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.

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

Perhaps I should do that because?

What is the grounds for the suggestion?

Because a well reasoned attack on continental philosophy would be a good thread and stronger support for your position than simply antagonising me.

Because a well reasoned attack on continental philosophy would be a good thread and stronger support for your position than simply antagonising me. — fdrake

For one, I'm not of the opinion that it's some unified project (continental philosophy) that can be attacked as if it is. It's that contingently, the works that conventionally fall under that banner are poorly written, poorly reasoned, etc.

That's not to let analytic philosophy off the hook, necessarily. There's plenty of crap there, too. But at least it tends to be much more clearly written and reasoned crap.

It was just an off-the-cuff comment above, obviously meant in jest. You wanted to argue about it, so I don't mind arguing about it.

It was just an off-the-cuff comment above, obviously meant in jest. — Terrapin Station

Well then, I'm sorry for lumping you in with every other joking dismissal of continental philosophy as 'fashionable nonsense'. I'm glad that you have some amount of appreciation for it.

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."
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.
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 directions on a map, suggesting we travel in a certain direction.

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

Thanks for the reply. Yes, it is difficult, isn't it? And then existence is always underway, unfinished, further clarifying itself, including the how of this clarification -- such as Hegel seeing the emptiness of slapping on minimally in-formed predicates.

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

That sounds great. I'm sorry I didn't pay more attention to that the first time around. I will def. check it out.

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

Beautiful way to put it.

. 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

If you feel like expanding on that first idea, I'm all ears. I do think the arche-fossil argument is valuable, and I agree that it doesn't make sense to make being dependent on the observer. And I enjoyed your reply generally. Thanks.

Here's a thread which you may or may not feel like picking up with me:

One of the charms/problems of AF is its dependence on Cantor's work. Now Cantor's work is beautiful, but constructing a metaphysics on it maybe takes mathematical foundations for granted. Clearly one can prove the existence of uncountable sets, but one is thrown back on the issue of how such sets exist. IMV, there is certainly a strong intuitive component operating in math, but its epistemology is more formal and machine like. Proofs can be checked by computers and recognized as proofs without anyone finding 'meaning' in them. The computable numbers have measure zero, which means that most real numbers exist only as background that can never be foregrounded. In one sense this is unnerving. In another sense it is the perfect metaphor for that dark place from which we listen --that 'global' know-how which we cannot make fully explicit (the possession of a language that moves through existential time.) Another mathematical metaphor for this global would be artificial neural networks (unsurprisingly, since they are inspired by actual neural networks.) The 'distributedness' of meaning is what I have in mind, with a special focus on its spread 'over' time, as I think you already grasp.

Maybe read a philosopher who isnt just a big mishmash of gobbledygook instead. :joke: — Terrapin Station

Ha. Well I understand your frustration. Some of Hegel doesn't seem worth the candle. On the other hand, his actual lectures (which were hugely popular) are quite approachable. His Lectures on Fine Art, while a little abstract, are especially profound. His book on history is also considered a relatively concrete introduction to his system. I have Kaufmann's translation of the famous preface. While a few lines are still obscure to me (I don't claim to grasp Hegel as Hegel grasped Hegel), much of it is comprehensible right away and some of it becomes more comprehensible on rereading.

And the difficultly of interpreting Hegel relates to my central theme of holism. One slowly gets a sense not only of Hegel's basic grasp of existence but also of the feeling he had about it that motivated him to share it. Occasionally he gave speeches to the general public. These especially reveal his motivation, which puts his entire project in the context of his sense of himself and of philosophy.

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

Will you agree that at least Hegel is clear in the above?

I realize that you may not grasp philosophy as he does (quasi-religiously but intensely humanistic). I just provide an example of how clearly he can speak or write at times. The above only indicates a general direction. For him 'positive content' and not just a general direction (the absolute as inarticulate feeling) is a big theme. Sometimes he seems too thorough, especially in the light of 20th cent. insights about language. But on the whole he is a profound personality.

Staying away from the continentalists is a good idea in general. :yum: — Terrapin Station

I know you're joking, but really the continentals are the good stuff, the exciting stuff. Yes, some of them are ridiculous at time. Yes, they encourage some puffed-up nonsense at times in their readers. But on the other end of the spectrum (an opposite vision of philosophy) there are 'neckbeards,' who are methodologically stupid. A perfect example of over-correcting the indulgence often perceived in cont. phil. is the objectivism of randroids. A vague conception of rationality is presupposed as an absolute. One ends up with a 'religion' of the word 'reason' that simply flees from criticism that doesn't already accept the very presuppositions and initial understanding of this 'reason' it seeks to clarify or criticize. So objectivists have their own forums, since they don't know how to play well with others.

I'd say that radical criticism (reason at its most active) is always going to be unintelligible at first, precisely because it strikes at what is taken for granted, which has silently and invisibility operating as 'beyond question,' or rather not even available for questioning, because not till then 'disclosed.' Such disclosure is not the result of argument but rather of 'formal indication' or phenomenological 'pointing.' If this sounds suspect at first, I understand. But it's hard to avoid if one starts asking what arguments are about.

A note on 'continental' versus 'analytic' philosophy, which invites a reply from anyone:

First these categories are already cartoons. But even the routine cartoonish intelligibility of chatter has a positive content, by which I mean that, however crude that distinction it is, it has some 'initial' meaning.

I think this is best explored in terms of the wideness or narrowness of one's image of philosophy. For instance, does one find Dostoevsky adjacent to philosophy? Is philosophy adjacent to or even entangled with and inseparable from literature? Or is philosophy a far more specialized disciplined, a science of science, propositions about propositions, which is best professionalized and pursued as more adjacent to STEM than literature?

Either position is defensible, though I am strongly in the first camp. Is this because I don't love science as much as I love literature? No. Instead I think literature falls within some higher concept of science with seeks to clarify our existence as a whole, including not only the traditional sciences but also their relationship to the rest of existence and their foundations. And this higher 'science' (in grandiose terms 'Science') will (no surprise) look into own foundations, perhaps as its most radical or essential activity. Such foundations will include motive and an investigation of meaning itself, insofar as such a ting is possible --and into how such a thing 'is' possible or impossible. If this sounds dangerous 'subjective' or 'phenomenological,' I think it is indeed. Now doubt narrower conceptions of science are more exoteric and reliable. But if we stick with the exoteric, then philosophy's traditional question for a wider science in the context of a 'spiritual' passion will just continue to exist under a different name. In some sense man 'is' metaphysics, which is an indulgent way of saying that maybe the quest to clarity and question existence is 'essentially' human. Even if we reserve the word 'philosophy' for an exoteric (reliably intelligible) self-consciousness of natural science, we will in fact as individuals do that other kind of esoteric or suspicious philosophy. Whether one encourages or discourages the public version of this 'private' clarification of existence is presumably a function of that private clarification. If 'Hegel is rot,' this is not only about Hegel but perhaps especially about he who says it (and I understand the suspicion of ambiguity, which is a hard-won suspicion that has proved itself in experience.) This paragraph of mine is, I suppose, an example of 'cont. philosophy,' since it traces distinctions back to a wider context, into their perhaps dispersed and only imperfectly graspable foundations. It is motivated by suspicion's counter-passion, which is to say curiosity. But it is also an elaboration of that same suspicion what has finally got around to questioning itself (not quite right, but I'm trying.)

Much more can be said far more eloquently, I'm sure.

Will you agree that at least Hegel is clear in the above? — macrosoft

Personally I think it's a mess Pretty much every phrase there is problematic. Just for one example, "the "self-consciousness of his essential being"? First off, essentialism is muddle-headed in general. 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.

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.

scientific inquiry is necessarily reductive. — fdrake

That is really illuminating and useful post, thank you. I had read one or two papers from Meillassoux in years past, mainly due to promptings from this or the earlier forum, but I think that is an excellent synopsis.

The rejection of scholastic metaphysics and the crumbling of the ptolmaic cosmology and the associated imaginary domains, coincided with, and were also responsible for, a profound shift in the human conception of itself. I think that in In medieval epistemology, the subject-object distinction is never made explicit, because ultimately in that milieu, 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. 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.

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

You know the etymology of 'world' is Old English w(e)oruld, from a Germanic compound meaning ‘age of man’; related to Dutch wereld and German Welt .

The connotation is relevant!

It doesn't mean, as the quote I provided above says, that the Universe sprang into existence only when it became perceived; what I think it means is that, any coherent or meaningful statement about what is real, always must include or assume the existence of an observing mind, which synthesises all of the data and percepts into a meaningful whole within which the statement about the reality of anything is real. And this manifold of perceptions, judgements, and so on, is what constitutes 'the world'. But that is a philosophical, not a scientific, observation - science assumes the reality of a mind-independent world, which it can safely do. It's only when it then treats that as a metaphysical principle, and not a methodological assumption, that the problems begin! (And that is quite compatible with Kant's declaration that one can be both an empirical realist and a transcendental idealist, for which see this blog post.)

I am almost in agreement with Berkeley's philosophy, although I don't accept his nominalism.

Will you agree that at least Hegel is clear in the above? — macrosoft

That is a great passage, and has so much in it, you could write a term paper on it.
But this phrase here:

the highest [thing] which man can possess, namely the self-consciousness of his essential being, is not extinguished and lost.... — Hegel

I think refers to what Maritain would later refer to as the 'intuition of being' - which, I think, has considerable parallels with the notion of 'divine illumination' or 'spiritual enlightenment' - something that has indeed become 'extinguished and lost' in the Western tradition, for various complex and deep-seated reason. There, Hegel is showing his mystical side, which was unfortunately to become obscured by his enormous verbosity. And that is one respect in which I think Kant was lacking; I don't think he had that breakthrough into the sense of 'mystical union' which is what I think Maritain means by the 'intuition of being'.

(You might enjoy this OP on Hegel's conception of God in Philosophy NOW, which has many resonances for me. Also, I've been meaning to read Dermot Moran on Idealism in Scotus Eriugena and its influence on German idealism here).

I'm really confused about this whole thread. "Unperceived object" is not a contradiction in terms (does anyone really think that???).

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.

I'm not a direct realist but a direct realist (because some kind of faulty representationalism is clearly the case) would surely laugh at this and say you're just defining your way to victory and then thinking you've found a novel truth. Literally anyone can do this and it's a shitty argument in any context. "X is the case because I've defined the crucial terms Y & Z in such a way that they entail X". That only works if everyone agrees on how to define the terms. If they don't agree on those then it clearly doesn't follow. So this:

In other words, it is impossible to perceive an unperceived object by definition.

Give the definition and see if it's actually impossible. I'm willing to bet the definition is not so clear that a reasonable alternative can't be given to avoid the apparently irrefutable conclusion.

You cover a lot of ground there, Wayfarer.
Without making an argument about anything else, one element Robert Wallace did not touch upon in his interesting article is how the "self-consciousness" that is being discussed developed through interactions between other "self-consciousnesses." The primal events Hegel is looking for in his Phenomenology of Spirit is an argument about why things are the way they are but also the introduction of a new way to represent experience. By way of example, Kierkegaard argues against aspects of the psychology being introduced but also writes Sickness Unto Death which uses the same dynamic of a consciousness going through changes when they encounter unavoidable problems. Marx is an example of someone who took the dynamic in a different direction.
If Kierkegaard and Marx are in the same lobby in another plane of existence, I bet the only thing they agree on regarding the works of Hegel is that Berkeley has withdrawn from the field of battle.

That is really illuminating and useful post, thank you. — Wayfarer

Thanks for saying so.

, a profound shift in the human conception of itself. — Wayfarer

That makes sense, but I would add that the feel of the conception is essential here. I'd say that our grasp of ourselves is only 'only conceptual' when strive to nail it down with words.

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

That sounds plausible to me, and I think the word 'sense' is appropriate. As I've been exploring in other posts, one way to understand the modern worldview is the sense of nature of a dead machine, and that's how I sense it, 'pre-theoretically,' having grown up in this culture. I think that young adults have to repeat this process of being wrenched. Capitalism echoes nature as dead machine, too. The young adult feels himself within a machine within a machine, with the inner machine wanting only his work and the outer machine not wanting him at all. I don't at all think that this modern worldview is simply bad or good. It's a change. It closes some possibilities and open others. It can be viewed in terms of 'true' adulthood in that the alienated orphan becomes his own parent. But this orphaned adult has paid for grand interiority with the loss of a dominant public sense of what it all means, assuming that the orphan doesn't fall apart while constructing a personal meaning from the chaos of meanings available in the first place.

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

Indeed. But I'd say that his sensing himself a stranger in a strange land is possible through other means too. 'Philosophy begins in wonder.' Is there terror in wonder? In some shades I think so. But other senses of wonder perhaps come with a sense of familiarity and trust. I mention this because 'strange land' reminds me of both terror and wander.

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. We reject it because we have good reason to think it is false. Having good reasons to take a position literally means some type of refutation is in play. Else our reasons are not reasons at all. They are just a preference.

You are putting no effort into thinking about the subject. In the face of the positions in question, you've just thrown your hands up and just said we cannot know anything. You're just repeating popular aphorisms about mystery. Why would the independence of objects by something we could never know?

The reason logical independence refutes idealism is because it shows other things are not logically given by experience. An object doesn't to require experience of it to exist. What we might call the empirical veil, our inability to confirm empirical states outside moments of observation, does not affect independence.

Can we confirm a tree is still there when we turn our head away? We cannot. But this does not create dependency relation between the tree and the presence of our experience. In terms of the state present, there might still be a tree (since we cannot observe it, we cannot say it must be absent) or there might be an absence of a tree. Either way, the state exists even if we a not observing. It's existence is not dependent on the presence of our experience.

The form of idealism referred to in this thread (which is not even Berkeley's) confuses our confirmation of an empirical event for the existence of an empirical event. It commits the category error of my experience observing a tree for the existence of a tree.

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

I don't think that's the case. We may well have good reasons for accepting realism (or idealism) without that position being proven. Having a good reason to believe X is not equivalent with establishing that X is the case. Justification and truth are not the same concept. So it's not a contradiction.

I think atheism is a view I have good reasons for holding. That doesn't mean I've proven no gods exist.

Personally I think it's a mess — Terrapin Station

I respect that, and appreciate your sincere answer.

ust for one example, "the "self-consciousness of his essential being"? First off, essentialism is muddle-headed in general. — Terrapin Station

IMV, if I can be equally honest, this is you reading your concerns into what for me is pretty clear. His essential being is the most important aspect of his being. It's more about value in this context. You do touch on some of my own reservations about Hegel. He opposed himself to religion based on feeling alone and needed concepts to be clearer than I think they really are. And then there is this way of looking at it:

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

As Hegel himself stresses in his preface, the 'naked result' is worthless. IMV, his portrait of the historical evolution of self-consciousness is central. And this is already in his critique of prefaces (bare results compared to bare results.) Consciousness is like a snowball rolling down a snowy hill, becoming bigger and more complex, more aware, for instance, of its own role in what it perceives. Error, for Hegel, is necessary. The truth is not ignorance of error but made of error. It is an unfinished syntheses of errors that each try to fix the preceding error. He interpreted the history of philosophy philosophically not as some random scattering of idiosyncratic worldviews but as an essentially connected thinking spanning generations that finally (in Hegel, for instance) became conscious of itself as this sort of thing. One might say that he 'unflattened' time, or saw through a simple vision of time as being space-like. I have the sense that lots of Hegel is 'common sense' for us now. A more qualified individual might be able to make a case that he even popularized a certain conception of Progress.


This is one take on that:

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

Note that Engels is already changing Hegel here. For Hegel, the process does attain some kind of stable self-consciousness (or that's a common understanding of his view.) The Left-Hegelians took this or that aspect of Hegel and ran with it. Feuerbach kept some of it and fused it with the sensual and the emotional, becoming something like a Nietzsche-before-Nietzsche critic of philosophy as still-too-metaphysical. 'The true religion is no religion. The true philosophy is no philosophy.' And for Feuerbach concepts had to address what was non-conceptual, philosophy what was resistant in man to philosophy.

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

I still maintain that you are losing the forest in the trees here. IMV, you are zooming in on individual phrases you find objectionable in terms of AP concerns that didn't exist then (linguistic self-consciousness exploded in 20th cent. philosophy it seems, for AP and cont. philosophy). You do not at all respond to the big picture of Hegel's motives or thrust or direction (either to approve or disapprove.) You have every right to respond as you see fit, but I do think it's an uncharitable reading.

That's true, but then you are shifting from "good reasons" in terms of truth, to "good reasons" in terms of normatively or preference, as per my comment. They aren't good reason in terms of the truth being discussed.

More importantly, these normative good reasons are independently defined to truth based good reasons. The former doesn't make the latter false. Someone might, for example, have good normative reasons for believing in a god, even when there aren't good reasons in terms of truth (which is the case for most claims of god because they propose a refutable empirical claim).

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.

I'm not sure I follow. You yourself said:

If we have good reason to hold one is sure over another

which is surely about whether or not we have good reason to believe something. So we're surely talking about justification in believing something to be the case not about preference. But that's not truth then, clearly. And unless I'm much mistaken, when Terrapin says neither realism nor idealism are refutable he's talking about the truth of which is the case. They might well accept your reasons as more... reasonable in believing realism, but still hold it's not determinative in settling the debate (or even that the debate cannot be settled to the required level to call one side refuted).

Am I missing your point?

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

Yes, I do grant that he makes a clever argument for that. My objection would be that this is finally like 'maybe we are all brains in a vat.' After all his anti-faith talk in AF, he presents the same old object of faith--a denial of mortality and 'real' injustice. Personal death and the crude unfairness existing in life if not illusions are at least possibly all fixable, according to a creative argument that depends on Cantorian mathematics. Recall that Cantor caused a war in the foundations of math once. This is not the solidest of foundations. And his arguments are generally pretty delicate, fragile, even on the edge of sophistic.

Moreover he dodges 'Heideggarian' concerns about how mathematics exists for us. There is also the problem of meaning beneath any adoption of arguments.

He calls his God the non-existence of God (to oversimplify). Don't get me wrong. He's fascinating.

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; it is more concerned with human experience as opposed to the natural world per se, or even human culture and behavior per se. Philosophical literature may be thought to be an exceptional case; 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.

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

I don't have literature alone in mind as that kind of 'Science.' Instead I might say that we 'live' this 'Science' already as we make sense of our existence in terms of literature, philosophy, and science simultaneously. While careers split us up in specialties, we operate as entire personalities in all realms at once, though of course with different intensities of care and its attendant skill.

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.

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.' So perhaps the issue is whether we think we can get this coherence in an ideal 'object language' constructed from within the wider context of the 'metalanguage.' This 'metalanguage' would be our full range of speaking and listening intelligibly. If we find this 'full range' untrustworthy for various reasons, we might try to restrict ourselves to an object language where ordinary words are given fixed meanings and neologisms are built from these fixed meanings as if from bricks. Of course I think this approach is not terribly promising and mostly argue against it.

I am suspicious of the value of a certain kind of system-building, but then I also think we move toward coherence 'automatically.' — macrosoft

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 apart from the benefit of science, move towards any coherence, i.e. settled opinion.

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

In Heideggarian jargon, we might say that science is exactly about Anyone's opinions. The time of science is the time of the clock. Of course I love science and work in science, and indeed it is far more objective in some important sense. But I wouldn't be so fast to charge literature with utter subjectivity. I'd say it's phenomenological in some ways. We might say that science is grounded on entities that are already publicly and explicitly revealed. For instance, it is not at all the case that most people know enough calculus to really do science, but we all understand what it is to repeat an experiment. We understand what it is to measure. We understand what it is to predict something definite so that correctness or incorrectness is sufficiently clear. This requires the use of language and a basic knowhow for getting around in the world. Science would not be intelligible without this knowhow. Science asks for the bare minimum of phenomenological revelation. Literary greatness is elitist phenomenologically --as well as being dangerously non-neutral along those lines. But there is inter-subjectivity available there, perhaps no more mysterious and unjustied than that in the perception of furniture, except for this 'elitism' or diminished accessibility. In more mundane terms, people agree that certain TV shows are great (high art.) They perceive something in common, an elusive greatness. Perhaps we could say that science is grounded in the most reliable kind of intersubjectivit, and that there is something like a continuum.

Its 'methodical shallowness' was a stroke of genius (Galileo and the chandelier, his hand on his wrist.) . Forget 'why' things move and describe how they move. This may encourage a forgetfulness of how they are more generally present for us, but it's so practically effective that I'm not about to complain. I'm only hesitating to identify objectivity with science without further consideration.

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

I wouldn't personally identity coherence with settled opinion. I'd think more in terms of the walk matching the talk. Or of a life on earth that makes more sense. It [this life] isn't jarring. The system purrs. If there are contradictions (as I think there must be whenever we demand a certain explicitness) then they aren't dominant or incapacitating or the cause of much distress.