Phenomenology can be good, but it often leans into the usual ghost story. Why is that bad ? The ghost story, in most of its forms, is obsolete -- has been shown to be wrong or incoherent. Because it's outlandish and daring, it's supposed to be sophisticated, but believers are quick to tell you that 'practically' they are just like everyone else. So it's a bad theory that serves no purpose, hackneyed poetry basically, 'describing ' the world by denying it ... insisting it cannot be described, does not exist, etc. — Pie
I'm glad you approve. It'll be good for your soul to return to your your Hegel, Heidegger and Derrida etc. :wink: : analytic philosophy is too anal, and if one keeps at it too long one disappears up one's own arse. — Janus
I compare any antiphenemenological stance to interplanetary civilizations; in a sense phenomenology is, to put it mildly, mundane, restricted to, let's just say, (a) special case(s). Mind you, I'm not disagreeing with ya. — Agent Smith
To me they all fit together. Brandom and Sellars are great, both arguably 'fixing' Hegel, removing the mystic bluster, keeping the crucial insight into the sociality and autonomy of reason. I take early Derrida to be a Husserl scholar making quasi-Rylean points against the core of phenomenological version of the myth of the given, but from more of an historical angle, tracing the superstition back to Aristotle, for instance. — Pie
As to 'dissappearing up one's own arse,' avoiding this is one motive against theories of the private mind that would make up-our-own-arses the only safe hiding place from doubt. Some would build a little world up there, with exactly one citizen, speaking a language made just for him, within which concepts always conveniently mean just what he thinks they mean. Is this not a bunker metaphysics ? Not even the NSA can peek in. And the only things allowed in are those I can't be wrong about. — Pie
I think we're on the same page. A philosophy book should tell us about the/our world. It can do this be focusing on the 'how' of our seeing it, and phen. sometimes does this well (Heidegger's hammer is cool!). I'm mostly just griping that constructing the world from the inside out doesn't make much sense. Yet it's taken as the 'obvious' starting point. It's like 'well clearly Venusians run the world, but we don't know if it's through the CIA or the Girls Scouts of America.' — Pie
Neil deGrasse Tyson (astrophysicist, science educator, author) said something to the effect that the universe isn't in any way obligated to make sense to humans - it (the universe) can, it looks as though, do whatever the hell it wants; to hell with humans and their silly standards! :snicker: — Agent Smith
That's interesting. What do you understand to be the "phenomenological version of the myth of the given"? And how do you see it relating back to Aristotle? — Janus
http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/interpretation.1.1.htmlSpoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words. Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images. — Ari
The feelings of the mind, expressing things naturally, constitute a sort of universal language which can then efface itself. It is the stage of transparence. Aristotle can sometimes omit it without risk. In every case, the voice is closest to the signified, whether it is determined strictly as sense ( thought or lived ) or more loosely as thing. All signifiers, and first and foremost the written signifier, are derivative with regard to what would wed the voice indissolubly to the mind or to the thought of the signified sense, indeed to the thing itself ( whether it is done in the Aristotelian manner that we have just indicated or in the manner of medieval theology, determining the res as a thing created from its eidos, from its sense thought in the logos or in the infinite understanding of God) . The written signifier is always technical and representative. It has no constitutive meaning. This derivation is the very origin of the notion of the "signifier." The notion of the sign always implies within itself the distinction between signifier and signified, even if, as Saussure argues, they are distinguished simply as the two faces of one and the same leaf. This notion remains therefore within the heritage of that logocentrism which is also a phonocentrism...
...absolute proximity of voice and being, of voice and the meaning of being, of voice and the ideality of meaning.We already have a foreboding that phonocentrism merges with...the meaning of being in general as presence, with all the subdeterminations which depend on this general form and which organize within it their system and their historical sequence (presence of the thing to the sight as eidos, presence as substance/ essence/ existence / ousia, temporal presence as point [stigme] of the now or of the moment [nun], the self-presence of the cogito... — Derrida
I realize now that I misspoke regarding analytical philosophy causing one to disappear up one's own arse; this is not correct at all; it causes one to disappear up the public arse, a far nastier place to be. — Janus
You don't have to, unless you feel insecure, justify your ideas to anyone. — Janus
Improvising: it's basically a version of the 'ghost story.' 'Pure' meanings glow for it, infinitely intimate, unsoiled by the particularity and historicity of (social, worldly) experience. Presence. I'll find a good Derrida quote on this. But here's an historical source. (This is what Derrida quotes in Of Grammatology. ) — Pie
Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images. — Ari
In my opinion, this tempts us to think of a set of universal, pre-given, immaterial concepts... — Pie
Here's some of Derrida's response to the quote above. Note that the critique of phonocentrism (putting the voice closes to meaning than writing) is driven by a critique of the ghost. — Pie
His meaning is right there, glowing and present and perfect, independent of the network of other public concepts. Is Derrida not making a Hegelian point that everything is mediated, mediated, mediated, or a Brandomian point that awareness is linguistic ? For we who are not thermostats? — Pie
I think you are trying to have your cake and eat it too. If you are indeed a great poetic soul, too cool for anal discussions of epistemology, then...good for you, sir ! But I'd believe it more readily if you weren't wasting your time with an even greater triviality like indulging in hackneyed 'defenses' of The Poetic Soul, as if your the only one among your peers that's ever had a finger in. — Pie
This is one of the most irrationalist assertions I've ever seen on a philosophy forum (if you mean the typical role of ideas in social life, Mr. Anti-Up-My-Arse ) or the tritest (if you mean that the checkout girl at Costco doesn't care about the books I've read.) — Pie
If you can't prove something, it's a belief, correct? — GLEN willows
Neil deGrasse Tyson (astrophysicist, science educator, author) said something to the effect that the universe isn't in any way obligated to make sense to humans - it (the universe) can, it looks as though, do whatever the hell it wants; humans and their silly standards, bah! :snicker: — Agent Smith
Do you think that things must be proved in order to be true?
Or are there things that are true yet unproven? — Banno
Do you think that things must be proved in order to be true?
Or are there things that are true yet unproven? — Banno
I believe he’s saying that if you can’t prove that aliens exist then you don’t know that aliens exist, even if you believe that aliens exist and even if aliens exist. The same with there being other minds. — Michael
Things must be proven to be known to be true, — Janus
"Justified", or "warranted", are the usual the terms used, rather than proven. — Banno
Even if there is no proof of other minds, it does not follow that they do not exist. — Banno
"Justified", or "warranted", are the usual the terms used, rather than proven.
Here's my point again, just to be clear: Even if there is no proof of other minds, it does not follow that they do not exist. — Banno
Do you have any particular views on Truthmaker Theory? — Tom Storm
Even if there is no proof of other minds, it does not follow that they do not exist.
— Banno
I would have thought that was self-evident to most folk. — Tom Storm
. I think where people seem to get carried away is the notion that in some cases if X can't be proven (let's say God), we have no good reason to accept X (God). — Tom Storm
It seems to me that under the JTB definition of knowledge, even assuming that there are real criteria concerning what counts as justification, that we can know things, but we cannot be certain that we know them, unless what we know is proven — Janus
...Davidson does not merely reject the specific premises that underlie the realist and anti-realist positions, but views the very dispute between them as essentially misconceived. — SEP:Donald Davidson
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