In summary, philosophers start from their sensibility and project this onto an phantom exteriority. Yet is has not been shown that meaning has any reality beyond sensibility, nor that sensibility carves the limits of reality. It has not been shown that humans have the right to form beliefs about the world. It has not been shown that humans are in positions of observation. It has not been demonstrated that demonstrations are reliable indicators of Truth. — darthbarracuda
Darth
I love your post! Seriously... even if it is a bit narcissistic? — Marcus de Brun
However we humans are united in our humanity and we are united in our physiological interface with 'phantom reality'. In this sense there may well be ONE truth that may well be arrived at by the process of (human) deductive reasoning. — Marcus de Brun
Yet it has not been shown that truth has any relation to what makes sense to a person. — darthbarracuda
Nietzsche — Marcus de Brun
This is an obscene act of auto-fellatio. — darthbarracuda
I have little interest in discovering TRUTH. TRUTH is imaginary, but there are truths about x that we can discover. — Bitter Crank
Philosophy is an anthropocentric narcissism of the highest magnitude that entails an exceptional view of the power of reason. To hold any theoretical belief is to assert that one has a special place in nature, a privileged position concocted by the illusions called "knowledge" and "understanding". — darthbarracuda
But neither he, nor they, have had any inkling of Sophia in my book. Cast your mind back to the Greeks - the things they were able to conceive of and develop, due to the power of reason, ought to astound you. — Wayfarer
Philosophy is an anthropocentric narcissism of the highest magnitude that entails an exceptional view of the power of reason. To hold any theoretical belief is to assert that one has a special place in nature, a privileged position concocted by the illusions called "knowledge" and "understanding". — darthbarracuda
Yet it has not been shown that "understanding" has any relation to truth. — darthbarracuda
-- are reasonable objections to a certain sort of philosophy that I too hate (e.g. Continental Rationalism and huge swaths of analytic philosophy), but not, as you assert, philosophy as a whole; that is, not philosophy as a practice or as the whole history of a tradition.Reality is forcibly coerced into reason, subjugated by the ambitions of a finite being whose narcissism tells him that reality can be "understood", and that the limits of his faculties forms the limits of the world itself. — darthbarracuda
Socrates seems to me to have accomplished little beyond his kamikaze mission to destroy his own bodily existence while hastening the collapse of Athenian society — John Doe
I think there could be something to be said about the "spirit" of philosophy and its history. A. W. Moore calls the history of (modern) metaphysics as a history of sense-making. There is something noble and, as Descartes and Husserl (et al) noticed, an ethical dimension to the philosophical endeavor. That individuals have a duty to hold rational, well-informed beliefs is a core aspect of the philosophical spirit that differentiates it from rhetoric, sophistry or even science. It is this part of the philosophical spirit that I love, where nothing is held to be so sacred as to be beyond questioning. — darthbarracuda
Philosophy is used to banish evil ideas, solipsism, relativism, skepticism, "nihilism", etc. — darthbarracuda
There is something noble and, as Descartes and Husserl (et al) noticed, an ethical dimension to the philosophical endeavor. But yes, I am less concerned with other forms of philosophy here than I am with others, you are correct about this. When speaking of philosophy I have in mind a certain kind of philosophy rather than "philosophy" in the abstract. Anti-philosophy is still philosophy, etc etc. I have in mind philosophers who evidently see philosophy as some kind of grand narrative that almost ought to be worshiped, its traditional problems as of utmost importance. Philosophy is used to banish evil ideas, solipsism, relativism, skepticism, "nihilism", etc. — darthbarracuda
It's significant to me that we have no clear foundation for knowledge and that at the end of the day we really just have to hope that certain things are true. — darthbarracuda
I think the general skepticism of this thread has not ever been refuted but simply passed by because there are "more important" things to do. — darthbarracuda
:sad: — Wayfarer
I guarantee you that if you name any conceivable interpretation of Heidegger I will find you a published author who has proposed it. — Pseudonym
There's a value in showing how the angst that the 'big' philosophical questions can cause can be dissolved by proposing that they are mostly just linguistic misunderstandings, and lots of philosophy attempts to do that. — Pseudonym
"...their doctrine is self-contradictory, and therefore must be false."
"...the thought of there being an unutterable kind of truth that ‘makes itself manifest’. Hence the key paragraph 6.522 in the Tractatus:
“There are indeed things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.”
In other words, there is a categorically different kind of truth from that which we can state in empirically or logically verifiable propositions. These different truths fall on the other side of the demarcation line of the principle of verification."
“6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value – and if there were, it would be of no value. If there is value which is of value, it must lie outside of all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental. It must lie outside the world.”
In other words, all worldly actions and events are contingent (‘accidental’), but matters of value are necessarily so, for they are ‘higher’ or too important to be accidental, and so must be outside the world of empirical propositions:
"There is simply no objective truth to be had about a judgement of value. So it would be extremely odd if the values – be they moral, aesthetic, religious, or whatever – that manifest themselves to us as individuals were to be the same for everybody."
“There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical” (6.522). None of these sayings could possibly be interpreted as the views of a man who had renounced metaphysics.
the fact that metaphysical propositions cannot be meaningfully analysed in an inter-subjective sense does not make them "nonsense", but it does make them a very specific category of proposition which is rarely how they are treated. — Pseudonym
The one entirely investigate-able and a fit topic for argumentative discourse, the other totally mystical, revealed only by it's existence (not by investigation) and not a fit topic for argumentative discourse. — Pseudonym
At no point does Wittgenstein refer to these values a 'higher' — Pseudonym
Furthermore because of this, any theoretical belief has to be dogmatic and narcissistic, because the person holds absolute trust in their own sense of reason. They trust themselves, they listen and heed their own voice of reason. They feel entitled to their opinion because it makes sense to them. But nowhere has anyone demonstrated that something making sense to you has any relationship with it being true. What is felt is what compels us to do things, but the experience of understanding could very well be only that, an experience and nothing more, signaling or meaning nothing beyond its immediate existence. "I understand" - but that literally means nothing but that you feel as if you understand. You have associated feeling a certain way with actually understanding and this has no necessary connection. There is no way of knowing at any given point in time whether what you think has any importance whatsoever. — darthbarracuda
In my profession I have cause to discuss matters with professional philosophers and almost exhaustively I've found them to be humble about their beliefs and accepting of their limited nature. Most published papers will use terminology like "it seems to me...", "I find X more persuasive because...", or "my feeling is that...". It's only places like this, where people are desperate to prove themselves that you will encounter the more dogmatic "so and so proves that...", "you've misunderstood what X means", "you don't know what you're talking about until you've read X..." etc. As I say, no academic philosopher I've ever met actually speak like that, but it seems entirely de rigueur here, and that's a disappointment. — Pseudonym
Nietzsche is just as valid a target of your argument as Kant, or Lewis. It doesn't matter what the target of his philosophical propositions were, nor the result of an 'understanding' of them, it is still your understanding of them, It is still monumentally narcissistic of Nietzsche to write (especially in such a obscure manner), with the intention that his understanding of the world (even Nihilistically), actually means anything other than as an insight into his own mental state. — Pseudonym
In terms of critiquing Philosophy, the effects are what is relevant, not the intentions. If the effect of the presentation of certain existential texts is that they are wielded as evidence in a pseudo-analytical project, then they are as guilty of misleading as the analyst. — Pseudonym
Again, this is more the case outside of academia where you here nonsense like "that's not Heidegger's point..." (which I read recently), like any of us actually have a clue what Heidegger's point actually is. I guarantee you that if you name any conceivable interpretation of Heidegger I will find you a published author who has proposed it. — Pseudonym
As I say, no academic philosopher I've ever met actually speak like that, but it seems entirely de rigueur here, and that's a disappointment. — Pseudonym
I'm personally convinced of the therapeutic interpretation of Wittgenstein's meta-philosophy (not necessarily convinced that that is what he intended, just convinced that it's right). I think there is value in philosophical propositions which aim to provide a story to help make personal sense of the world, and I think there is value in discussing these propositions in the way someone might try on clothes to see which they like. There's a value in showing how the angst that the 'big' philosophical questions can cause can be dissolved by proposing that they are mostly just linguistic misunderstandings, and lots of philosophy attempts to do that. — Pseudonym
Nietzsche is just as valid a target of your argument as Kant, or Lewis. It doesn't matter what the target of his philosophical propositions were, nor the result of an 'understanding' of them, it is still your understanding of them, It is still monumentally narcissistic of Nietzsche to write (especially in such a obscure manner), with the intention that his understanding of the world (even Nihilistically), actually means anything other than as an insight into his own mental state. — Pseudonym
I think that most of your concerns reflect the limitations of an internet forum. Faceless people quickly constructing written posts back-and-forth can come across as much ruder or more arrogant than they are in reality. I recently joined, and I am still fairly shocked at how obnoxious many of my posts read, but I don’t belive that this reveals anything significant about my character. (I hope not!) People come across strange in email too. — John Doe
If a philosopher is narcissistic because they claim to have insight into anything whatsoever other than their own mental state then there is a lot of ground we will have to cover, but I suspect that such an extreme position will not hold up to extended scrutiny. — John Doe
Do philosophers have to be so precise as to eliminate all possible misinterpretations? — John Doe
I suppose I just think that it’s fair game, if someone is critiquing Heidegger, to retort that they are criticizing a position they seem to be incorrectly ascribing to Heidegger, and to offer what one takes to be something closer to his actual position. — John Doe
In a sense, Nietzsche has spoken and I have listened and appropriated certain ideas into my own sense of life, meaning, etc. — darthbarracuda
as long as we recognize that these are just games and that they're inescapable in some sense, then skepticism is without a clear target. — darthbarracuda
Yes, this is how I like to treat philosophy, like a work of art, it either means something to you personally or it doesn't, but like art, there'll always be those who think that what it means to them had some universal applicability. Apparently most children have developed a theory of mind by the age of six, it seems in some fields it only lasts a few years before they abandon it. — Pseudonym
Yes, I too think skepticism can be defeated this way. I think extreme relativism can be defeated similarly, there's so much agreement as to the rules of the game that progress can still be made within broad parameters, it just gets problematic when we try to overstep the limits of inter-subjectivity. — Pseudonym
I don't know if you read different threads to me, but I think that's overly magnanimous. I'd rather your generous optimism than my bitter misanthropy but I'm struggling to see how you're interpreting the sort of statements we regularly get here as quirks of the format and not the narcissistic excesses anonymity encourages. — Pseudonym
the rejection of a priori knowledge (which, as I mentioned to Wayfarer) is what this is really about, — Pseudonym
If the only method of communicating some insight is so open to interpretation that virtually any conclusion could be drawn from reading it, then nothing had really been achieved by studying it. — Pseudonym
but what justification do we have for thinking ourselves more likely to find it by determining what Heidegger really meant than by simply following through whatever we think he means? — Pseudonym
But the overwhelming evidence from decades of investigation is that it cannot be established whether an interpretation is "closer to his actual position". — Pseudonym
Philosophy is an anthropocentric narcissism of the highest magnitude that entails an exceptional view of the power of reason. — darthbarracuda
To hold any theoretical belief is to assert that one has a special place in nature, a privileged position concocted by the illusions called "knowledge" and "understanding". — darthbarracuda
would it be accurate to describe yourself as broadly Kantian? Objectivity defined as inter-subjective agreement with an agnosticism to the nature of the noumena? — darthbarracuda
As Nietzsche observed, the greatest failure of philosophers is their lack of historicity. — darthbarracuda
I don't know if they are so much defeated, or refuted, as much as they are overcome. The theoretical attitude that skepticism draws from is a complex spurring from a more basic attunement to the "world". — darthbarracuda
I think it's not so much that I am more optimistic than you about the camaraderie on this forum than it is that I am far more pessimistic than you about the shockingly bad behavior of academic philosophers and theorists. This forum is far more cordial than the websites which cater to academics and graduate students. — John Doe
This strikes me as precisely the type of narrow position I agree with darth is wrong-headed. I have no problem with rejecting the notion of a priori knowledge. But this doesn't banish philosophy to mere knowledge of our own 'mental states' as you said, perhaps with an intentionally polemic tone. — John Doe
The same holds for art. Returning to an earlier analogy, someone might not understand or appreciate a Tarkovsky film because they lack any sense of film as art, and this says nothing about the film so much as the viewer. Or perhaps they have a sense of film but not for certain types of films. Roger Ebert, for example, criticizes a lot of films that became genuine classics because he failed to understand and appreciate them. But it would seem weird to say that it reflects negatively on these films because they were open to the sort of misinterpretation that gets articulated in Ebert's reviews. (Blue Velvet is not a misogynistic film about sexual fantasy, for example, but a very interesting and profound film which touches on many important themes. — John Doe
So yeah, I think you're right to draw the analogy with art. Just like art, there's a lot of judgements being made on entirely subjective levels masquerading as some measureable thing. — Pseudonym
Look at the thread currently running on the Tractatus, they can't get past the second proposition with becoming mired in uncertainty. — Pseudonym
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