this spirit or attitude is anti-metaphysical and directed toward engagement with the world and experience. — pomophobe
James is taking the empirical attitude — pomophobe
It's aimed at active personalities who take life or experience as the primary authority. It expects revision. — pomophobe
Empiricism is not necessarily anti-metaphysical. — Joshs
Do we assume that our constructions are a mirror or correspondence with an independent reality, and that we assymptotically approach truth through sequential , incremental revision? — Joshs
Many philosophers have argued that there seems to be a gap between the objective, naturalistic facts of the world and the subjective facts of conscious experience. — Joshs
this transcendental or metaphysical realist position is the paradigm of a nonsensical or incoherent metaphysical viewpoint, for (among other problems) it fails to acknowledge its own reflexive dependence on the intersubjectivity and reciprocal empathy of the human life-world." — Joshs
While this is far too fuzzy initially to either hit or miss, my suspicion is that it's a maximally pretentious way to say something pretty simple. — pomophone
Do we assume that our constructions are a mirror or correspondence with an independent reality, and that we assymptotically approach truth through sequential , incremental revision? — Joshs
Must we commit to a position here? How has our species accomplished so much already without settling this issue? We mostly get by just fine without top-down theories. — pomophobe
Francisco Varela elaborated something similar with his neurophenomenological model. It draws from the idea of a living system as self-organizing. In this view, the origin of cognition is the enactive nature of organismic functioning, the fact that a living system shapes the very environment that it is affected by. This approach doesn't require us to choose between subjectivism or empiricism. It makes the formal and empirical sides of things into poles of an interaction in which neither self nor environment, neither mind nor world , have any coherent sense or existence apart from their interaction. So no top-down theory, but also no bottom up empiricism. This is the meaning of embodiment.The input is sentences and the output is sentences, but what goes on in the middle has nothing to do with words. It's a mesh of millions or billions of floats, each of which is meaningless in isolation. — pomophobe
And that is why Heidegger is a chore to read. His work is best read in reverse. — I like sushi
, I defy pomophone to effectively summarize Heidegger's philosophy in Being and Time.it's a maximally pretentious way to say something pretty simple. — pomophone
pomophone has exclusively quoted from Heidegger's post 1920's writing. — Joshs
18th of December, 1931
Dear Fritz, dear Liesl, dear boys,
We would like to wish you a very merry Christmas. It is probably snowing where you are, inspiring the hope that Christmas will once again reveal its true magic. I often think back to the days before Christmas back at home in our little town, and I wish for the artistic energy to truly capture the mood, the splendor, the excitement and anticipation of this time.
[…]
It would appear that Germany is finally awakening, understanding and seizing its destiny.
I hope that you will read Hitler’s book; its first few autobiographical chapters are weak. This man has a remarkable and sure political instinct, and he had it even while all of us were still in a haze, there is no way of denying that. The National Socialist movement will soon gain a wholly different force. It is not about mere party politics—it’s about the redemption or fall of Europe and western civilization. Anyone who does not get it deserves to be crushed by the chaos. Thinking about these things is no hindrance to the spirit of Christmas, but marks our return to the character and task of the Germans, which is to say to the place where this beautiful celebration originates.
— Heidegger
While the authenticity theme is flattering to us who aren't phony and crumby, it hasn't aged well for me. — pomophobe
perhaps you can see why a fact/value distinction is useful. I think Heidegger had some insights of independent value from his grandiose cultural concerns. For my money Being and Time is already contaminated with something not quite 'scientific.' Is the forgetfulness of Being an essentially political-spiritual point? Is authenticity really a technical term? What's with all the talk of death? Does he make himself clear? How much of Being and Time is better expressed in earlier works that were not yet available when his big book was published -- without the shakier elements? — pomophobe
Ah, but is the inauthentic for Heidegger a matter of being phony? That sounds like an existentialist reading of him. Beware of secondary sources. — Joshs
My favorite readers of Heidegger are the poststructuralists, particularly Derrida. — Joshs
I don't think we can really do justice to Heidegger without first delving more deeply into your comment that a" fact/value distinction is useful".
If what you are saying is that you don't quite agree with the arguments of Putnam-Quine-Rorty-Goodman , then perhaps you identify more with the 'pre-Hegelian' branches of analytic philosophy, cognitive science and philosophy of science — Joshs
There is something 'anti-intellectual' in this empiricism, and a move toward the 'authenticity' of being in the world. — pomophobe
I actually like Bennington's Derrida. He writes strong English. — pomophobe
Instead of debating Kant vs Hegel, how about we compare Hinton with Dennett, Gallagher, Hutto, Thompson and Varela? — Joshs
The gap between pure math and its application is a nice metaphor for the gap between theory and practice in general. — pomophobe
In the new AI paradigm, it's looking to me like our best models are going to be black boxes. We'll have tools that work that don't really make sense to us. — pomophobe
Don't you think there's a difference between theory in the metaphysical sense and what Nietzsche, Heidegger and the poststructalists were trying to do? — Joshs
The meaning of empirical success, workablity, validation, truth are well on their way to becoming such evanescent entities, as Nietzsche envisioned. — Joshs
This is not a loss with respect to the old Cartesian ways of thinking about empirical truth. The price the realists paid for their belief in a world of reductive causation was an even more profound sort of arbitrariness(a unified theory of physics to be run on a computer, but in which everything important to human culture is assigned to randomness) . — Joshs
Heidegger's Being isnt meant as a concept but as placing difference, activity, practice, transformation relation and becoming prior to subjects and objects. — Joshs
For me this is part of Kant's point. We are thrown into an intelligible world, into nature that already makes a lot of sense for us. These frameworks offer us uncontroversial entities and a language in which we can talk about them. Without these frameworks, science would be impossible. So science depends on these frameworks. — pomophobe
know-how is prior to knowing-that — pomophobe
The philosophical problem of what we should value also melts away when their are clear metrics for performance. At work in that context, there is no substantial ambiguity about the goal or the standards. — pomophobe
go try to master using some complicated software. Or fix your car by yourself the next time it breaks down. These mundane things are what theory likes to forget, but they are what non-theoretical life is largely made of. — pomophobe
non-theorists tend to use these words ('real', 'true', etc.) as a way to point to the stuff they depend on, the stuff they can't get away with ignoring, the stuff that will punish their ignorance-blindness --whatever it 'really' or metaphysically is. — pomophobe
My question to you is, how do you think Heidegger thinks we jump from ready-at-hand to present-at-hand thinking? — schopenhauer1
Think about finding what is broken in a car by indicative sounds, or using a voltmeter to assess if an appliance is working correctly, or writing a line of code in a familiar programming language, or pausing to think how to articulate a concept. When you are reflecting, it usually pauses the autopilot until an opportunity to resolve it presents itself. — fdrake
But he does not, at least not to my knowledge, provide a detailed phenomenology of cognitive labour, or make comments that allow us to infer what it would be, at all. — fdrake
So I'm quite tempted to Mearlu-Ponty-ise Heidegger's present-at-hand/ready to hand distinction here, while the distinction was noticed through creative synthesis of descriptions of transcendental structure (existentialia) out of the experiences suggestive of it (existentielle), construing the 'present at hand' as merely an obstacle or aberration from all usual functioning in the world is precisely a framing error. In phenomenological/Heidegger terms the error is in taking how something is thematised within a particular reflection as constitutive of its essence rather than formally indicative of it! The present-at-hand gets downplayed because Heidegger needed it to for his account, in other phenomenological contexts it's incredibly important to attend to. — fdrake
You might like Ray Brassier's 'Concepts and Objects' for an interesting corrective about how to think about conceptual, specifically philosophical, labour. — fdrake
From Heidegger, you get the insight that the 'present at hand'; our mode of being when observing objects standing out from a background in cognised and cognisant engagement, usually emerges out of our ready-to-hand autopilot when something goes awry. — fdrake
For cognitive labour, or labour that often requires reflection, especially systematic thought, the present at hand/ready to hand distinction doesn't capture any of the oscillatory character between the readiness to hand of exegesis or understood intervention and stuck, problem solving thought. It doesn't get at how for this type of activity presence at hand and readiness to hand both superimpose, contradict, and behaviourally entail each other. — fdrake
Think about finding what is broken in a car by indicative sounds, or using a voltmeter to assess if an appliance is working correctly, or writing a line of code in a familiar programming language, or pausing to think how to articulate a concept. When you are reflecting, it usually pauses the autopilot until an opportunity to resolve it presents itself. — fdrake
construing the 'present at hand' as merely an obstacle or aberration from all usual functioning in the world is precisely a framing error. In phenomenological/Heidegger terms the error is in taking how something is thematised within a particular reflection as constitutive of its essence rather than formally indicative of it! — fdrake
Yes, like troubleshooting a technical problem. You may know some of what to do, but it's not a flow state by any means, but grueling attempts to match known heuristics with the new problem or find a possible other cause and solution. — schopenhauer1
if present-at-hand is equated with reflective capabilities, it is indeed the primary way we humans engage and survive in the world (contra Heidegger). — schopenhauer1
The present to hand is not equated with reflection by Heidegger, it is equated with subject-object predicative statements(the basis of formal concepts as well as objective determinations of physical things). There is nothing particularly problematic for Heidegger about reflective thinking unless it cuts itself off from relevant contexts of involvement by narrowing itself down to theoretical or logical analysis. He would not want us to simply reject such forms of discourse, but to understand its derivation. so that we can use such forms in a more knowing and ethically effective manner. — Joshs
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