José Saramago — javi2541997

Yesterday I got a copy of Saramago's The Cave. I don't know when I'll get around to reading it.

All the Names — javi2541997

I'm intrigued by the premise.

Cool! :party: :death:

:up:

Fair enough. We shall see.

I may get around to replying to you down the line.

The proper response is “Oh! I get it now, thanks for clearing that up.”

No, you are tacking on that last bit yourself with seemingly no reason, is how it looks to me — flannel jesus

I take @Luke to be saying that indirect realists think perception would have to be “untainted by representation” for it to be direct.

More generally it seems that many of them think directness would require there to be no perceptual process at all. It’s a bit odd, but maybe just shows that indirect realism on the forum is often not thought through (not all of them think this way).

It’s also a species of the fallacy of judging our contact with the world as somehow inferior, distorted, filtered, etc., on the basis that we have a specific and finite way of contacting the world, which is to sneak in the view from nowhere as the model of perfect perception. Thus Luke is right on the mark in accusing some indirect realists of a failure to let go of the mythical view from nowhere.

Yeah, I know I’ve posted it at least five times already.

Excellent, thanks. So maybe @wonderer1’s mention of a “connotation of animism” was quite relevant.

I’d read that Barfield essay if I could find it.

do you think of me as a rat or something like that? — Metaphysician Undercover

Gerbil.

There is an issue I have found with German philosophers in general, and that is that they tend to have very idiosyncratic word usage. It appears to me like they actually choose unusual words, to intentionally hide the origins of their conceptions. So they'll read and learn prior philosophers and prior concepts, then present them in a new way with different words, hiding their sources, and creating the illusion of originality. — Metaphysician Undercover

Scurrilous accusations.

It isn’t true of the German philosophers I’ve read. Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx, Husserl, and Adorno didn’t do it. Their novel terminologies were genuine. Heidegger too: as far as I can see he sincerely coined new terms to get away from certain modes of thinking in philosophy (the conscious subject, etc). Hegel? I don’t know. Obscurantist, let’s say maybe, for the sake of argument—but so as to seem more original than he really was? I don’t buy it. Leibniz? What was he trying to hide?

But yes, people do argue that Freud in particular tried to conceal his sources. Turns out he’d probably read more Nietzsche than he admitted. And if he did take sublimation from someone else it was likely Nietzsche, who used the word in Human, All Too Human.

But he recognizes that the structures of language games developed over time. — Paine

Yes, and the shifting of the river bed of certainties, which points to historical change, as opposed to Kant’s often ahistorical time—time as the form of inner sense, but not as social change. I think these are different topics: Hegel and Wittgenstein on history, Kant on time as such.

I dont know why you want to say that , but I can tell you that in Husserl’s phenomenology objects don’t just appear to a subject as what they are in themselves in all their assumed completeness, but are constituted by the subject through intentional acts. This means they present themselves to the subject within some mode of givenness. For instance, an object can be given in the mode of recollection, imagination or perception. Within spatial perception, we never see the whole object in front of us; the object gives, or presents, itself to us in only one perspectival aspect at a time. So what we understand as the object as a unitary whole is never given to us in its entirety. This abstract unity is transcendent to what we actually experience. — Joshs

Nice summary. I was—or @Banno was—hung up on the connoted attribution of agency to an object that “presents itself.” It wasn’t clear to me how we go from the object as “constituted by the subject through intentional acts” to the object as that which is doing the presenting. I’m not saying this doesn’t work, just that the locution is not clear to me.

It's a good question. I'm not convinced that speaking of things presenting themselves to us necessarily invokes agency on their part. Well at least not agency in the sense of intention to present themselves. In the context of chemistry agency is spoken about—we say there are chemical agents, defined as those compounds or admixtures which have toxic effects on humans.

While things don't have the intention to present themselves, they could be said to have the propensity to do so. Language is multivalent. We can speak of things presenting themselves or being presented or being or becoming present to us.

I don't know if I've answered the question adequately but that's all I've got right now. — Janus

:up:

Yes, that’s pretty much where I’m at.

I'd be curious as to what connotations "present" has in this context and how those connotations might contrast with a scientific view on the matter. — wonderer1

With science we force the object to present more of itself than it wants to. :wink:

Whatever the case, I think we might agree that I made a Freudian slip — Metaphysician Undercover

I deeply regret my failure to make this point myself.

snow, the solid form of H2O, evapourates directly to gas, without passing through the intermediary, liquid form, in the process of evapourating — Metaphysician Undercover

:ok: :razz:

Great stuff.

Whether you can coherently think of the object as autonomous in its capacities to affect us while placing the means by which its nature is revealed as an interaction involving an agent is an issue which clouds all that. Which is a question of whether objects transcendentally condition interaction with them based on their properties. — fdrake

There is no shame in hitting the wall of paralogisms and antinomies. Or maybe there is.

Are you confusing sublimation with Hegel’s sublation?

That said, I see from Googling around that there’s been some talk of sublimation as expressing some of the sense of Hegel’s Aufheben. And I quite like that sense in the context of the OP as well.

The back of the house presents itself to you — Jamal

...has intimations of intent on the part of the back of the house. — Banno

I like it for that reason, but I’m struggling to justify it. I think it’s to do with an ecological, relational, reciprocal sort of idea of perception. Or the idea that the back of the house is independent of you, which can be hinted at by metaphorically ascribing agency to it. Your mind doesn’t present it; it presents itself. It’s already there, waiting (to pounce on your eyeballs).

Maybe you can help @Janus? Why do you and I want to say, and why do some phenomenologists say, that the things we perceive present themselves to us? I feel I’m missing something obvious.

What even is that way of speaking? :chin:

Since it’s not the lack of evidence that leads me to believe that God is not, maybe I’d need more than evidence to persuade me that He is. What I mean is, I cannot bring myself to think of God in terms of evidence at all.

262. I can imagine a man who had grown up in quite special circumstances and been taught that the earth came into being 50 years ago, and therefore believed this. We might instruct him: the earth has long… etc.—We should be trying to give him our picture of the world.

This would happen through a kind of persuasion.

612. At the end of reasons comes persuasion. (Think what happens when missionaries convert natives.) — Wittgenstein, On Certainty

In a nutshell, I’ll believe in God when someone with enough charisma brainwashes me into it, but I can't really imagine that happening. And bearded men on clouds don't work on me either.

:up:

Very amusing, MU.

If your point is that according to Wittgenstein there are multiple forms of life, then of course I agree. My point—which was just an aside—was that in the interpretive debate over the granular level and the plurality or singularity of form(s) of life, I have a way of juggling the different interpretations, viz., that there is a plurality of forms of life among human beings, as well as an overarching singular form of life, and perhaps many levels in between. This is compatible with the presence of exclusive (and even incommensurable) forms.

It's probably worth pursuing it.

Yeah. Well sure, everyone from octopuses to planet-encompassing sentient oceans is welcome. I was throwing "human" around carelessly.

The aliens in the ocean seem to be speaking, though. — Moliere

Cthulhu?

Almost a good point, but I think it can be used in a non-passive sense. The back of the house presents itself to you when you go round and look. Your activities and desires elicit diverse presentings on the part of the thing, so to speak.

but there are bigger fish to fry — Banno

Like explaining for the thousandth time that we see cups, not light?

I mean, given the right circumstances, I and the hunter gatherer can work out how to live together and talk to each other. Could we do this if there were not some general but suprabiological human form of life?

Edit: cross-post. Yes, I think so, that’s kind of what I was thinking.

I feel like denying that “the only common form of life is the basic biological form”, but I’m not ready to pursue it right now. Anyway, you might be right.

I don't see any advantage in such obtuse phrasings — Banno

I like it. It encapsulates direct realism in a way that acknowledges the points made by these naive indirect realists about the physicality of perception, while also in that context showing the right way to use the word “see”.

Thank you for the detailed points. I’m not really interested in promoting the view that Wittgenstein was a linguistic idealist, especially not with regard to his later philosophy, where I agree that “other activities” are part of our forms of life—as I try to say in the OP, it’s our life and social practices in general that matter here. In the OP I do emphasize (perhaps over-emphasize) the linguistic nature of forms of life, but I certainly don’t think that’s all there is to them.

A potentially damaging criticism in your post is your point that in the Tractatus it’s logic, not language, which is transcendental, which means that 5.6 can’t serve as the model of transcendental philosophy in the way I’m using it in the OP. I’m not sure about this, but I suspect it’s not a big deal. By which I mean that I could continue to hold pretty much the same position if I just ditched those statements of the form, the limits of my X mean the limits of my world.

And then there’s this:

In other words, the limits of my form of life mean the limits of my world — Jamal

The form of life of a cloistered monk is not my form of life, but it is possible for me to become a monk and for the monk to leave the monastic life. — Fooloso4

Fair. But I meant it more loosely and suggestively, simply to show that W’s transcendental came to be centred on our concrete practices, rather than on language/logic as it was in the Tractatus, and rather than on the mind as it was for Kant. Perhaps I could have worded it differently, or, again, just ditched 5.6 as model statement.

Incidentally, I tend to think of forms of life hierarchically, as if there’s a multiply nested plurality all within the general human form of life.

On Kant's side, the "limit of experience" is not so much trying get beyond a particular domain, like a dog straining against a tether — Paine

I agree. I don’t think I implied anything like that, but it’s certainly worth emphasizing.

but a problem of perceiving the self, particularly a self in the world: — Paine

From all this one sees that rational psychology . . . — CPR, Kant, B421

As it happens I’ve been reading the paralogisms recently. But I don’t know what you’re getting at with respect to my attempt to describe the transcendental perspective. What Kant has to say in the paralogisms is about “rational psychology” and the indeterminacy of the “I”. It is certainly a consequence of the transcendental perspective but I can’t quite see its specific relevance.

On the Wittgenstein side, I do not read the "form of life" as a replacement for what could not be explained by Kant. — Paine

Nor do I. Actually though, I don’t know what you mean.

:up:

I'd like to read that. Patricia Kitcher is great. I see the abstract mentions McDowell's linking of Kant and late Wittgenstein but I haven't read that.