If you have a good argument that all continental philosophy is worthless, incoherent nonsense perhaps you should start a thread on the topic rather than throwing spitballs at me. — fdrake
Because a well reasoned attack on continental philosophy would be a good thread and stronger support for your position than simply antagonising me. — fdrake
It was just an off-the-cuff comment above, obviously meant in jest. — Terrapin Station
For me this is a good sketch of the futility of taking categories like 'realist' or 'idealist' seriously. Their quasi-timeless content offers only a bare suggestion. I need to scan quite a few paragraphs of a poster on this forum, for instance, to even begin to learn his/her somewhat-private language as a 'system' or whole --the only way science/knowledge does (and not merely 'ought' to) exist. In the real world we do this all the time. We meet personalities as personalities, 'systems' grokking 'systems' as systems in order to make sense of this or that emission against a background understanding which is crucial. The naked result is almost nothing without its history/context. It cannot trap all the meaning that led up to a pithy summary. The summary is enjoyed (and meaning-rich) only after its engendering is repeated in the listener's mind (approximately repeated, since 'perfect' clarity is a ghost too quick for us.) — macrosoft
I think your reading of Hegel accurately reflects his method but also hints at how difficult it is to proceed in a manner that provides "the result along with the process of arriving at it. — Valentinus
That sounds great. I'm sorry I didn't pay more attention to that the first time around. I will def. check it out.The Gregory Bateson essay I mentioned earlier in this thread does a particularly good job at showing how "comparisons of differences" cannot be a reduction to a single scheme. — Valentinus
In trying to "grok" different systems, what is being discussed looks different if being understood as bringing something to an end, a last word that does need further thought, or as a directions on a map, suggesting we travel in a certain direction. — Valentinus
. Even in After Finitude things get exceptionally chaotic. I dislike that in untethering time from experiential temporality through the arche-fossil argument he also untethers becoming from forming stable structures. But I think the arche-fossil stands alone as an excellent argument against a strict dependence of being upon an observer situated within it. — fdrake
Maybe read a philosopher who isnt just a big mishmash of gobbledygook instead. :joke: — Terrapin Station
This science has sought refuge among the Germans and survived only among them; we have been given custody of this sacred light, and it is our vocation to tend and nurture it, and to ensure that the highest [thing] which man can possess, namely the self-consciousness of his essential being, is not extinguished and lost.[11] But even in Germany, the banality of that earlier time before the country’s rebirth had gone so far as to believe and assert that it had discovered and proved that there is no cognition of truth, and that God and the essential being of the world and the spirit are incomprehensible and unintelligible. Spirit [, it was alleged,] should stick to religion, and religion to faith, feeling, and intuition [Ahnen] without rational knowledge.[12] Cognition [, it was said,] has nothing to do with the nature of the absolute (i.e. of God, and what is true and absolute in nature and spirit), but only, on the one hand, with the negative [conclusion] that nothing true can be recognized, and that only the untrue, the temporal, and the transient enjoy the privilege, so to speak, of recognition – and on the other hand, with its proper object, the external (namely the historical, i.e. the contingent circumstances in which the alleged or supposed cognition made its appearance); and this same cognition should be taken as [merely] historical, and examined in those external aspects [referred to above] in a critical and learned manner, whereas its content cannot be taken seriously.[13] They [i.e. the philosophers in question] got no further than Pilate, the Roman proconsul; for when he heard Christ utter the word ‘truth,’ he replied with the question ‘what is truth?’ in the manner of one who had had enough of such words and knew that there is no cognition of truth. Thus, what has been considered since time immemorial as utterly contemptible and unworthy – i.e. to renounce the knowledge of truth – was glorified before[103] our time as the supreme triumph of the spirit. Before it reached this point, this despair in reason had still been accompanied by pain and melancholy; but religious and ethical frivolity, along with that dull and superficial view of knowledge which described itself as Enlightenment, soon confessed its impotence frankly and openly, and arrogantly set about forgetting higher interests completely; and finally, the so-called critical philosophy provided this ignorance of the eternal and divine with a good conscience, by declaring that it [i.e. the critical philosophy] had proved that nothing can be known of the eternal and the divine, or of truth. This supposes cognition has even usurped the name of philosophy, and nothing was more welcome to superficial knowledge and to [those of] superficial character, and nothing was so eagerly seized upon by them, than this doctrine, which described this very ignorance, this superficiality and vapidity, as excellent and as the goal and result of all intellectual endeavor. — Hegel
Staying away from the continentalists is a good idea in general. :yum: — Terrapin Station
Will you agree that at least Hegel is clear in the above? — macrosoft
scientific inquiry is necessarily reductive. — fdrake
At this point, imagine that one of these sophisticated readers is a hobbyist digging for dinosaur fossils and they find one! Great luck! Unfortunately, things which predate the coupling of subject and being are not good for an ontology which necessitates their coupling. In one sense, the correlationist says, the dinosaur fossil predates humanity - in another, more profound sense, it does not; all interactions with it generate interpretations which are derivative of our phenomenological condition. The fossil appears as prior to the suture between the subject and being only because it is already within that suture as one of its interactions.
Which is rather strange, is it not? Something which predates the very coupling of human subjects and our world is nevertheless denied expression of its being until we come along and save the day; allowing the universe to 'talk to itself' in the only register fit to recognise its dynamics, the thoughts, speech and words of humanity. — fdrake
Will you agree that at least Hegel is clear in the above? — macrosoft
the highest [thing] which man can possess, namely the self-consciousness of his essential being, is not extinguished and lost.... — Hegel
Whatever I experience I experience as an idea in my mind. I assume that this idea is caused by an object in the external world. However, I can never experience this object itself since this object is by definition independent of my experience.
In other words, it is impossible to perceive an unperceived object by definition.
That is really illuminating and useful post, thank you. — Wayfarer
, a profound shift in the human conception of itself. — Wayfarer
humans lived in a 'I-thou' relationship with God; the sense of 'otherness' to the world which becomes so pronounced in modernity, the sense of being accidental by-products of a mindless process, couldn't even have been conceived. That was a major reason why the transition to modernity was so wrenching. — Wayfarer
Post-Enlightenment, man becomes, instead of imago dei, simply another species thrown up by 'the accidental collocation of atoms' (in Russell's memorable phrase). A 'stranger in a strange land', so to speak. — Wayfarer
That doesn't refute anything. Not that I'm an idealist of course, but that doesn't refute it. Neither idealism nor realism are refutable. It's just a matter of whether we have good reasons to buy one framework or the other. — Terrapin Station
This is an outright contradiction. If we have good reason to hold one is sure over another, then we are dealing with refutable positions. By the measure of truth, having a reason to select one potion over another involves some sort of refutation of an opposing position. — TheWillowOfDarkness
Personally I think it's a mess — Terrapin Station
ust for one example, "the "self-consciousness of his essential being"? First off, essentialism is muddle-headed in general. — Terrapin Station
It is self-evident that owing to the needs of the “system” he very often had to resort to those forced constructions about which his pigmy opponents make such a terrible fuss even today. But these constructions are only the frame and scaffolding of his work. If one does not loiter here needlessly, but presses on farther into the immense building, one finds innumerable treasures which today still possess undiminished value. With all philosophers it is precisely the “system” which is perishable; and for the simple reason that it springs from an imperishable desire of the human mind — the desire to overcome all contradictions. — Engels
Secondly, what does "self" add there that "consciousness" without the "self" modifier wouldn't do just as well? And what is "consciousness of his being" saying, really, anyway? It seems like a needlessly rococo way of just talking about consciousness or awareness period. — Terrapin Station
But precisely therein lay the true significance and the revolutionary character of the Hegelian philosophy (to which, as the close of the whole movement since Kant, we must here confine ourselves), that it once and for all dealt the death blow to the finality of all product of human thought and action. Truth, the cognition of which is the business of philosophy, was in the hands of Hegel no longer an aggregate of finished dogmatic statements, which, once discovered, had merely to be learned by heart. Truth lay now in the process of cognition itself, in the long historical development of science, which mounts from lower to ever higher levels of knowledge without ever reaching, by discovering so-called absolute truth, a point at which it can proceed no further, where it would have nothing more to do than to fold its hands and gaze with wonder at the absolute truth to which it had attained. And what holds good for the realm of philosophical knowledge holds good also for that of every other kind of knowledge and also for practical action. Just as knowledge is unable to reach a complete conclusion in a perfect, ideal condition of humanity, so is history unable to do so; a perfect society, a perfect “state”, are things which can only exist in imagination. On the contrary, all successive historical systems are only transitory stages in the endless course of development of human society from the lower to the higher. Each stage is necessary, and therefore justified for the time and conditions to which it owes its origin. But in the face of new, higher conditions which gradually develop in its own womb, it loses vitality and justification. It must give way to a higher stage which will also in its turn decay and perish. Just as the bourgeoisie by large-scale industry, competition, and the world market dissolves in practice all stable time-honored institutions, so this dialectical philosophy dissolves all conceptions of final, absolute truth and of absolute states of humanity corresponding to it. For it [dialectical philosophy], nothing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the transitory character of everything and in everything; nothing can endure before it except the uninterrupted process of becoming and of passing away, of endless ascendancy from the lower to the higher. And dialectical philosophy itself is nothing more than the mere reflection of this process in the thinking brain. It has, of course, also a conservative side; it recognizes that definite stages of knowledge and society are justified for their time and circumstances; but only so far. The conservatism of this mode of outlook is relative; its revolutionary character is absolute — the only absolute dialectical philosophy admits. — Engels
I don't want to spend time and the thousands of words it would take to address the whole thing in that way, but it all has problems in that vein. — Terrapin Station
If we have good reason to hold one is sure over another
Meillassoux's position is pretty understandable in the context of radical contingency. Since he holds any logically possible state can occur, including ones which violate what would seem to be established rules of reality, there is no limit to possible events except a logical contradiction.
Resurrection is not a logical contradiction. Tomorrow, the bodies in a graveyard might blink to the surface and be reconstituted as living. All it involves is a movement of bodies and a change in their status. Since there is no correlationist rule which constrains the behaviour of finite states, it's possible dead bodies could reappear living tomorrow. — TheWillowOfDarkness
I don't think a conception of literature as a kind of overarching science is really supportable, because literature, unlike science, is a phenomenological exercise on the affective and/or descriptive, rather than the analytic, side; — Janus
but only if you think the practice of system-building that aspires to grand syntheses is really a worthwhile endeavour apart form whatever aesthetic value it may create. — Janus
I am suspicious of the value of a certain kind of system-building, but then I also think we move toward coherence 'automatically.' — macrosoft
Sure, but the difference is that science is not about anyone's opinion; whereas literature and philosophy most certainly are predominately about people's opinions.
That is the divide along which the contrast between objectivity and subjectivity runs. — Janus
Philosophical systems are generally systems of opinion which purport to plug as many holes as possible; and I don't think it is arguable that philosophy, or humans generally, outside of science, or absent the benefit of science, move towards any coherence, i.e. settled opinion. — Janus
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