I put the Brother's Karamazov far above any of the influential articles we read. Is it philosophy? Arguably not. But it's lent itself to a great many philosophical treatments. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes. There are some topics that benefit greatly from literature. Ethics is a prime example; Politics is another. A thumbnail sketch may be good enough for logic, but the issues in ethics really require a good imagination, so they benefit from a good story-teller. Raymon Gaita's books "The Philosopher's Dog" andin a different way, "Romulus, My Father"are a good examples. They sell well, too.

Either way, it's a thorny issue the formal solution simply obscures. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Is there a formal solution to the problem of free will?

This birthed the very influential, now hegemonic "neo-liberalism;" again, probably not to its credit. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Forgive me, but, in my book, proper (i.e. traditional, socially responsible) liberalism was hi-jacked in the eighties by capitalist interests. It has very little to do with neo-liberalism.

Continental philosophy still has a fairly large effect on culture through the arts and the humanities, although the effects on some fields like Classics hardly seem to its credit — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well, given that analytic philosophy has very little to say to or about the arts and humanities, that's hardly surprising. I have an impression that there's a good deal of suspicion of science, and a desire to distance philosophy from science. But, to be fair, analytic philosophy looks much more towards science than continental philosophy does. Some would say that it often approaches scientism.

One way this plays out is in the absolutely catastrophic job market for philosophy PhDs. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well, it's hard to sell a non-vocational qualification in the present climate of absolute obsession with The Career. But I do think we should try not to think of an educational qualification as primarily a qualification for a career. Nor is philosophy the only subject facing those issues. Fine Art and English (and languages in general) face the same issues.
Though I can't believe that students enrol for a philosophy qualification at any level expecting to get a job on the strength of it. Lots of them do other things, and, I hope, feel that they benefited from their philosophical training. When I enrolled for my Ph D, I expected to have to start a proper career when I had done the three years' residency. I was not at all sure that I even wanted a job in academia and getting an offer was quite a surprise.

What follows wasn't intended as a bit of silliness as I began writing it, but I think that's what it turned out to be. It may provide amusement if not insight. — Srap Tasmaner

Okay.

Then (P) is the claim that philosophy is disciplined when both (D/s) and (D/o) hold. — Srap Tasmaner

It seems to me that we do not need (D/o) at all, and that this is the point of (P). (P) is the claim that, "Discipline from semantics is by itself sufficient..." If (D/o) were necessary then (D/s) would not be sufficient.

But that means there are two ways for (D/s-) to hold: failure of (D/s), or failure of (D/o). — Srap Tasmaner

I think I understand what you are trying to say here. I think you are trying to say that, "failure of (D/s), or failure of (D/o)," result in a non-philosophical approach. I would simplify this whole thing and just say that philosophy must be disciplined by something, whether that is semantics or something else. "But that is no reason to produce work that is not properly disciplined by anything."

There's a bit of a muddle at the beginning — Srap Tasmaner

I agree with this, by the way. Those sorts of muddles are why I am not fixating on the paper itself.

I think part of the problem here is that "disciplined" is being used in two different ways — Srap Tasmaner

Or else "semantics" is being used in two different ways.

I think part of the problem here is that "disciplined" is being used in two different ways ― not quite two different senses. It's rather like the way we use the word "hot" in two ways: you can ask if something is hot or cold, and you can ask how hot something is (or similarly, how cold). Similarly, discipline seems to be, on the one hand, a matter of how firmly your inquiries are guided by other disciplines, and by how many; but on the other seems to be something that can be achieved, and that stands as the contrary of "undisciplined".

This is rather unfortunate. — Srap Tasmaner

Why is it unfortunate? I don't see a problem with using "disciplined" in that way, just as I do not see a problem with using "hot" in that way. This is a form of analogical predication, where we simply do not have any obvious "unfortunate" equivocation occurring.

Why does it sound like he wants to say "Be disciplined rather than undisciplined" when it will turn out, quite soon, that he means "Be more disciplined by more things, rather than less disciplined by fewer things"? — Srap Tasmaner

I don't find his point hard to understand. "Be disciplined, not undisciplined. That means adhering to at least one standard, and hopefully more than one (e.g. semantics, syntax, logic, common sense...)." This will of course involve rigorously adhering to the standards one adopts (for rigor is a form of discipline). It also involves adhering to more than one standard, supposing this is what discipline requires. The wrinkle is that, depending on how one views 'semantics', it could be a necessary standard that cannot be done without. Either way, the point he is making seems clear to me.

Now what about discipline? Here again, he seems to want to stake out what we might call "realism about discipline" ― i.e., that there is a fact of the matter about whether you are or aren't ― but where he ends up is with this scale of gradations between being disciplined and undisciplined.

Now what you'd expect from his other work (I believe this paper falls between vagueness and knowledge) is that the important corollary to the discovery of this area of gradation between disciplined and undisciplined, is that we cannot know for sure where we fall on it! We may indeed be doing proper disciplined philosophy, but we cannot know it. — Srap Tasmaner

I don't find his ideas here uncongenial. I would phrase it this way: <Everyone agrees that we should be disciplined and not undisciplined, and everyone knows what it means to be extremely disciplined and what it means to be extremely undisciplined>. This is a sufficient starting point. The notion that we need perfectly nailed down lines of where "undisciplined" stops and "disciplined" begins is incorrect.

This is extremely close to an Aristotelian or Thomistic understanding of goodness and badness. It provides the proper initial orientation without foreclosing on the conclusion (e.g. see my post <here> where I answer Banno's charge that if we have a vague target then we already have a conclusion).

So this is the odd thing: Williamson is a diehard realist of the first order, all of whose work seems to force on him a recognition of degrees and weights... — Srap Tasmaner

Why in the world would someone think degrees and weights are incompatible with realism? Realism and teleology have always gone hand in hand, and you don't have teleology without degrees and weights.

And so I think it is with philosophy. It's not really a matter of formalism at all, but more like the distinction in a legal opinion between the actual decision, the language of which is binding on parties, and obiter dicta, which could be important to understanding the decision and complying with it, but which does not have the force of law. (Maybe I should have gone for this analogy first.) — Srap Tasmaner

That all seems fine to me, and relates to what I said here:

In fact good logic courses incorporate a lot of translation between formal languages and natural language... — Leontiskos

But I don't see why anything you are saying would entail that, "no actual philosophical work by anyone anywhere in this thread." I think that if we move away from a focus on formalisms or professional methodologies, then philosophy is taking place in the commonest of places.

To be clear, are you claiming that there is no distinction being made in this thread between the "legal opinion and the actual decision," and therefore there is no philosophy occurring? If so, I would have to think more about the claim.

So would you still have to say? — Fire Ologist

Probably.

I tried to do a bit of logical analysis of the text, but I didn't try all that hard. And I connected what I found to what I know of Williamson, but my knowledge has obvious limits. I'd call that post "quasi-philosophy," how's that?

The labeling is not all that important to me, but I don't think it's helpful to ignore the difference between what is clearly technical work and what isn't. Call it all "philosophy" if you want, but you'll still need some terminology for that obvious distinction.

The labeling is not all that important to me, but I don't think it's helpful to ignore the difference between what is clearly technical work and what isn't. Call it all "philosophy" if you want, but you'll still need some terminology for that obvious distinction. — Srap Tasmaner

Hear, hear. This is what is important: There is an obvious distinction, and we can probably find some consensus on terminology that eschews the "phil/not phil" binary. I've grown used to thinking of what you're calling technical work as simply "semantical or logic-derived analytic phil." A bit cumbersome, maybe, but as you say, we all more or less know what we're talking about.

I think we should also try to avoid a value judgment about what is better or worse philosophy -- style-wise, that is, not in terms of interest or rigor or clarity.

The labeling is not all that important to me, but I don't think it's helpful to ignore the difference between what is clearly technical work and what isn't. Call it all "philosophy" if you want, but you'll still need some terminology for that obvious distinction. — Srap Tasmaner

One could say, if we want to say what we are doing is philosophy, if we want to label it ‘philosophy’, we must do better.

But, I see the more substantive point. The distinctions being made here are the important point, and where someone wants to overlay the label or official domain called ‘philosophy’ isn’t itself the real point. Like for example, it’s all philosophy, sure, but good philosophy will stand apart (maybe with subtlety at times only recognizable as such by good philosophers) and is worth its own distinguishing terminology.

What's curious is this "Let A = ..." business.

"Let A = ..." is a sort of snapshot of the translation process. — Srap Tasmaner

Very good. Reminiscent of Rodl's "naive" questions about what 'p' is supposed to represent.

I've grown used to thinking of what you're calling technical work as simply "semantical or logic-derived analytic phil." A bit cumbersome, maybe, but as you say, we all more or less know what we're talking about.

...interest or rigor or clarity — J

I think the elephant in the room is that we don't know what we mean by "technical work," or, "professional work." We can agree that philosophy requires rigor, but we don't know what we mean by "rigor." That's what is trying to be deciphered.

But what he’s trying to say is that, as Wittgenstein would agree, to understand anything in a fundamental sense is to understand it in a new way, in a fresh context. To treat what is understood as already familiar as a derivative of a pre-existing scheme or picture is to render it meaningless, to fail to understand it in Heidegger’s primordial sense. — Joshs

Again, I'm curious what this amounts to without the hyperbole. To understand anything in a fundamental sense is to understand it in a new way? Why? Couldn't the old way have been fundamental too?

And "to render it meaningless"? Why so drastic? Why not just "to construe it in a less interesting way than the writer intended"? And I'm sorry, but what the heck is a "primordial sense"?

You see where I'm coming from (hopefully with both our senses of humor intact :smile: ). I would very much like to see Heideggerians and others who followed his path stop treating all these matters as if they were do-or-die, right-or-wrong, essential-or-meaningless, succeed-or-fail, agree-or-you-haven't-understood, etc., etc., and aim for more modesty and, dare I say, humility. We're all in this conversation together.

Or, for a more direct example, we might consider how someone like Plantinga goes about showing how "God cannot create a rock so heavy he cannot lift it," is merely logically equivalent with "God can lift any rocks." Does this bit of work resolve the issue?

Not really, it simply misinterprets the problem by trying to squeeze it into formalism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I would sum this up by saying that natural language is much more powerful than artificial languages, such as formal languages (which in fact depend on natural language). I would go back to this:

So how does one offer an argument against logical presuppositions? The most obvious way is to argue that the presupposition fails to capture some real aspect of natural logic or natural language, and by claiming that natural propositions possess a variety of assertoric force that Frege's logic lacks, this is what you are doing. Yet this is where a point like Novák's becomes so important, for logicians like Russell, Frege, Quine, et al., presuppose that natural language is flawed and must be corrected by logic. This moots your point. Further, Quine will set the stage for a "pragmaticizing" of logic, which destroys the idea of ontologically superior logics at its root: — Leontiskos

This is why Scholasticism's rigor is so much more robust than Analytic Philosophy's rigor:

In scholasticism the matters are rather more complicated. Generally speaking, the scholastics lacked the Russellian revisionist attitude towards natural language, and therefore they rarely explicitly challenged the obvious capacity of the natural language to refer to non-existents. Their approach was, generally, to explain and analyse, not to correct language... — Lukáš Novák, Can We Speak About That Which Is Not?, 168

I'll argue now for a slightly different position.

A lot of students have trouble with word problems not because they lack the needed technical mastery ― are unable to solve simple equations ― but because they are stymied by the "setting up" process. They'll say that they just don't know where to begin. There's this little story that involves numbers, but how do get that into a form that you can solve algorithmically?

(I think the issue here is a little different from the "translation" that goes on in introductory logic classes, which is mostly about understanding which words in English map to which logical constants. Not important.)

What I want to say here is that this is a problem of seeing. The question is whether you can detect the picture that the sentences of the word problem are painting and detect the part of the picture that is left blank.

One thing that's a little odd about this is that mathematical notation itself is completely superfluous, and only exists to make understanding such "pictures" easier, to make their structure graspable at a glance.

What the students who struggle lack is this mathematical perception. The real point of word problems is to develop this perception.

Now, as it happens, a great deal of philosophical writing is concerned not with technical issues per se but with changing how you see things. (Among innumerable examples, Wittgenstein is an easy one.) A great deal of work goes not into demonstrating that A is a subset of B, but in getting you to see A and B as sets at all, and particularly for getting you to see that, for the problem at hand, A and B are the relevant sets.

Now to Williamson's point: what he demands is "setting up" work that is through enough that you can reduce a "natural" question to a technical one.

I think we have to call the "setting up" work philosophy; Williamson adds a stricture on the aim of setting up, a way to compare different ways of setting up a problem, and a criterion of success or at least improvement.

This is why Scholasticism's rigor is so much more robust than Analytic Philosophy's rigor: — Leontiskos

Please just stop doing this. No one wants to hear it.

Please just stop doing this. No one wants to hear it. — Srap Tasmaner

I'm quite serious. But while we're at it, please stop with your condescending posts where you instruct other people how to behave, what to write, and how to rewrite their posts to adhere to your own standards. No one wants to hear it.

You have a point. I apologize for giving in to a moment of pique.

Thanks, I appreciate that.

My point that a philosophy which places natural language above formal language is more robust than a philosophy which does not was serious, and I am willing to defend that point. This is a thread about scrutinizing philosophical quality, after all.

You see where I'm coming from (hopefully with both our senses of humor intact :smile: ). I would very much like to see Heideggerians and others who followed his path stop treating all these matters as if they were do-or-die, right-or-wrong, essential-or-meaningless, succeed-or-fail, agree-or-you-haven't-understood, etc., etc., and aim for more modesty and, dare I say, humility. We're all in this conversation together. — J

Don’t get your knickers in a twist . I’m not in philosophy to insist on do-or-die, right or wrong ( Heidegger spent his career deconstructing the concept of truth as correctness). However, as to ‘ agree-or you haven’t understood’, what if we instead put it this way: ‘summarize the ideas of a philosophical school in a way that is reasonably consonant with the community of scholars who inhabit it or you haven’t understood’. Before we can get to the agree or disagree part, we have to get past this key first step. Then it’s fine to say,’there, I’ve shown that I’ve done my due diligence and I still disagree’.Modesty and humility are lovely qualities, but we can’t apply them until we know what it is we are trying to be modest about.

Again, I'm curious what this amounts to without the hyperbole. To understand anything in a fundamental sense is to understand it in a new way? Why? Couldn't the old way have been fundamental too? — J

So here’s an opportunity to familiarize yourself with an important set of ideas grounding Heidegger’s equating the concept of understanding with novelty. Once we have mastered these ideas we can together put on our modesty and humility hats and ask skeptical questions about how essential or primordial they are. Like Deleuze, Foucault and Derrida, Heidegger makes use of Nietzsche’s principle of the Eternal Return of the Same. Rather than viewing it as a cosmological principle, or as imagining that we would have to live the same content of our lives over and over again eternally, they read it as eternal return of the different. Difference must be understood as ontologically prior to identity. Identity is a surface effect of difference. So for instance, in referring to ‘the old way’, they ask how we know what is old except through recollection. Does recollection retrieve a past like fishing out a stored file from a cabinet? Or does memory reinvent what it recalls? Deleuze writes:

When we say that the eternal return is not the return of the Same, or of the Similar or the Equal, we mean that it does not presuppose any identity. On the contrary, it is said of a world without identity, without resemblance or equality. It is said of a world the very ground of which is difference, in which everything rests upon disparities, upon differences of differences which reverberate to infinity (the world of intensity). The eternal return is itself the Identical, the similar and the equal, but it presupposes nothing of itself in that of which it is said. It is said of that which has no identity, no resemblance and no equality. It is the identical which is said of the different, the resemblance which is said of the pure disparate, the equal which is said only of the unequal and the proximity which is said of all distances. Things must be dispersed within difference, and their identity must be dissolved before they become subject to eternal return and to identity in the eternal return…

If repetition exists, it expresses at once a singularity opposed to the general, a universality opposed to the particular, a distinctive opposed to the ordinary, an instantaneous opposed to variation, and an eternity opposed to permanence… in univocity, univocal being is said immediately of individual differences or the universal is said of the most singular independent of any mediation…In this manner, the ground has been superseded by a groundlessness, a universal ungrounding which turns upon itself and cause only the yet-to-come to return.” (Difference and Repetition)

Heidegger et al are not interested in proving the assumptions of identity and a self-identical past incorrect, they want to offer an alternative view that leaves the old ideas alone and burrows beneath them. This way we can keep the naive assumptions but understand their basis more richly. There is no experience that is completely devoid of meaning, but some ways of thought can produce confusion and arbitrariness, as Wittgenstein pointed out. It’s not just Heidegger and his ilk who pound the table for a notion of understanding as transformation. It has made its way into the popular culture in many forms. For instance, John Vervaeke’s popular youtube series on the modern meaning crisis introduces his notion of relevance realization, while Buddhist-influenced approaches teach an idea of ethical coping as practical context-immersed involvement. What these have in common is a view of understanding as primordially enaction and active production rather than epistemological representation.

This topic reminded me of one of the quotes I like on the value of historicism in philosophy, which has tended to play a larger role in Continental thought (although IMO, it hasn't always been a helpful one because it can be problematically absolutized):

Only the abstract is non-historical. Philosophy is, or should be, an effort to think the concrete. That is why it cannot attempt to surmount the conditions of temporality by seeking out categories which seem to be exempt from history, as do mathematics and logic. It is true that any mind at any socio-historical perspective would have to agree on the validity of an inference like: If A, then B; but A; then B. But such truths are purely formal and do not tell anything about the character of existence. If metaphysics views its categories as intelligible in the same manner, it has really taken refuge in formalism and forsworn the concrete. That is why a metaphysics which conceives itself in this way has such a hollow ring to it...

...Let us now consider the second aspect of the sociology of knowledge, its positive contribution. For the impression must not be left that the social and historical dimensions of knowledge are simply a difficulty to be somehow "handled" by one who wants to continue to maintain the objective value of our knowledge. This would be to miss the very real contribution made by the modem historical mode of thought to our appreciation of what objectivity is. Here we may advert to the remarks made in connection with Kant's view that we can only be properly said to know things and that only phenomenal consciousness (a combination of formal category and sense intuition) apprehends things. To this we may add, with Dewey and the pragmatists, that action is also involved in the conception of a "thing."24

Now with this in mind we may confer a very positive cognitional relevance on the social and historical dimensions of human existence. For if metaphysical categories like "being," "soul," "God," "immortality," "freedom," "love," "person," and so forth are to afford us the same assurance as phenomenal knowledge, they must be filled in with some kind of content-they must begin to bear upon something approximating a "thing." Now obviously this content cannot come from the side of sense intuition as such, which cannot exhibit these notions. It might come, however, from action of a superior kind. And here is where the social and historical dimensions become extremely relevant. For it is through his higher activity as a social and historical being that man gives a visible manifestation to the meaning creatively apprehended in these philosophical concepts. His grasp of himself as a trans-phenomenal being is weakened and rendered cognitionally unstable unless he can read it back out of his existence. Therefore, the historical process by which he creates an authentic human existence for himself is integral to the cognitive grasp of the transcendent dimension of real.

Kenneth Gallagher - The Philosophy of Knowledge

Which also reminds me of:

The foundation for such a view was already laid in that great law of"reflecting realities" expressed in the Mystagogia, according to which whole and part, idea and individual, ultimately the whole intelligible world and the whole sensible world, are formed in each other and with in relation to each other.

For the totality of the intellectual world appears mysteriously in sensible forms, expressed through the whole sensible world, to those who have the gift of sight; and the whole sensible world dwells within the intellectual, simplified by the mind into its meanings by the formative process of wisdom.... For the ability to contemplate intellectual realities through sensible ones, by analogy, is at once intellectual insight and a way of understanding the visible world by means of the invisible. It is necessary, surely, that both of these realms-which are ultimately there in order to reveal each other-should possess a true and unmistakable impression of each other and an indestructible relationship to each other.26

This paragraph, which recalls for us the metaphysics of the whole and the part, would be enough in itself to purge Maximus of any reputation of unworldly spiritualism. Precisely as a mystic, he understands the limitations of pure thought, which of its own power embraces the object only through abstract concepts, not on the basis of experience.

26. Mystagogia PG 91, 669 CD

Hans Urs Von Balthasar - Comic Liturgy: The Cosmos According to Maximus the Confessor

In terms of the focus on method, there is perhaps a risk of going too far over into either side here, either the retreat into formalism (abstraction), or a sort of totalitarian empiricism. And I suppose the difficulty here is that the question of method relies to some degree on questions about being itself. It's a bit of a chicken and egg issue. For instance, the conclusions of the elimintivist do support their methodology, but then the methodology is also what leads to their conclusions, and I'm sure this applies in many cases.

@Count Timothy von Icarus, @Joshs

There is a tendency in this thread to use "continental philosophy" as a foil to rigorous philosophy, but that does seem odd to me. Do continental philosophers lack rigor? Not usually. But the key may be that the person who reads them casually lacks rigor, and this reflects back on them. It's almost like the phenomenon where the casual reader who tries to express Einstein's theory of general relativity lacks rigor and precision, and then the listener assumes that Einstein himself must also have lacked rigor and precision.

This also accounts for why analytic-type philosophy is popular on philosophy forums such as this one: because it is easier to understand and learn. It's not a coincidence that Russell gets discussed more than Heidegger. Russell is much more accessible. This presents a problem for continental philosophy, at least if it wishes to be discussed in popular circles.

My point that a philosophy which places natural language above formal language is more robust than a philosophy which does not — Leontiskos

I've said similar things myself, even in this thread, even recently, but at the moment the question of priority is less pressing for me than the issue of how the two are related, so that's what I've been writing about.

@Banno's position here is interesting because he is strongly committed both to the primacy of natural language and the usefulness of classical logic. The argument he often makes is that classical logic is not something you find implicit in ordinary language, as its hidden structure, say, but you can choose to conform your language use to it.

I think that view actually rhymes quite well with the description I've been trying to develop of how formal, technical language can be embedded in natural language, much as mathematical language is and must be embedded in natural language.

There is a tendency in this thread to use "continental philosophy" as a foil to rigorous philosophy, but that does seem odd to me. Do continental philosophers lack rigor? Not usually. But the key may be that the person who reads them casually lacks rigor, and this reflects back on them. It's almost like the phenomenon where the casual reader who tries to express Einstein's theory of general relativity lacks rigor and precision, and then the listener assumes that Einstein himself must also have lacked rigor and precision.

This also accounts for why analytic-type philosophy is popular on philosophy forums such as this one: because it is easier to understand and learn. It's not a coincidence that Russell gets discussed more than Heidegger. Russell is much more accessible. — Leontiskos

Absolutely. It’s hard to explain to someone , especially if their standards of clarity are shaped by the corporate world, how a set of ideas can be rigorous yet not instantly accessible.

I think we have to call the "setting up" work philosophy; Williamson adds a stricture on the aim of setting up, a way to compare different ways of setting up a problem, and a criterion of success or at least improvement. — Srap Tasmaner

I want to say that the crux of the paragraph on page 10, along with @Count Timothy von Icarus ideas about wisdom being determinate, as well as my thread on transparency, all get at a central concern.

The concern is that if something is to be philosophy then it must say something. To "say something" is to offer up something which one believes, which one is willing to defend, and which someone else might deny. Even Williamson's very minimal criterion of "disciplined by something," generates this "saying something." If one offers something that is conditioned and answerable to no discipline whatsoever, then one is not actually saying something.

That's a low water-mark for philosophy, but I find it not only helpful, but also commonly accepted and commonly deployed. A common critique of, say, Heidegger, is that he is just engaging in word-salad without saying anything at all. The rejoinder is never, "Oh, well I agree that he is engaged in mere word-salad, but that's a-ok!" Rather the rejoinder is, "No, he is not engaged in mere word-salad (and if he were then I agree that would be a problem)."

I want to say that this minimal criterion can run much farther than might at first seem possible. This is why the questions, "But what are you saying?," or, "But why does that matter?," are so often helpful. Further, definitions, formal argumentation, and obiter dicta are all aids to saying something, albeit not necessary aids. If they were necessary then I would agree that philosophy could not be done without them.

Absolutely. It’s hard to explain to someone , especially if their standards of clarity are shaped by the corporate world, how a set of ideas can be rigorous yet not instantly accessible. — Joshs

Yes, and also "fruitful" alongside "rigorous."

↪Joshs

Yes, the religious phenomenologists (and we could include Henry, Scheler, and perhaps even Zahavi and Levinas in this group) believe that to exceed the solipsistic self-givenness of the subject requires metaphysics. But why?

Well, first, it resolves the problem of seemingly presupposing giveness as a spontaneous, self-contained movement of potency to act, which would seem to make the world untinelligible. If something can just be given, "for no reason at all," or "no reason in particular," then there is no way to explain why the world is one way and not any other, no way to explain man's progress towards self-determining freedom, or the Good as such. The charge of solipsism against Kant always made some sense to me—not that he suggests it—but that it seems like he might actually be implying it against his will. But, and it's been a while, when I was reading Husserl's later stuff it sort of struck me as in some ways coming close to "Kant with extra steps." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Intention and intuition, potency to act and action are not separated in poststructuralist thinking, except artificially. Repetition and difference are prior to this distinction. But difference does have its reasons. For Husserl, the associative synthesis tying one moment of experience to the next links the two consciousness on the basis of some relevant dimension of commonality and similarity (this is quite different from Hume’s external principle of temporal association). For the poststructuralists as well, relevant relationality is the basis of reason. We are never without criteria of justification.

↪Joshs

How does the transcendence of the subject toward a substantive in-itself (the Goodness , Height and Righteousness of the divine other) not represent a backsliding away from Husserl’s content-free ground towards an arbitrary substantive beginning?

Well, consider my original question, in what way is this even a "ground?" Does it secure the authority of reason? Does it explain it in virtue of its causes or principles? Is the cause of giveness giveness-itself, man self-moving and spontaneously self-creating? The purely descriptive is not really a "ground" in the traditional sense. It is not a first principle either. And there is the issue I mentioned before where other "Great Names" attempt the same exercise and come to a radically different conclusion from Husserl, which seems to me to cast doubt on what we are to make about claims to have stepped behind all mediation. This same issue haunts the Greater Logic. Even advocates like Houlgate readily admit people following the same method are unlikely to come to the same "deductions." — Count Timothy von Icarus

It is not just man that is self-moving, it is the world that is self-moving. And self-movement does not mean willing what one chooses to will. The movement is as much passive as it is active. One finds oneself in motion. One is throw into situations. The meaning and relevance of what we find ourselves thrown into, it’s ‘reason’ emerges out of the fact that we bring our history with us into new situations. The blending of this history with the situations it enters into makes the world always recognizable and familiar to us at some level. We can remain within a stable social structure for quite a long period of time, during which we can lay down the kinds of metaphysical grounds of reason and ethics that we can consult and depend on to be absolutely authoritative.

↪Joshs
Like I said in the other thread, the idea that immediate sensation is maximally unabstract is a presupposition that enters the door with Enlightenment materialism. I don't think it's an obvious conclusion; indeed Hegel's point is that this is the sort of least stable phenomena, devoid of content, and so the least itself and its own ground, the most abstract. The inability to transcend these sorts of presuppositions is partly why I think there is no truly post-modern philosophy, just the same trend of nominalism and individualism cranked continually upwards.

Consider the etiology of "reify' in "res," and it becomes clear that the idea that moving away from immediate sensation as "reifying" is itself a loaded metaphysical supposition, just one that is often being ignored and taken for granted by "bracketing" (arguably, simply dogmatically assumed if this is then used to supplant metaphysical inquiry). It's true that some thinkers do the opposite, and elevate the universal inappropriately. But I think the more subtle thinkers on this topic are often at pains to elevate neither of the "two streams"—particular or universal—over the other. Rather, they are like Ezekiel's two wheels, passing through one another, each reflecting the other and revealing it. — Count Timothy von Icarus

And you didn’t read Husserl as uniting the universal and the particular in his concept of the living present, which is precisely a rejection of the myth of the given?

Of course, if one just assumes nominalism as a starting point by bracketing out realism a priori, one has already elevated the individual, but that's not the same thing as justifying that move, so I think that's one of the difficulties to be addressed. If we presuppose that phenomenology can be understood without reference to what lies outside the bracket we have already cleaved the part from the whole and declared the whole subsistent; or declared the part the whole (solipsism). — Count Timothy von Icarus

What we are bracketing, especially when done by Heidegger or Derrida, are idealizations which exclude from consideration the outside which is their condition of possibility.

Subsistent-Bing-Itself cannot be an "abstraction." It is rather most subsistent, most determined by itself, etc. Being truly infinite, it is not contained in any "abstraction,' hence the via negativa and analogia entis. Whereas the giveness of human phenomenology is always referred outside itself. Being radically contingent, it cannot be its own ground (unless it is self-moving potency), or so the concern goes. — Count Timothy von Icarus

↪Joshs
if we want to critique Husserl’s ground of pure presence as excluding Otherness, we can follow the path set by Nietzsche, Deleuze, Heidegger and Derrida, who don’t fall into the trap of imprisoning transcendence with a substantive divine content.

How can you imprison transcendence? If it is imprisoned, it has simply failed to be truly transcendent. The true infinite isn't a prison, because it is beyond all concepts; e.g. Dionysius, Plotinus, etc. That Nietzsche never studied this tradition and projected the popular 19th century German Protestant pietism he grew up with backwards onto the whole of Christian (and Jewish, Islamic, and Pagan) thought is not really a failing of those traditions, but of Nietzsche as a source of historical analysis. This is also why I wouldn't put him beyond modernity. The God of the German Reformers looms large in the Overman. So too for Heidegger, projecting Suarez back onto the whole of scholastic philosophy, although I will allow he has a vastly better grasp. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The true infinite can only be considered infinite to the extent that it is an endless repetition of the same finite quality. A transcendence which is transcendent to everything else but immanent to itself is no true transcendence. It only has ontological status when we think its iteration, imagining this same quality of Goodness again and again and again. But in doing so, its sense returns to us differently, in endlessly shifting valuative and affective textures of meaning. This is true transcendence, the eternal return of the different.

Banno's position here is interesting because he is strongly committed both to the primacy of natural language and the usefulness of classical logic. The argument he often makes is that classical logic is not something you find implicit in ordinary language, as its hidden structure, say, but you can choose to conform your language use to it.

I think that view actually rhymes quite well with the description I've been trying to develop of how formal, technical language can be embedded in natural language, much as mathematical language is and must be embedded in natural language. — Srap Tasmaner

But isn't the claim that "mathematical language is and must be embedded in natural language," actually contrary to the claim that, "classical logic is not something you find implicit in ordinary language"? At least if mathematics is on par with classical logic? At the very least, you are claiming that some kind of formalism (mathematics) is implicit in ordinary language.

Let me try for two birds with one stone: both this question and the question of philosophical "rigor" or "discipline."

My nephew is four years old. At Halloween we were playing with figurines who had interchangeable costumes. One of the costumes had eight legs. During our taxonomy my nephew claimed that it was an octopus. I disputed his claim and said that it was a spider.

• Nephew: "This one is an octopus."
• Leontiskos: "I think it's a spider."
• Nephew: "I don't think so."
• Leontiskos: "Octopus have suckers, but this one has no suckers."
• Nephew: "Hmm... I still think it's an octopus."
• Leontiskos: "Why?"
• Nephew: "Because it has eight legs."
• Leontiskos: "How many legs does a spider have?"
• Nephew: "Six."
• Leontiskos: "I thought spiders had eight legs?"
• Nephew: "No, octopus have eight legs."

My initial argument was clear enough:

1. All octopus have suckers
2. This thing has no suckers
3. Therefore, this thing is not an octopus

He considered my argument, but he wasn't altogether convinced of my first premise. His rejoinder was also clear enough, and valid:

4. No "animal" has the same number of legs as another animal
5. Therefore, because an octopus has eight legs, therefore a spider does not have eight legs
6. This animal we are playing with has eight legs
7. Therefore it must be an octopus and not a spider

My next argument was as follows:

8. Some "animals" (species) have the same number of legs
9. Therefore, Octopus and spiders might have the same number of legs
10. Therefore, this eight-legged animal might be a spider

My task was to justify (8), but that wasn't too hard since he knows that dogs and lions and giraffes all have four legs, and from this he was able to see that (4) is false. It still took awhile to clear away the certitude-debris that had accumulated from his former way of thinking, but clear away it did. It's also worth noting that (4) is not wholly wrong, insofar as it flows out of the fact that each species is different. It's just that they aren't necessarily different qua number of legs.


Now here's the question: Was my nephew doing philosophy? Was it rigorous? Was it disciplined? Was there logical inference at play, even at four years old? It seems clear to me that he was doing philosophy (and logic, and zoology), perhaps not unlike the budding geometrician in the Meno. Note that my argument is not, "He was doing philosophy because we aren't allowed to say that some putatively philosophical things are not in fact philosophy." Rather, my argument is, "He was doing philosophy because he was involved in the mental rigor and discipline that philosophy requires." If he was not doing philosophy, then what did he lack?

Was my nephew doing philosophy? Was it rigorous? Was it disciplined? Was there logical inference at play, even at four years old? — Leontiskos

Yes.

I find children are pretty open to philosophical exploration, especially with respect to adults. Obviously they're children and do it their way, but it bears all the hallmarks of wonder, asking questions, making distinctions, pointing out what doesn't count, making up rules, etc. etc.

For sure. :up:

I've also tried to help his parents in their quest to keep him well-fed by utilizing philosophy. "When you eat food, your stomach transforms it into you, and you get bigger and stronger and faster. What goes into the toilet is just leftover waste from that process. Therefore it is good to eat food!" His response, translated, was, "You're full of shit, uncle Leontiskos!" :lol:

Don’t get your knickers in a twist . I’m not in philosophy to insist on do-or-die, right or wrong ( Heidegger spent his career deconstructing the concept of truth as correctness). — Joshs

Knickers untwisted! :razz: But the binaries "essential-or-meaningless, succeed-or-fail" are from the Heidegger quotes, and if he doesn't believe he's correct about what he says, he's doing a very good imitation.

‘summarize the ideas of a philosophical school in a way that is reasonably consonant with the community of scholars who inhabit it or you haven’t understood’. Before we can get to the agree or disagree part, we have to get past this key first step. — Joshs

Yes. And so often the step is skipped. It raises a huge question -- bigger than can fit in this thread, probably -- about whether the conditions for understanding are the same as the conditions for verification. But in a case like this, since my understanding of Heidegger on this subject is shaky at best, I have no opinion on whether he's saying something insightful.

Difference must be understood as ontologically prior to identity. — Joshs

OK, I'd like to understand this. Do you believe it's possible to offer a explication that launches from common English uses of the key words (difference, understand, ontological, identity), or would an explication necessarily bring in further technical terms?

I'm reminded of how one of my good friends, who's a physicist, talks to me about his work. At a certain point, inevitably, he'll say something like, "Well, you'd need the math now," and we both know I don't have it. But . . . before reaching that point, he's able to use my language -- non-technical but educated English -- to explain a great deal. He believes that, as a specialist, he has an obligation to do this, as best he's able, which I appreciate very much, since I learn a lot. I will never completely understand the topics he talks about, and as for having an opinion about whether he's "right" about some thesis he puts forward . . . that would be ludicrous. But there is absolutely some translation going on.

So I guess that's my question to you. Can something like "Difference must be understood as ontologically prior to identity" be translated into my language? In my language, neither difference nor identity have anything like ontological priority, because they aren't entities. You see what I mean . . . I can think of some possible paraphrases that do make sense in my language, but I'm afraid they would miss Heidegger's point.

Thanks for that. Interesting.

I think part of the problem here is that "disciplined" is being used in two different ways ― not quite two different senses. It's rather like the way we use the word "hot" in two ways: you can ask if something is hot or cold, and you can ask how hot something is (or similarly, how cold). Similarly, discipline seems to be, on the one hand, a matter of how firmly your inquiries are guided by other disciplines, and by how many; but on the other seems to be something that can be achieved, and that stands as the contrary of "undisciplined". — Srap Tasmaner

Relative and absolute senses. She will be huddled under blankets while I am comfortable in my tee shirt. But we at least agree that she is cold while I am hot; that this is the fact of the matter. And this will be so regardless of what the thermometer shows, it would be impertinent for me to say she was mistaken here. So let's not suppose our differences to be merely subjective.

Perhaps Williamson needs a thermometer and thinks it will solve his problem. But we don't, since we can easily see what is the fact of the matter. It doesn't stop us from adjusting the thermometer.

So the issues is, can we find a setting that is comfortable for us both?

Was my nephew doing philosophy? — Leontiskos

I'll take Williamson's line, not with respect to your nephew, but this question and your answer to it: is your approach here disciplined by the decades of relevant research on how children acquire concepts? It looks to me like the answer is "no". You have, it appears to me, worked out an armchair account of the rational inference that it seems to you *must* underly the process. I don't believe the relevant research supports this account.

So you claim:

1. If an approach is not disciplined by the decades of relevant research, then it isn't philosophy
2. Leontiskos' approach is not disciplined by the decades of relevant research
3. Therefore, Leontiskos' approach is not philosophy

Is that fair or do you want to tweak it before we examine whether it has any merit?