And if we're not a singular, simple subject, but a bundle — Moliere
Despite our massive 'internal' complexity, I think we are singular as discursive subjects. At least in a practical life we are. A philosophy forum might give each member two different avatars, expecting them to diverge. I do think Shakespeare, for instance, proves that we are internally multiple. [ I guess I should have started with my agreement, in retrospect. ] — plaque flag
I think we need to recognize how much we, as human beings, are not the Enlightenment's conception of Man as Rational Decider. — Moliere
Looking around the world today, I'd be tempted to say we are mostly crazy, but there is relatively robust tradition of relative individual freedom which I can't or at least shouldn't take for granted. — plaque flag
Shakespeare works wonderfully, but most wouldn't listen to theatrical sorts in a philosophical space -- that's just mere art and all that. — Moliere
I've generally spoken in favor of the academy. I wouldn't have the understandings I do today without having gone. And I wouldn't be able to perceive the world as crazy unless I happened across these paths. — Moliere
I depend on professors mostly for my translations of German philosophy, so the universities are totally rotted out (I mostly joke, but I don't love stories of professors hounded out.) But I had in mind the larger culture of a free society, to the degree that it's not rotted out by tribal fear and hatred. — plaque flag
There's something beautiful and difficult about being an individual --our strange mission in a freeish rational society. Do you know the song Nutshell by Alice in Chains ? Nice ambivalence.
video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AzCj0b4MUU
lyrics:
https://genius.com/Alice-in-chains-nutshell-lyrics — plaque flag
My hope is to fire up some conversational research. Does this OP make sense ? Do you see errors in my reasoning ? — plaque flag
Conditions for the possibility of critical discussion cannot be rationally challenged without performative contradiction. — plaque flag
abstract
Conditions for the possibility of critical discussion cannot be rationally challenged without performative contradiction. Such conditions are therefore not only a sturdy foundation for further inquiry but ontologically axiomatic. Such conditions include a shared world one can be wrong about in a shared language. Another such condition is the participants willingly binding themselves to the coherence and justification of their claims, which is to say to being philosophers and not just daydreamers or mystics. — plaque flag
explication
I take ontology in in this context to be “critical” or “scientific” in its intention, as opposed to relatively irresponsible myth-making. Granted that we put on the heroic robes of the “scientific” (critical) philosopher, as opposed to the mystic who denigrates dialectic as a means to truth, what have we already assumed in so doing ? How do these assumptions affect the project of ontology ? As its enabling conditions, they must be included.
Any other ontological thesis depends on the conditions for the possibility of ontology, so the ontologist is justified in putting ontology itself at the center of reality –-- and not on the outside peeping in. The same kind of realization is intended in “theology itself is ‘God.’” My position might be called 'neorationalism.' I suggest that our normative conceptuality is irreducible. A critique of psychologism is implied here, which might be developed in the thread.
skeptics are using the resources of rationality without acknowledging it. — Moliere
Which is, I think at least, the temptation of foundationalism -- if you're against everything, if you feel you know, if you want something other than what is then how else to pursue that than through a foundationalist philosophy? Or through something like a Marxist philosophy which reduces everything to some other conflict you're interested in? — Moliere
In fact I believe we ought explore multiple rationalities, because we don't know what the future holds and so we do not know what thoughts will help us most as things change. — Moliere
I completely understand the temptation to psychologize foundationalism in general, and I tend to find something plausible in such moves. But the psychological sword is sharp on both sides, and the 'anarchist' is just as easily 'diagnosed. — plaque flag
FWIW, what interests me about this foundational project is its radical minimalism. I want nothing more than what's already implicit in the idea of autonomous-critical thought. What is the absolutely minimal constraint on 'scientific' ontology ? What conditions make it intelligible, coherent ? So that any rational challenge of it misunderstands itself ? — plaque flag
So I'd call them (from this sketched position anyway) pseudo-skeptics who don't understand themselves. The 'true' skeptic doesn't show up or at least refrains from projecting claims about what others can know. Epistemological claims are implicitly ontological claims, typically about the 'universal' subject. One inspiration for my critique here is a quasi-Kantian pose that pretends to humility but makes a massive claim on what others can rationally hope to know. — plaque flag
To me that's already in the framework. What we are doing right now is in that framework. It's cooperatively adversarial and the reverse, as if the community was somehow shrewd enough to run a different 'logic' in every individual on its existential-discursive stage. — plaque flag
What still attracts me to the Kantian limit on reason is Hegel's philosophy, which I think is a mess -- it's an interesting mess! But a mess. — Moliere
:up:And we have the aesthetic values of parsimony, elegance, and simplicity which can serve as a judgment of a home. — Moliere
Conditions for the possibility of critical discussion cannot be rationally challenged without performative contradiction. — plaque flag
Critical discussion is all performative contradiction. Or to put it contrariwise, a philosopher is one who has become lost in language, and is trying to argue his way back to reality. — unenlightened
How does it avoid being the same kind of lostness in language it points out ? — plaque flag
a kind of playful speech act that calls the theorist home for supper. — plaque flag
By being oracular, or poetic. — unenlightened
Therefore there is no problem in the first place of 'ontology'. It's all 'engine idling'. — unenlightened
a philosopher is one who has become lost in language, and is trying to argue his way back to reality. — unenlightened
That was my first response, self-censored; Dinner realism, I eat therefore I am, and try not to eat the menu.
Am I eating the menu here? — unenlightened
I think we 'have' to separate logic in its ideal / normative sense from logic as a mere description of our fallible often illogical (in a normative sense) thinking process. I'd say that truly logical thinking ought to compel us. — plaque flag
This seems to assume that Reality exists independently of what we think about it, — plaque flag
And that which only exists dependent on what we think, I shall call a dream, a myth, an idea, or an image. — unenlightened
Hegel is a beast. I think I've always had to settle for misreadings of him that make him more coherent by throwing some of him away. — plaque flag
At the moment, I suggest interpreting him as intensifying Kant's project. We can interpret him as a direct realist who grasped the meaninglessness of talk about entities which are completely disconnected from other entities and the necessary centrality of the storytelling detective in the detective story and all this implies. 'Absolute knowledge' is (from this POV) just a collapse of indirect realism at a certain level of inquiry's self-explication. The key theme is us realizing what we are already doing. What we have and live in is 'just' our autonomous-rational-critical sensemaking in this world together. The 'other side' of this sensemaking (postulated untouchable-always-filtered Reality. ---with an Official (?) conceptual articulation) is a token within that adventurous self-unfolding sensemaking --- eventually seen as a kind of phlogiston. But this doesn't close off a return to 'alienated' mysticism and other flights from autonomy.
I wouldn't go that far. I think the reason Hegel's philosophy is a mess is because it's hard to say what a misreading of him even is. I've read fascists, anti-colonial communists, and liberals who all claim Hegel as their philosophical base. So clearly there's something inspirational in there for people -- but where you can go with the ideas is a very wide range of possibilities. — Moliere
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ae/part2-section3.htm#s1The true content of romantic art is absolute inwardness, and its corresponding form is spiritual subjectivity with its grasp of its independence and freedom. This inherently infinite and absolutely universal content is the absolute negation of everything particular, the simple unity with itself which has dissipated all external relations, all processes of nature and their periodicity of birth, passing away, and rebirth, all the restrictedness in spiritual existence, and dissolved all particular gods into a pure and infinite self-identity. In this Pantheon all the gods are dethroned, the flame of subjectivity has destroyed them, and instead of plastic polytheism art knows now only one God, one spirit, one absolute independence which, as the absolute knowing and willing of itself, remains in free unity with itself and no longer falls apart into those particular characters and functions whose one and only cohesion was due to the compulsion of a dark necessity.
Yet absolute subjectivity as such would elude art and be accessible to thinking alone if, in order to be actual subjectivity in correspondence with its essence, it did not also proceed into external existence ... the Absolute does not turn out to be the one jealous God who merely cancels nature and finite human existence without shaping himself there in appearance as actual divine subjectivity; on the contrary, the true Absolute reveals itself and thereby gains an aspect in virtue of which it can be apprehended and represented by art.
But the determinate being of God is not the natural and sensuous as such but the sensuous elevated to non-sensuousness, to spiritual subjectivity which instead of losing in its external appearance the certainty of itself as the Absolute, only acquires precisely through its embodiment a present actual certainty of itself. God in his truth is therefore no bare ideal generated by imagination; on the contrary, he puts himself into the very heart of the finitude and external contingency of existence, and yet knows himself there as a divine subject who remains infinite in himself and makes this infinity explicit to himself. — Hegel
:up:if even Logic and its categories are not forever-and-always concepts that become baptized in space and time through the Transcendental Subject -- but instead are time-bound then the categories are also subject to change just as the world and its objects are — Moliere
There is nothing to explain about a priori synthetic knowledge because there is no a priori -- rather there is the dialectic which the phenomenologist is able to see and explicate through training in philosophy. — Moliere
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