That's where phenomenology dovetails well with Buddhist philosophy, which says that nothing exists in itself, but only in relationship. And also with Rovelli's relational interpretation of qm. — Wayfarer

What is relationship? You mine as well say, "Information processes"... or "occasions of experience" or "actual entitites" or "little green goblins goblining".. It is the fallacy of homunculus on steroids.

A shame you need to make a personal attack. We're done. — Jackson

It wasn't a personal attack. By your irrelevant comments you have demonstrated that you don't understand what Kant was doing. I am not criticizing you; I am criticizing your demonstrated misunderstanding of Kant's project. Don't you want to learn?

There is no problem with saying there is being outside of any perspective, or that things exist independently of any perspective; but it's obvious, by definition, that anything we say about it, including the statement that there is being outside perspective, or things existing independently of any perspective is from a perspective. — Janus

Right but obviously Idealists would chide you into "what" that is... Clearly a universe without perspective is a metaphysical mess that non-idealists might get defensive about and then conjure up old Wittgenstei and say, "STOP!!" "Thouh shalt not pass!!" :lol: :lol: Ignoring the issue doesn't make it go away.. That is simply a reflection of the philosopher and their propensities. Go make your model airplanes and watch paint dry.. I don't know.. Monger more minutia perhaps.. Construct some cool code, make some furniture? Do something you think as "practical" and just forget all this metaphysical "nonsense"..

Ad hominem attack. If you want to discuss philosophy, I will. If you cannot refrain from ad hominem attacks then I will not respond.

My tentative, meta-philosophical claim is that this implies that in some sense, the appearance of conscious sentient beings literally brings the universe into existence. Not that ‘before’ we came along that it didn’t exist, — Wayfarer

You seem to be contradicting yourself. How could the appearance of conscious sentient beings bring the universe into existence if it is not the case "that 'before' we came along it didn't exist". And why the inverted commas around "before"?

If you take that as an "ad hominem attack", then you are probably too overly sensitive for a robust philosophical discussion, so yes, we'd best leave it. Good luck with your education.

Kantians think everything is about science. It is not.

How could the appearance of conscious sentient beings bring the universe into existence if it is not the case "that 'before' we came along it didn't exist". And why the inverted commas around "before"? — Janus

That is addressed in the longer quotation that Schopenhauer 1 provided from Schopenhauer 0 on the previous page, to wit:

Thus we see, on the one hand, the existence of the whole world necessarily dependent upon the first conscious being, however undeveloped it may be; on the other hand, this conscious being just as necessarily entirely dependent upon a long chain of causes and effects which have preceded it, and in which it itself appears as a small link. These two contradictory points of view, to each of which we are led with the same necessity, we might again call an antinomy in our faculty of knowledge... The necessary contradiction which at last presents itself to us here, finds its solution in the fact that, to use Kant's phraseology, time, space, and causality do not belong to the thing-in-itself, but only to its phenomena, of which they are the form; which in my language means this: The objective world, the world as idea, is not the only side of the world, but merely its outward side; and it has an entirely different side—the side of its inmost nature—its kernel—the thing-in-itself... But the world as idea... only appears with the opening of the first eye. Without this medium of knowledge it cannot be, and therefore it was not before it. But without that eye, that is to say, outside of knowledge, there was also no before, no time. Thus time has no beginning, but all beginning is in time. — Schopenhauer

Or was it epistemology under the guise of (a new kind of) metaphysics or proto-phenomenology? — Janus

No. Epistemology cannot posit "knowing" it's own "conditions of possibility" – begs the question, no?

Do you think it is possible to reflect on and know what characteristics any possible experience or judgement must have?

No. Kant's 'transcendental scheme' is, in effect, a anthropocentric fiat: if humans experience X, then Y consists of the 'conditions of the possibility of' any human experience. A ("groundwork of the") metaphysics of human experience.

No. Epistemology cannot posit "knowing" it's own "conditions of possibility" – begs the question, no? — 180 Proof

Why? Epistemology is the inquiry into what we know and how we know anything. It is arguable that we can know, on the basis of reflection, what the essential general elements of all kinds of experiences are. Knowledge comes from experience; where else? I don't see any question-begging here.

It's not an "anthropocentric fiat" unless it purports to extend its findings beyond the anthropos, in other words as long as it doesn't aim to make claims about what lies beyond human experience. The latter is what anthropomorphizing consists in, as I understand it.

Why not, instead of a view from nowhere, a view from everywhere? So, instead of kvetching about how inadequate any particular perspective is, we could construct a picture of reality made up of all points of view (from worms to übermensch).

Epistemology cannot posit "knowing" it's own "conditions of possibility" — 180 Proof

Exactly. Like jumping over your own shadow.

Can we access the worm's eye view? Any animal's? Ubermensch's?

Kant was just a platonist, establishing absolute fiats as if no other way of thinking about the world was possible.

What was Kant's experience? Walked to university same path every day and died. That guy is going to tell me what experience is?!

But then they simply fall into the fallacy of I don't know... I'll just call it whatever the opposite of curiosity is. — schopenhauer1

As Kant says, we cannot acquire discursive metaphysical (in the traditional, not his Synthetic a priori, sense) knowledge, but that it is, nonetheless, intrinsic to rational thought to seek the unconditioned as the totality and ultimate explanation for the conditioned.

"I don't know" is not a fallacy, as I see it, but a suitably humble acknowledgement of the limits of knowledge; and it is by no means an injunction to cease thinking about such unknowables, because such thoughts can, and obviously have, enriched human life and creativity.

"STOP!!" "Thouh shalt not pass!!" :lol: :lol: — schopenhauer1

LOL, we can pass, but we have to leave our analytical discursive minds at the gate. The mind of the Muse may enter.

Can we access the worm's eye view? Any animal's? Ubermensch's? — Janus

We can make educated guesses: Worms probably have touch/pressure/pain receptors just like us. It's usually easier to get an idea of how lower life-forms see the world (we can do what they can). As for übermensch, it's a little harder.

:up:

Knowledge comes from experience; where else? — Janus

Non-empirical knowledge (e.g. mathematical theorems) does not "come from experience".

It's not an "anthropocentric fiat" unless it purports to extend its findings beyond the anthropos, in other words as long as it doesn't aim to make claims about what lies beyond human experience. The latter is what anthropomorphizing consists in, as I understand it.

I understand anthropo-centric to denote knowledge restricted to "human experience" – limited to only what humans can perceive – which implies that "beyond" "human experience" there is not anything (e.g. neither quasars nor quarks) knowable by humans.

Non-empirical knowledge (e.g. mathematical theorems) does not "come from experience". — 180 Proof

Is such knowledge possible without mathematical experience?

Right, I misread anthropocentric as anthropomorphic. In any case my point stands re anthropomorphizing, and we are apparently in agreement about knowledge outside human experience being impossible.

Kant was a Newtonian. He thought there was absolute time and space. — Jackson

Yes he was, but no, he did not, at least in one sense of “absolute”, that being irreducible physical reality.....

“...Time and space are, therefore, two sources of knowledge, from which, a priori, various synthetical cognitions can be drawn. Of this we find a striking example in the cognitions of space and its relations, which form the foundation of pure mathematics. They are the two pure forms of all intuitions, and thereby make synthetical propositions a priori possible. But these sources of knowledge being merely conditions of our sensibility, do therefore, and as such, strictly determine their own range and purpose, in that they do not and cannot present objects as things in themselves, but are applicable to them solely in so far as they are considered as sensuous phenomena. The sphere of phenomena is the only sphere of their validity, and if we venture out of this, no further objective use can be made of them.

On the other hand, those who maintain the absolute reality of time and space, whether as essentially subsisting, or only inhering, as modifications, in things, must find themselves at utter variance with the principles of experience itself. For, if they decide for the first view, and make space and time into substances, this being the side taken by mathematical natural philosophers, they must admit two self-subsisting nonentities, infinite and eternal, which exist (yet without there being anything real) for the purpose of containing in themselves everything that is real. If they adopt the second view of inherence, which is preferred by some metaphysical natural philosophers, and regard space and time as relations (contiguity in space or succession in time), abstracted from experience, though represented confusedly in this state of separation, they find themselves in that case necessitated to deny the validity of mathematical doctrines a priori in reference to real things...”

....which still leaves room for “absolute” in the sense of irreducible transcendental ideality. But that isn’t Newton, so....we are left with an ambiguity with respect to the term itself, between your meaning of the word, and his.

And even if one leans on Kant’s granting “empirical reality” to both space and time, as indicating “absolute”, it behooves him to recognize the further qualification of that condition, as being merely “objective validity in reference to all objects which can ever be presented to our senses”, which reduces the conception of “absolute” to no more than pertaining to possible experience, and therefore hardly absolute in Newtonian terms, the reference frame for which being the Universe in general.

As if CPR wasn’t sufficient introduction, we can then be referred to “The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science”, particularly the chapter “Phenomenology”, in which Kant refutes the notion of Newtonian absolute time and space, re: Friedman, 1992. How well he refuted....well, that’s been suspect since 1786. Then comes Einstein, a self-proclaimed non-Kantian, who elaborates successfully a strictly Kantian argument.

Go figure......

When you say ‘human’ do you have in mind an a priori ala Kant? To be human is then to be possessed of a prior categories. This makes humanity a divine notion. — Joshs

No, I do not agree with Kant's a priori category. What I think, is that the mind operates in unison with sensation in specific preestablished ways. This means that there is something prior to mental experience, similar to Kant's a priori, as the conditions for such experience, but this, whatever it is which is prior to experience, cannot be conceptual in any way. So Kant calls them "intuitions". Well, I find "intuition" as an equally faulty word, because that word as we normally use it, has mental experience implied within. That's why when Aristotle investigated the nature of intuition in his "Nicomachean Ethics" (what he considered the highest form of knowledge, incidentally), he concluded that it is a combination of innate and acquired features. Therefore, I believe that to properly characterize what is prior to mental experience, as the condition for such experience, we need to go beyond "intuition".

That is the very claim which Kant refuted. — Janus

This wasn't a refutation at all, just a simple assertion. But it's really a defeatist attitude. If we say that reality extends beyond our capacities of sensation (and what science shows us is that it does), yet we claim that reason has not the capacity to understand this reality, then we render science as impotent. Science uses hypotheses to understand what is beyond the limitations of sensation.

But this is also why we have to be wary of scientific conclusions, and duly subject them to skepticism. We tend to fall under the illusion that scientific theories are verified by sense experience, and therefore in some sense cannot be wrong, providing us with certainties. The problem though, as the ancients indicated, is that sense experience is what leads us wrong in the first place, and the goal of science is actually to access that true reality (noumenal) which is beyond sensation. If science's verification is provided by sensation, then we have the potential for a vicious circle within science, such that the deceptions of our senses are used to verify deceptive theories.

At issue in the way that line of thinking developed, was the fact that through the faculty of reason, you could know something with apodictic certainty - mathematical certainty, as we like to say. — Wayfarer

I would say that what Plato demonstrated, and especially Aristotle, is that this form of certainty, which you call "apodictic" is really an illusion, a false certitude which is nothing more than sophism. As Aristotle demonstrated, mathematical axioms and geometrical constructs, which are proposed for various purposes, what Plato called "the good", are forms which are property of the human mind. When "the good" wanders, strays from truth and honesty into pragmaticism, then persuasion may become the principal goal involved with such proposals. Then we have mere sophistry. Einstein for example, was a master at this type of persuasion, in his presentation of the nature of time. He presents a conception of "time" which is pragmatic rather than truthful, and offers numerous different persuasive arguments as to why this conception of time ought to be employed.

So, from the empirical perspective it is of course true that the Universe precedes our existence, but from the perspective of transcendental idealism, ‘before’ is also a part of the way in which the observing mind constructs the world.

My tentative, meta-philosophical claim is that this implies that in some sense, the appearance of conscious sentient beings literally brings the universe into existence. Not that ‘before’ we came along that it didn’t exist, but that the manner of its existence is unintelligible apart from the perspective brought to it by the observer. We can’t get ‘outside’ that perspective, even if we try and see the world as if there’s no observer. (Sorry for the length of this post.) — Wayfarer

This is exactly the point, and it's very well said here Wayfarer; nice job. Wittgenstein likes this example too, the earth existed before me, he implies that it's something which cannot be doubted. Actually though, it's a very good example of precisely why we need to doubt such things, which we otherwise would tend to take for granted.

We see "the world" is a human construct, a conception, how we understand our environment, what's around us, enveloping us. So if "the world" refers to the way that I understand my environment, then it's impossible that the world existed before me. That's a basic fact. Now, to move to this belief, that the world actually existed before me, I have to accept the truth (correspondence) between this conception of my environment, which envelopes me, "the world", and the actual reality of my environment. Once I accept this as a truth, then all the temporal, spatial, and mathematical conceptions implied by this concept "the world", as logically prior to that concept (necessary for it), are implicitly accepted by me as well. These become true conceptions, as necessary for rendering truth to "the world existed before me". The problem is that we readily accept "the world existed before me", because it is extremely intuitive, without taking the time required to understand exactly what that proposition entails.

So you can see that the simple proposition "the world existed before me" involves a massive web of temporal, spatial, and mathematical conceptions all tied together, as necessary to ensure the truth of that proposition. If any of these conceptions might be inaccurate, then the entire proposition is cast into a shadow of doubt. The most obvious problem is the term "before". Our conception of time is so primitive and obscure, that we do not know with any degree of certainty what "before" actually means. And so, in setting a relationship between myself and my environment, which includes the concept "before", I have to approach with much skepticism.

“… the logical edifice of the Tractatus came tumbling down and with it the whole notion of ‘logical form' that.played such a central role in Wittgenstein's — Joshs

Really? Tumbling down? As I understand it, the picture theory of language was abandoned, but the insistence of logicality was not. For me, no one has ever convinced me that idealism of some kind is wrong. How does anything out there get in here? I just don't see it. Why am I not listening and observing activated "neuronal networks" ONLY?

Well, I find "intuition" as an equally faulty word, because that word as we normally use it, has mental experience implied within. — Metaphysician Undercover

But this line of thinking simply denies that there is anything "there" in some emphatic, irresistible way. I may not know what things are, but THAT they are, notwithstanding "are" being interpretatively indeterminate, is impossible to deny.

"Not that ‘before’ we came along that it didn’t exist"

"IT"??? This is the problem.

You misread my meaning again, sir. Kant's anthropocentric fiat isn't even false (i.e. metaphysical, and in the manner to which he objects) as evident by knowledge derived through fundamental particle physics / astrophysics, evolutionary molecular biology, pure mathematics (e.g. Lie Groups, Number Theory, Axiomatic Set Theory), as examples, which we cannot perceive directly (via "intuition") and are "beyond" human experience. The CPR is a masterpiece of (subjectivist) metaphysical fiction IMHO.

isn't even false — 180 Proof

we cannot perceive directly — 180 Proof

"beyond" human experience — 180 Proof

All that's left to do is make systematic guesses, oui? Without the possibility of ever knowing whether we go it right or no.

We dont have some general body-maintenance feedback first and then have to decide how to explain its meaning by relating it to a current situation. Emotions come already world-directed. There is never just some generic arousal that then has to be attributed. Feelings emerge from within experiences that are relevant to us in some way. We are never without a mood. — Joshs

Do you have a reference? I'd be interested in reading more. Beyond what Barrett says, in my own experience I have had to work to understand what particular emotions are. Babies have to learn everything about the world and how to put it into words. In particular, emotions have to be expressed in socially specific ways. What we call "anger" isn't just one thing, it's a whole bunch of related but significantly different things. That's something else I've experienced directly.

Look to the fallibilists like Peirce, Dewey, Russell, Wittgenstein, Popper, Feyerabend, Haack, Deutsch, Taleb for how we (can) learn/know reliably.

As I understand it, the picture theory of language was abandoned, but the insistence of logicality was not. For me, no one has ever convinced me that idealism of some kind is wrong. — Constance

I don’t think it would be wrong to say that Wittgenstein’s language games are a kind of idealism, but what do you mean by ‘logicality’? The ‘S is P’ propositional structure? Belief statements?

Do you have a reference? I'd be interested in reading more. — T Clark

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5972154/

Babies have to learn everything about the world and how to put it into words. In particular, emotions have to be expressed in socially specific ways. What we call "anger" isn't just one thing, it's a whole bunch of related but significantly different things. That's something else I've experienced directly. — T Clark

Are emotions just expressed is socially significant ways or, as Wittgenstein shows , is their very sense created via these contextual engagements? Putting into words wouldnt merely be relating symbols to already formed meanings but allowing the worlds to form the sense of a meaning.