So, my conclusion is that philosophy needs to differentiate of science, — Belter
In my view, it is "semantic" matter, or linguistic one in general.an exploration of the limitations of linguistic understanding and what language means beyond the colloquial use — I like sushi
Kant would not be agree that philosophy is contradictions free.pure human thought without any fallacies, prejudices, or contradictions — hks
Science works on assumptions (theoretical side). The prescribing role could be interesting. Some philosophical accounts have turned to psychological theories (e.g. the mental files theory of Perner, grounden in Frege`s semantic). But it is (theoretical) science after all.focused on critically examining assumptions that we make, as well as trying to describe, account for and occasionally prescribe things about the world based on abstract structural relations — Terrapin Station
Again, it is science. Science is not just to make experiments, but to design the experiments, which is often the claimed matter of philosophy, contrarily to the common view of philosophers.Philosophy is logical investigation which provides a coherent concept — Galuchat
Science works on assumptions (theoretical side). The prescribing role could be interesting. Some philosophical accounts have turned to psychological theories (e.g. the mental files theory of Perner, grounden in Frege`s semantic). But it is (theoretical) science after all. — Belter
Wittgenstein claimed that it is better does not talk about metaphysics, due to only the science language reflects truly the reality. — Belter
His work is opposed, as he once put it, to “the spirit which informs the vast stream of European and American civilisation in which all of us stand.” Nearly 50 years after his death, we can see, more clearly than ever, that the feeling that he was swimming against the tide was justified. If we wanted a label to describe this tide, we might call it “scientism,” the view that every intelligible question has either a scientific solution or no solution at all. It is against this view that Wittgenstein set his face.
from The Fundamental Concepts of MetaphysicsPerhaps [philosophy] cannot be determined as something else, but can be determined only from out of itself and as itself -- comparable with nothing else in terms of which it could be positively determined. In that case philosophy is something that stands on its own, something ultimate.
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We are always called upon by something as a whole. This 'as a whole' is the world...This is where we are driven in homesickness. Our very being is this restlessness. We have somehow always already departed toward this whole, or better, we are always already on the way to it. ...We ourselves are this underway, this transition, this 'neither the one nor the other.'
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Rather this urge to be at home everywhere is at the same time a seeking of those ways which open the right path for these questions. For this, in turn, we turn to the hammer of conceptual comprehension, we require those concepts which can open such a path. We are dealing with a conceptual comprehension and with concepts of a primordial kind. Metaphysical concepts remain eternally closed off from any inherently indifferent and noncommittal scientific acumen.
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Above all...we shall have never have comprehended these concepts and their conceptual rigor unless we have first been gripped by whatever they are supposed to comprehend. All such being gripped comes from and remains in an attunement.
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We ask anew: What is man? A transition, a direction, a storm sweeping over the planet, a recurrence or vexation for the gods? We do not know. Yet we have seen that in the essence of this mysterious being, philosophy happens. — Heidegger
Check out Heidegger — macrosoft
I think your post is based on a fundamental mistake about what philosophers, prior to modernity, thought that science was — Wayfarer
I can very well think what Heidegger meant about Being and Angst. Man has the drive to run up against the boundaries of language. Think, for instance, of the astonishment that anything exists [das etwas existiert]. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is also no answer to it. All that we can say can only,a priori, be nonsense. Nevertheless we run up against the boundaries of language.
Kierkegaard also saw this running-up and similarly pointed it out (as running up against the paradox). This running up against the boundaries of language is Ethics.
I hold it certainly to be very important that one makes an end to all the chatter about ethics – whether there can be knowledge in ethics, whether there are values [ob es Werte gebe , whether the Good can be defined, etc.
In ethics one always makes the attempt to say something which cannot concern and never concerns the essence of the matter. It is a priori certain: whatever one may give as a definition of the Good – it is always only a misunderstanding to suppose that the expression corresponds to what one actually means (Moore). But the tendency to run up against shows something. The holy Augustine already knew this when he said: “What, you scoundrel, you would speak no nonsense? Go ahead and speak nonsense – it doesn’t matter!" — W
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 a value which is of value, it must lie outside 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.
6.42 Hence also there can be no ethical propositions. Propositions cannot express anything higher.
6.421 It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed.
Ethics is transcendental.
(Ethics and aesthetics are one.)
My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up it.)
I have taught the Dhamma compared to a raft, for the purpose of crossing over, not for the purpose of holding onto.
When I met Wittgenstein, I saw that Schlick's warnings were fully justified. But his behavior was not caused by any arrogance. In general, he was of a sympathetic temperament and very kind; but he was hypersensitive and easily irritated. Whatever he said was always interesting and stimulating and the way in which he expressed it was often fascinating. His point of view and his attitude toward people and problems, even theoretical problems, were much more similar to those of a creative artist than to those of a scientist; one might almost say, similar to those of a religious prophet or a seer. When he started to formulate his view on some specific problem, we often felt the internal struggle that occurred in him at that very moment, a struggle by which he tried to penetrate from darkness to light under an intense and painful strain, which was even visible on his most expressive face. When finally, sometimes after a prolonged arduous effort, his answers came forth, his statement stood before us like a newly created piece of art or a divine revelation. Not that he asserted his views dogmatically ... But the impression he made on us was as if insight came to him as through divine inspiration, so that we could not help feeling that any sober rational comment of analysis of it would be a profanation. — Carnap
This faith does not formulate itself—it simply lives, and so guards itself against formulae. To be sure, the accident of environment, of educational background gives prominence to concepts of a certain sort: in primitive Christianity one finds only concepts of a Judaeo-Semitic character (—that of eating and drinking at the last supper belongs to this category—an idea which, like everything else Jewish, has been badly mauled by the church). But let us be careful not to see in all this anything more than symbolical language, semantics[6] an opportunity to speak in parables. It is only on the theory that no word is to be taken literally that this anti-realist is able to speak at all. Set down among Hindus he would have made use of the concepts of Sankhya,[7] and among Chinese he would have employed those of Lao-tse[8]—and in neither case would it have made any difference to him.—With a little freedom in the use of words, one might actually call Jesus a “free spirit”[9]—he cares nothing for what is established: the word killeth,[10] whatever is established killeth. The idea of “life” as an experience, as he alone conceives it, stands opposed to his mind to every sort of word, formula, law, belief and dogma. He speaks only of inner things: “life” or “truth” or “light” is his word for the innermost—in his sight everything else, the whole of reality, all nature, even language, has significance only as sign, as allegory.—Here it is of paramount importance to be led into no error by the temptations lying in Christian, or rather ecclesiastical prejudices: such a symbolism par excellence stands outside all religion, all notions of worship, all history, all natural science, all worldly experience, all knowledge, all politics, all psychology, all books, all art—his “wisdom” is precisely a pure ignorance[11] of all such things. — N
I have taught the Dhamma compared to a raft, for the purpose of crossing over, not for the purpose of holding onto.
I view “philosophy” as being no more than an exploration of the limitations of linguistic understanding and what language means beyond the colloquial use, what it could be, and politically what it is to soon become. — I like sushi
Philosophy is pure human thought without any fallacies, prejudices, or contradictions. — hks
I also came across the following definition (from an esoteric book whose name I can't remember), "Philosophy is the study of facts in their right relation." — BrianW
What do you make of the idea that intelligibility itself is the fundamental mystery? — macrosoft
Aristotle, in De Anima, argued that thinking in general (which includes knowledge as one kind of thinking) cannot be a property of a body; it cannot, as he put it, 'be blended with a body'. This is because in thinking, the intelligible object or form is present in the intellect, and thinking itself is the identification of the intellect with this intelligible. Among other things, this means that you could not think if materialism is true… . Thinking is not something that is, in principle, like sensing or perceiving; this is because thinking is a universalising activity. This is what this means: when you think, you see - mentally see - a form which could not, in principle, be identical with a particular - including a particular neurological element, a circuit, or a state of a circuit, or a synapse, and so on. This is so because the object of thinking is universal, or the mind is operating universally.
….the fact that in thinking, your mind is identical with the form that it thinks, means (for Aristotle and for all Platonists) that since the form 'thought' is detached from matter, 'mind' is immaterial too. — Lloyd Gerson
Consider that when you think about triangularity, as you might when proving a geometrical theorem, it is necessarily perfect triangularity that you are contemplating, not some mere approximation of it. Triangularity as your intellect grasps it is entirely determinate or exact; for example, what you grasp is the notion of a closed plane figure with three perfectly straight sides, rather than that of something which may or may not have straight sides or which may or may not be closed. Of course, your mental image of a triangle might not be exact, but rather indeterminate and fuzzy. But to grasp something with the intellect is not the same as to form a mental image of it. For any mental image of a triangle is necessarily going to be of an isosceles triangle specifically, or of a scalene one, or an equilateral one; but the concept of triangularity that your intellect grasps applies to all triangles alike. Any mental image of a triangle is going to have certain features, such as a particular color, that are no part of the concept of triangularity in general. A mental image is something private and subjective, while the concept of triangularity is objective and grasped by many minds at once.
Also, to what degree would you limit the spiritual to the realm of feeling, concept, and sensation? — macrosoft
The point about 'intelligible truths' was that they were immediate and apodictic in a way that facts about the world could never be. — Wayfarer
But, the idea of intelligibility is intimately linked to the theory of ideas. Again, the idea or form of something was grasped directly in a way that facts-about-the-world could never be. — Wayfarer
I think this is why universals are fundamental to the notion of 'intelligibility'. Get rid of universals, as nominalism did in the late medieval period, and intelligibility goes with it, with considerable consequences. — Wayfarer
The problem, again, is that the cultural matrix in which our dialogue is conducted has no convention within which such a question can even be meaningfully discussed. That's why it must always be depicted in terms of 'poetry and religion' - vague, nebulous, ennobling perhaps, but in no way real. We have a collective construct of what is real, built around science, but science itself is also a construct, at least when it comes to being considered a world-view. — Wayfarer
For me though the issue isn't about certainty but about intelligibility itself, the very existence of meaning or concept — macrosoft
One of the questions you didn't address is whether such shallowness can be said to be 'cured' in terms of conceptually mediated feeling. — macrosoft
Cartesian anxiety refers to the notion that, since René Descartes posited his influential form of body-mind dualism, Western civilization has suffered from a longing for ontological certainty, or feeling that scientific methods, and especially the study of the world as a thing separate from ourselves, should be able to lead us to a firm and unchanging knowledge of ourselves and the world around us. The term is named after Descartes because of his well-known emphasis on "mind" as different from "body", "self" as different from "other".
The question of power, however, seems inseparable from the question of value. That which is powerful is that which gives us what we want. As long as we want animal comforts and fun gadgets more than 'inner' illumination, there will be a temptation to read scientific discourse as metaphysical truth. So the position that opposes science-as-metaphysics can be understood to oppose a certain shallowness in the contemporary lifestyle. — macrosoft
I did read some of the links in your profile. And I sometimes get the impression that what some culture warriors desire is to simply replace one positive theology (of dead junk) with another. — macrosoft
Would you grant that the spiritual is maybe 'only' 'ordinary' life lived in a certain way? With no quasi-scientific claims to make but only reports of 'internal' experience? This 'internal' is tricky, because the higher thoughts and feelings have a universality in my view. All explicit formulations fail or have their blind-spots, like every attempt to count the real numbers one by one. — macrosoft
The fact that the meaning has shifted, actually means that we no longer have the same sense of what 'intelligible' means. And I don't think that the reality of universals is at all accepted in modern philosophy generally - about the place you'll find it, is in neo-Thomism, as they have kept it alive (which I have learned from reading a smattering of neo-thomist philosophy from the likes of Gilson, Maritain and Feser.) — Wayfarer
Cartesian anxiety refers to the notion that, since René Descartes posited his influential form of body-mind dualism, Western civilization has suffered from a longing for ontological certainty, or feeling that scientific methods, and especially the study of the world as a thing separate from ourselves, should be able to lead us to a firm and unchanging knowledge of ourselves and the world around us. The term is named after Descartes because of his well-known emphasis on "mind" as different from "body", "self" as different from "other".
So, a 'cure' for that, involves coming to some understanding of how modernity is itself a kind of mindset or state of being, and understanding the cultural dynamics that drive it. That is the sense in which my orientation is basically counter-cultural. You actually have to jail-break yourself out of the Western mindset which is no easy task, if you're living in it, as we all are. — Wayfarer
My 'meta-narrative' is about how the secular-scientific attitude became so entrenched in Western culture. So I don't see it in terms of 'replacing one theology with another' but trying to understand the underlying dynamics and how they have unfolded over history. (Actually had I had any kind of career in academia, it would likely have been more suited to history than philosophy per se.) — Wayfarer
There are some domains of discourse in which that is true - for example, Soto Zen, which is very much oriented around how the 'ordinary mind' is itself extraordinary ('Chop wood! Draw water! How marvellous! How mysterious!'. 'When hungry I eat, when tired I sleep, fools will laugh at me, but the wise will understand.') But the point is, that school of Zen was itself the culmination of more than a thousand years of dialectic, starting with the Buddha, and then unfolding through the subsequent centuries, millenia even, to find expression in the writings of Dogen (who some have compared to Heidegger.) And there's an awful lot of implicit depth in that tradition, if you actually encounter it; their 'ordinary' is far from the 'ordinary' of the 'ordinary wordling'.
But overall, my 'perennialist' leanings are such that I really do think there's an underlying 'topography of the sacred'. Of course the 'parable of the blind men and the elephant' always bedevils such an analysis, but this is the general drift (courtesy Ken Wilber): — Wayfarer
And I find it plausible that we don't have the same notion of intelligibility. But how would we know? If you, for instance, have access to this notion, then it's not really lost — macrosoft
This is one of the big themes in Heidegger.... — macrosoft
The "'topography of the sacred' along with the diagram reminds me a lot of Plotinus mapping out forms of experiences. — Valentinus
It could be demonstrated with reference to the texts - that’s what I tried to do with those two quotes from Gerson and Feser. I’ve read some books on the idea, but it’s hard to explain. — Wayfarer
But in any case, the really key point, the crucial fact, is the nature of the reality of ideas. They’re not real because they’re generated by some piece of meat that grew in the Petri dish of evolution; they’re real whether anyone knows them or not. — Wayfarer
Husserl’s critique of Descartes in Crisis of the European Sciences anticipated that. In any case, it is true - it is the consequence of treating ‘res cogitans’ as a ‘that’ (whereas in reality it is always unknown.) — Wayfarer
Have you heard about the purported relationship between Pyrrho of Elis and Buddhism? — Wayfarer
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