It feels a bit like saying "there's no foundation that is impervious to natural disasters, so you can't build a house" or "all houses are subject to possibly being ruined by natural disaster, so you may as well build anywhere". — Reformed Nihilist
Not quite. All houses are subject to possibly being ruined by natural disaster, but I need somewhere to live, so I'll do the best I can. That seems like a good analogy for philosophy. That's where philosophy ends - I'll do the best I can. — T Clark
Then where does the fascination with certainty come from? — Reformed Nihilist
A long look at the history of philosophy shows a commonly recurring theme. It shows the attempt to create/discover some fundamental bedrock of certainty upon which we can build a foundation for all knowledge and wisdom — Reformed Nihilist
Then where does the fascination with certainty come from? — Reformed Nihilist
I wouldnt say that Wittgenstein was looking for first “principles”, but rather that thinking which gives a unity to experience. The same is true of Heidegger, Nietzsche and the phenomenologists. There is a way for grounding experience without making recourse to a particular content , a particular truth. The ground can instead be self-reflexive It can have change built into its very premises. — Joshs
The fascination with certainty comes from the nature of fascination itself. Or more precisely, from
the nature of desire. Our way of being is anticipatory. The meaning we see in things comes in part from what we project forward into them with our expectations. So the desire for certainty arises out of of the fact that we are anticipatory beings. We are sense-making. — Joshs
It just seems to me that you can't end up where Wittgenstein, Nietzsche and Foucault did (that's an odd triplet), never mind Descartes or Kant, if the presumption that there is a bedrock of certainty somewhere to be discovered isn't part of where you started. Get me? — Reformed Nihilist
Put differently, they are interested in more than negative critique, in what we can’t do or shouldn’t believe, but are offering positive ideas in their own right, ways of seeing the world in intimate relationships al terms unavailable to those philosophies of certainty. What philosophers like Nietzsche and Wittgenstein are doing is showing us a more intricate order hidden within the order of ‘certainty’ that older philosophies offered. — Joshs
While I think I agree with the statements you made, I don't see how they answer the question. — Reformed Nihilist
I'm noting the existence and deep and pervasive roots of the notion in western philosophy, and perhaps if I am lamenting anything, it's that it is still incredibly pervasive. — Reformed Nihilist
I dont think the central question is why philosophers have desired certainty, but how , in their quest to make sens out of a chaotic world, the notion of certainty appeared to them as something attainable. So the primary goal was never certainty but predictability, and for a period of philosophical history the concept of certainty made sense. as a way to achieve this goal. The rapid and profound successes of the natural sciences in the 17th and 18th centuries , which were based on a mathematical logic which presupposed the certainty of a cognizing subject, reinforced and encouraged the idea of rational
certainty. — Joshs
I suspect it might be something deeper than what you are suggesting. — Reformed Nihilist
Is this a fool's errand? — Reformed Nihilist
I feel like you are being dismissive about an aspect of philosophy that is deeply rooted in its history, and still exists in a very broad sense in modern philosophy. — Reformed Nihilist
A long look at the history of philosophy shows a commonly recurring theme. It shows the attempt to create/discover some fundamental bedrock of certainty upon which we can build a foundation for all knowledge and wisdom. Some singular truth that is irrefutable and inerrant from which we can derive the other truths of the universe. — Reformed Nihilist
Descartes recognized the futility of "I think, therefore I am," as a guide to living. — T Clark
It's not impossible that another intelligent species somewhere else in the universe (of they exist), could have such a capacity of understanding which we lack. But we're stuck with what we have, which is plenty. — Manuel
I am sympathetic to this line of thought, although I think that ground - ground of all being, or ground of all knowledge - would be a more appropriate word here than certainty. (Of course, those who plump for some such ground will disagree, like Joshs with his phenomenology.) — SophistiCat
Then where does the fascination with certainty come from? — Reformed Nihilist
What you are describing is closer to what I think was CS Peirce's critique (it might have been a different philosopher) of Descartes, referring to his radical skepticism as "sham doubt" or "paper doubt", meaning he didn't actually doubt that he existed until it occurred to him that existing was a prerequisite for thinking, he just imagined doubting. That it was just a theoretical proposition. — Reformed Nihilist
The certain, the eternal, the unchanging, were felt to be superior to the uncertain and mutable. [...] It may be the result of a psychological or religious need people have, I don't know. — Ciceronianus
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