine. But what of the individual who comes to term with his smallness on the world stage? With the impotence of his notion of the way the world ought to be? Born into a kind of chaos, he will die in it. Also it seems fair to expect the species itself to go extinct.

In short, we operate within a sort of finitude and absurdity, granting these assumptions. We are future-oriented beings with long-term projects and social hopes. Yet projecting far enough ahead reveals a kind of futility. Of course we can 'forget' or 'justify' our deaths in terms of social hopes, artistic accomplishments, offspring, religion. But we reason about these things. We wrestle within ourselves. I'd include this kind of talk within 'philosophy.'

Yes, Feyerabend said that when Enlightenment science emerged in the 18th century, it acted as a corrective to the dominance of religious authority over thought. But now science is the dominant discourse and acts to repress other modes of inquiry.

I like Feyerabend. It's been awhile, but his Conquest of Abundance is pretty great. I hope I remember the title correctly. But I could also drag in Whitman here. Or lots of other poets. They are phenomenologists, one might say. They try to speak the truth about experience, to let the fish see the water. The science-religion debate is (at worst) like an argument between those who lost their left eye and those who lost their right eye. For 'spiritual' or 'aesthetic' reasons some of us strive for a kind of wholeness and richness of experience. An opposite drive exists toward some citadel of invulnerable correctness. 'Here, finally, is the systematic truth, the one true method, the machine-like set of words that puts to death the hassle of inquiry forever.' I can't curse that urge. It too seems deeply human.

I would make one comment about phenomenology. There is a common understanding of it that simply sees it a private, subjective experience, as 1st person experience vs the 3rd person perspective of science. Even Hegel uses it in a way similar to this. Husserl (and Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger also) was doing something I interpret as quite different and radical than simply talking about what is conventionally termed 1st person perspective. His project abandons a cause-effect behaviorist rubric for one that is radically interactional, making intentionality not an emergent property of something more reductive, but primary. His language of philosophy turns every noun into a verb, everything is a processing of process , an anticipating beyond in the very act of experiencing. This makes what we experience and our relation to it never an arbitrary chain of associations ala Locke or Hume, but a something with a certain thematic integrity even as the thematics are always evolving and transmogrifing.

But we might also speak of attaining a kind of emotional equilibrium, of making peace with death or 'evil,' etc. Of living and dying well. — ff0

I'm thinking of those as applied philosophy. So the answers are not so much to be found as invented. And a science - like positive psychology - is the place to be watching the technology coming through.

So the practical issue is that religious teachings and philosophical wisdom did try to create good life advice. But it was advice for a different world, a different time. A lot of it may have been particular to life as most people might have lived it 2000 years ago. Some deep principles may still apply. But also, a scientific, evidence-backed and conjectural approach, might be the better way to philosophise about "living well" today.

So the modern way of thinking recognises that the human project is subject to nature's constraints. We are evolved and that shapes our ideas about any personal or collective purpose. It is foolish now to believe that we are either radically free of this biological conditioning, or that alternatively, we are conditioned by some divine telos.

Of course, both those comments will be immediately disputed. But that's my position here. Philosophy is wasting its time - in terms of deliverables - if it is still seeking answers on the moral, the aesthetic, the human, in terms that either deny a biological history or claim a divine basis. So what philosophy would focus on productively is how to make sense of the freedoms we discover, given a history of natural constraints.

We've still got lots of choices. And we are so busy doing stuff, changing things, that we need to get scientific about the ultimate goals we might be wanting to achieve. We need to investigate our psychology well enough to have a credible story about what actually makes us happy, allows us to flourish, leads us towards the nirvana of self-actualisation - if that is indeed all the things we would freely choose for ourselves in the long run.

In short, between the moral absolutism and the moral relativism that is the polar dichotomy characterising most people's understanding of the philosophical choices, I am arguing for the moral pragmatism which takes the middle course of recognising reality to be historically conditioned, yet also semiotically open-ended. There is a practical balance of opposing tensions waiting to be struck. And the scientific method is what you apply once you start to zero in on a fully account of anything.

But perhaps you neglect the position of the mortal individual with a particular history. You mention the individual pole in passing, but don't have much to say about it, which is fine. But what of the individual who comes to term with his smallness on the world stage? With the impotence of his notion of the way the world ought to be? Born into a kind of chaos, he will die in it. Also it seems fair to expect the species itself to go extinct. — ff0

Is mortality more something you worry about when you are old or when you are young? Life seems to provide its own perspective on these things.

On their deathbed, most people regret not spending more quality time with family, friends and passions. A life devoted to striving and achievement seems unbalanced in retrospect. The cultivation of the individuated self - the idea of making one big difference to society rather than a lot of small differences for those closest at hand - seems overblown at the far end of life. For quite natural reasons. Just as it seems the most important thing of all back at the start of adult life.

So should the futility of life, the inevitability of death, be the final philosophy of "a good life"? The evidence of living suggests that what looms large at the beginning becomes naturally more inconsequential towards the end.

In short, we operate within a sort of finitude and absurdity, granting these assumptions. We are future-oriented beings with long-term projects and social hopes. Yet projecting far enough ahead reveals a kind of futility. This is a fascinating situation. — ff0

I've got to agree as I've felt it too. And I think finding it "fascinating" speaks to a suitably balanced assessment.

Life is both futile and worthwhile, both absurd and meaningful. And this isn't paradoxical, just an expression of the range of possible philosophical reactions we have learnt to manifest. We feel the full space of the possible - in a way that a lack of philosophy would render inarticulate.

And that in itself is both fascinating and unsettling.

So the only problem with philosophy is that once you have habituated its dialectical tendencies, they infect everything you could think about. Once you create range, you always then have the dilemma of locating yourself at some definite point on the spectrum you've just made.

The alternative to that is to float above your own spectrum of possibilities in some detached and free-floating manner. Which is where "you" start becoming a highly abstract kind of creature even to "yourself".

Do I care? Do I not care? At every moment I could just as easily make a different choice on that.

Thank goodness life provides its social scripts that "one" can always grab hold of, so as to decide the matter for the passing moment, eh? Ah, the existentialism of being an existentialist. ;)

Who said it's about answering questions? — ff0

Sure, I have a much better appreciation of the problems, but no concrete answers.
Maybe there are none. Perhaps it's the way philosophy is often phrased as a question - it suggests that maybe there are definite answers to be had. Without these answers, or the genuine possibility of one day finding them, we are left with the word games you mentioned. — Oliver Purvis

Husserl (and Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger also) was doing something I interpret as quite different and radical than simply talking about what is conventionally termed 1st person perspective. — Joshs

I agree. My understanding of it includes getting behind all of this encrusted theoretical language. To the things (factic life, existence, being there) itself. But this is a goal. On the way to that goal we have to cut through the pre-interpretations. We have go back behind the first wrong move as much as possible. Fail again. Fail better. Become a little more wakeful.

Deleted and pasted below.

word games
— Bitter Crank

I get a little nervous when people start talking about Truth (big T). I certainly do not think that "there is no truth", nor do I think Truth is relative to each and everyone's personal POV. I like to find truth--I have found bits of the truth here and there--and usually it is (small t) truth, a piece of larger truths that we suppose exist.

BIG T TRUTH are the windmills at which Mr. Quixote charges. An impossible dream. What makes BIG T TRUTH a windmill is that our reach exceeds our grasp. We can ask the question, "what is truth?" but we can not provide a very satisfying answer (so far). We like to think that we will know the truth, and the truth will make us free. Determining THE TRUTH will be a transformative event, worth a Nobel Prize, at the very least.

The trouble with THE TRUTH making us free is that it is an import from the Gospel of John. Jesus makes it clear enough that "THE TRUTH" is a Person. Finding the truth, and knowing the truth, is the result of a relationship with God, he says,

Now, I am not speaking here on behalf of John, Jesus, or Jason. I'm only pointing out that THE TRUTH in the famous quote isn't something that will ever result from the study of philosophy--or anything else, for that matter. I suspect that The Truth, or the ordinary secular truths we can actually grasp, are the consequence of our relationships with one another, and science, in that order.

Did you know that the leading edge of cognitive science is just now catching up with and integrating its models with that of philosophical phenomenology? Yep, the philosophers got there first. — Joshs

Assuming that what you say is correct, it would make sense--philosophy begat psychology rather recently (19th century).

Is mortality more something you worry about when you are old or when you are young? — apokrisis

In my experience, the young are more terrified of death. As we age, we start to understand its attractions. We go from terror to mixed feelings.

I didn't stress it, but I include the failure of the body in the problem of death. We don't usually just drop dead. Things fall apart first. The vitality we took for granted seeps away. For context, I'm between youth and old age. My remaining vitality beings to appear in its true finitude. This first-person switch from the future stretching endlessly to a certain number of Christmases and Thanksgivings is food for thought. Life takes on a new vividness. It's a loud dream. To some degree we choose to continue dreaming it.

On their deathbed, most people regret not spending more quality time with family, friends and passions. A life devoted to striving and achievement seems unbalanced in retrospect. The cultivation of the individuated self - the idea of making one big difference to society rather than a lot of small differences for those closest at hand - seems overblown at the far end of life. For quite natural reasons. Just as it seems the most important thing of all back at the start of adult life. — apokrisis

Yes. This sounds right to me. Youthful ambition is world-historical. Youth refuses to believe that the world will likely no more notice its departure than it did its arrival. I think seeing the 'hugeness' of the world and life is a sort of 'philosophical' realization. My voice is one among many. Those who locally love me give a damn, and that's usually it. Even intellectual fame would involve (I presume) something like a caricature or alienation. It has no obvious 'deep' meaning.

I've got to agree as I've felt it too. And I think finding it "fascinating" speaks to a suitably balanced assessment. — apokrisis

Thanks. I'm definitely looking for the right tone. Some of life's beauty lies in the death of all things. All things are temporary and elusive. We like to chase things. The receding seduces. The ungraspable beckons. What is more sickly sweet than an unplucked opportunity as it dies? Neither victory nor disaster endures. Neither the heroic deed nor the most terrible crime. It comes and goes like music.

Life is both futile and worthwhile, both absurd and meaningful. And this isn't paradoxical, just an expression of the range of possible philosophical reactions we have learnt to manifest. We feel the full space of the possible - in a way that a lack of philosophy would render inarticulate.

And that in itself is both fascinating and unsettling — apokrisis

We are 100% on the same page here.

The full space of the possible.

So the only problem with philosophy is that once you have habituated its dialectical tendencies, they infect everything you could think about. Once you create range, you always then have the dilemma of locating yourself at some definite point on the spectrum you've just made.

The alternative to that is to float above your own spectrum of possibilities in some detached and free-floating manner. Which is where "you" start becoming a highly abstract kind of creature even to "yourself".

Do I care? Do I not care? At every moment I could just as easily make a different choice on that.

Thank goodness life provides its social scripts that "one" can always grab hold of, so as to decide the matter for the passing moment, eh? Ah, the existentialism of being an existentialist — apokrisis

Good points. Sometimes hand-wringing theory-mongering is absurd and inappropriate.

I suspect that The Truth, or the ordinary secular truths we can actually grasp, are the consequence of our relationships with one another, and science, in that order. — Bitter Crank

Yes, in that order. If I give scientism hell, it's only because I think people in fact experience one another in a non-theoretical sense that transcends not only the lingo of science but also of metaphysics and theology. To me it is somewhat 'obvious' that we don't have a verbal handle on the fullness of what it is to be human. I assume that the lives of others are roughly like mine. This gut-level half-conceptual assumption is the kind of thing I'm talking about, though. Preconceptual or half-conceptual know-how.

For whom is their lover atoms and voids or a system of facts or a ghost in the machine? All these cute little concepts are pasted over something that's far harder to describe. I'm not anti-science, etc. There's just a tendency to pretend that life is reducible to physical or biological science that amuses and dismays me. Have such people ever been in love or buried someone? You know what I mean? Or heard great music? Or been moved by a novel? Life is big.

I didn't stress it, but I include the failure of the body in the problem of death. We don't usually just drop dead. Things fall apart first. The vitality we took for granted seeps away. — ff0

I agree. Getting old, it is decrepitude and its many indignities that are the live issue. Death becomes a solution more than a threat.

But then unnecessary longevity is such a recent thing too. A relatively new topic for the philosophisers. At least I've not yet noticed any modern Heidegger making a thing of humans being the only animals conscious of their own imminent gerontocracy.

Decay lacks the profundity, the finality, which we are so quick to grant death.

Some of life's beauty lies in the death of all things. — ff0

The biological perspective is my thing. So I really like the idea that life is like riding a bicycle, or the tilt of the sprinter.

We hang together on the edge of falling apart by flinging ourselves constantly forward. The beauty of living lies in this constant mastery over a sustaining instability. We stay in motion to keep upright. Then eventually we slow and it all falls apart.

So there is a self-making pattern. Individuals come and go, but the pattern always renews. And it is the possibility of the material instability that is the basis for the possibility of the formal control. Life is falling apart given a sustaining direction for a while.

Have such people ever been in love or buried someone? You know what I mean? Or heard great music? Or been moved by a novel? Life is big. — ff0

Sure they have.

I know. It was a rhetorical question. The point is that scientism (as distinct from science) ignores all of this. It's all 'really' quarks, etc. This 'really' is metaphysical for scientism in a way that it doesn't admit. They can have a ball with that. But I can have a ball picking my own horse and arguing with you about it. (This is my idea of fun.)

Another example: Neil deGrasse Tyson. He's a pretty lovable guy. But even a brilliant man like that doesn't get 'why is there something rather than nothing?' I sort of get it. Lots of religious types themselves think that this is quasi-scientific question, for which they have a quasi-scientific answer --God as hidden object. Both sides are obsessed with 'junk' they can be correct and certain about.

On what merit? That they get things done? I agree. But that's a pragmatic foundation, a vague foundation, an 'irrational' or inexplicit foundation. — ff0

Scientific theories require no justification nor foundation, as if any such thing were possible. They are the last idea standing after they have withstood all the criticism we are capable of subjecting them to.

Their merit lies in that they have survived as our best explanations as to what constitutes reality, how reality behaves, and why it does so.

But I also don't pretend that various prediction and control technologies are 'highest' things. — ff0

Not sure what that means, but I have a vague inkling that no one really does that.