I read Saramago's Blindness many years ago. Scared the crap out of me.

I recommend reading the introduction written by Bertrand Russell to get a sense of the "world" as a boundary rather than as a "thing."

I don't agree with Russell's framing of many issues, but he does reflect the distance from the "totality of facts" given in the descriptions:

More interesting than such questions of comparative detail is Mr Wittgenstein's attitude towards the mystical. His attitude upon this grows naturally out of his doctrine in pure logic, according to which the logical proposition is a picture (true or false) of the fact, and has in common with the fact a certain structure. It is this common structure which makes it capable of being a picture of the fact, but the structure cannot itself be put into words, since it is a structure of words, as well as of the facts to which they refer. Everything, therefore, which is involved in the very idea of the expressiveness of language must remain incapable of being expressed in language, and is, therefore, inexpressible in a perfectly precise sense. This inexpressible contains, according to Mr Wittgenstein, the whole of logic and philosophy. — ibid. page 18

OK, should there be a shadow to the right of the station? — BC

Given the angle of the other shadows, yes, there should be a bit of darkness to the right. There is no shadow of the fence either but that could be written off as the platform being too high. If one looks at the angle taken from the height of objects to the shadow cast, the cowboy's angle is greater than the others. And what is with the lantern casting a more washed-out shadow than the others?

I think there is an Escher thing underway along with the Hopper vibe.

For Aristotle, the hierarchical ordering of the different kinds of beings is based on the extent to which form predominates over matter in each. — Eric D Perl Thinking Being - Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition

Aristotle certainly put the active principle above the elements being acted upon. I am not aware of any passage that expresses a ratio of the sort Perl is putting forth.

What if one does not know the facts well enough to speak about them?

For those of us watching at home, are you referring to:

The world is the totality of facts, not of things. — Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1.1

Interesting image. The angle of the shadows changes for different objects. The light source is lower when striking the cowboy. The infrastructure visible to the left of the station is absent to the left of it. The station does not cast a shadow beyond the platform on the right.

I like how the cowboy is a Marlboro Man gone to seed when zoomed in upon.

The Greeks had a word for those who consistently engaged in fallacy, and it wasn’t “philosopher”. — NOS4A2

You are referring, presumably, to the Sophists. Aristotle did criticize their use of logical fallacy but also their misapplication of theory and account to the subject being investigated. Thus observations like the following:

We must therefore be content if, in dealing with subjects and starting from premises thus uncertain, we succeed in presenting a broad outline of the truth: when our subjects and our premises are merely generalities, it is enough if we arrive at generally valid conclusions. Accordingly we may ask the student also to accept the various views we put forward in the same spirit; for it is the mark of an educated mind to expect that amount of exactness in each kind which the nature of the particular subject admits. It is equally unreasonable to accept merely probable conclusions from a mathematician and to demand strict demonstration from an orator. — Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 1094b

In the case of your thesis, the subject is unavailable to the reader, a Chesire Cat, grinning derisively from a branch above.

Thanks for asking.

I should have said more. Kant would like to confirm the "thinking" as what humans do but does not place that on the level of experience that cannot be denied. The world is built upon our 'outward sense' and the simultaneity of events where other beings exist (if we see them that way). That is a bit of a pickle. The leverage of personal experience is used in one way but not another.

I was not aware of "Mendelssohn's materialism." Will check it out.

While we all might be quite happy to be informed our respective “I”’s can’t be really real, we still might be a little reserved in our happiness from being informed it’s no more than an intellectual conception. — Mww

Or at least the conception is posterior to the intuitions which Kant confirms are active in each person. Sort of taking half of Descartes' certainty at the expense of the other.

My life has mixed up those different kinds of action where I do not know where one begins and the other ends.

This goes in a lot of different directions. As a point of departure, how Descartes expresses it as a matter of moving from a center outwards is different from Kant. Kant is asking for something like:

if something thinks then by definition it must exist. — Janus

I don't see the judgement as an empirical one — Janus

Just to be clear, are you addressing Kant's statement in that regard? Where he stated it was such a thing?

I read the passage to mean that we have no way to confirm the judgment, a neat reversal of the special province of the "I" granted by Descartes.

So, no, not an argument for the opposite proposition.

Well, the tiny units I introduced is also a caution regarding assessment. I was agreeing with Pantagruel that trying to learn a discipline required working with its language. But my acceptance is thoroughly bound with the skepticism I have expressed previously about mapping territories.

I harmonize with the way Marcus Aurelius spoke of his teachers and influences. He just lays them out there and lets the reader find their own.

"...it is impossible to make sense of what it is to follow a rule correctly, unless this means that what one is doing is following the practice of others who are like-minded"
It seems that this is the sort of thing that Jamal has in mind, and yet it is not found in Kant. — Banno

It is true that Kant took it as a given that concepts formed through reason were demonstrations of a universal activity. Wittgenstein's view of what is built through interaction would have puzzled him.

But Kant did approach the insufficiency of Descartes' isolation. In the passage I quoted above, there is:

* The "I think" is, as has already been said, an empirical proposition, and contains within itself the proposition "I exist." But I cannot say "Everything that thinks, exists"; for then the property of thinking would make all beings possessing it into necessary beings. Hence my existence also cannot be regarded as inferred from the proposition "I think," as Descartes held (for otherwise the major premise, "Everything that thinks, exists" would have to precede it), — CPR, Kant, B421

The parallel the OP draws between the different views of limits is at least two examples of relative humility measured against what can be established as universals.

The mention of Hegel prompts me to ask about the role of time. Kant was very particular about how that as an element of experience. Wittgenstein is ahistorical in laying out the conditions of what can be said about the world as a whole or experience as Kant treated the matter. But he recognizes that the structures of language games developed over time.

You have framed this in an interesting way. I understand the doubt that the passage was self-referential. If the observation is accepted as sincere, the meaning is different. That would be working within conditions rather than rising above them.

The lack of an underlying logical structure is the position Wittgenstein moved on toward in the Philosophical Investigations, with "family resemblance" — Metaphysician Undercover

How is an appeal to "family resemblance" a negation of logical structure? What structure are you referring to?

I read Wittgenstein to be saying he is still doing philosophy at that juncture. This is a balancing point for many different interpretations. The matter seems to revolve around different methods of reduction. If the activity is no longer "philosophy", what is it?

Maybe you could say more about the implication that philosophy has been abandoned..

So language, and the various language-games, would trump logic or structure. — J

How do you see the 'relativizing' of separate language games as a rejection of logic and structure? That goes against the grain of passages like the following:

"When we do philosophy, we are like savages, primitive people, who hear the way in which civilized people talk, put a false interpretation on it, and then draw the oddest conclusions from this."
(PI 194)

Arguing for the limits to our explanations are not the denial of an existing order.

Do you know of an instance of Habermas bringing the charge of performative contradiction against Wittgenstein?

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. — Jamal

As a criticism of Descartes, the quoted section shows how Descartes presumed a private experience to be able to stand for what can be said of all humans. Kant was willing to approach 'Reason' as that kind of universal but not the individuals using it. As a consequence, a different psychology is needed.

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

I was objecting to your expression of "the human form of life" on the basis of such a proposition being more explanatory than Wittgenstein intended.

The transcendental perspective concerns the necessary conditions for the human experience of the world and defines the limits of this experience and the knowledge of objects therein; and from this perspective, the world around us, what is real in experience, is limited accordingly: the limits of my experience mean the limits of my world. — Jamal

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

From all this one sees that rational psychology has its origin in a mere misunderstanding. The unity of consciousness, which grounds the categories, is here taken for an intuition of the subject as an object, and the category of substance is applied to it. But this unity is only the unity of thinking, through which no object is given; and thus the category of substance, which always presupposes a given intuition, cannot be applied to it, and hence this subject cannot be cognized at all. Thus the subject of the categories cannot, by thinking them, obtain a concept of itself as an object of the categories; for in order to think them, it must take its pure self-consciousness, which is just what is to be explained, as its ground. Likewise, the subject, in which the representation of time originally has its ground, cannot thereby determine its own existence in time, and if the latter cannot be, then the former as a determination of itself (as a thinking being in general) through categories can also not take place. *

* The "I think" is, as has already been said, an empirical proposition, and contains within itself the proposition "I exist." But I cannot say "Everything that thinks, exists"; for then the property of thinking would make all beings possessing it into necessary beings. Hence my existence also cannot be regarded as inferred from the proposition "I think," as Descartes held (for otherwise the major premise, "Everything that thinks, exists" would have to precede it), but rather it is identical with it. It expresses an indeterminate empirical intuition, i.e., a perception (hence it proves that sensation, which consequently belongs to sensibility, grounds this existential proposition), but it precedes the experience that is to determine the object of perception through the category in regard to time; and here existence is not yet a category, which is not related to an indeterminately given object, but rather to an object of which one has a concept, and about which one wants to know whether or not it is posited outside this concept. An indeterminate perception here signifies only something real, which was given, and indeed only to thinking in general, thus not as appearance, and also not as a thing in itself (a noumenon), but rather as something that in fact exists and is indicated as an existing thing in the proposition "I think." For it is to be noted that if I have called the proposition "I think" an empirical proposition, I would not say by this that the I in this proposition is an empirical representation; for it is rather purely intellectual, because it belongs to thinking in general. Only without any empirical representation, which provides the material for thinking, the act I think would not take place, and the empirical is only the condition of the application, or use, of the pure intellectual faculty. — CPR, Kant, B421

On the Wittgenstein side, I do not read the "form of life" as a replacement for what could not be explained by Kant. It seems to me that Wittgenstein avoided expressing the idea as 'essential' as this:

The language games that constitute the lives of human beings thereby constitute the human "form of life," because human beings are linguistic to the core. — Jamal

Is there anything you disagree with? That is the starting point of many philosophies.

Given the possibility of being wrong, can anything be established at all? That has been a philosophical question for some time now.

Gold Sneakers and a large amount of money to spend.

Apologies to Steely Dan.

I think the willingness to test is not only an acceptance of some starting place of conception but willingness to change responses. The Tao that cannot be spoken is behind action in a way explanation is always after the event. François de La Rochefoucauld said it in French, which makes it more elegant:

"Philosophy triumphs easily over past evils and future evils; but present evils triumph over it."

I hope that I am slightly less ignorant than two decades ago, If that is true, it is because I feel and do things differently. As the Art of War notes at the beginning, if you need this book, you failed to learn the preceding lessons.

It is interesting how Enrgoran connected the decision to past scams.

Amongst other objectives, Kant wanted to squelch Hume's depiction of cause as only consisting of accidents and coincidence. David and Immanuel both accepted that Fred is real and not a figment of imagination. Immanuel says that the conditions of experience do not rule out asking how Fred appeared by necessity since Fred does not flicker in and out of immediate presence. But the ways we explore that idea is rimmed by a horizon we will never surpass.

Well, the first word in Homer's Iliad is Anger. We are more easily offended than a flower is buffeted by the wind.

In saying "choice and your act aren't separable" are you agreeing with the thesis of the OP that the actor is ultimately the only "cause" that matters? That seems to be an important criterion when separating incitement from action.

In regard to being "honestly mistaken", how far can that logic be applied when the actor expresses a clear goal in the aftermath? The line between reporting a perception and creating one.

I may be trifling here but I always find it hard to conclude a cause without some very clear, fairly exclusive, reason for the act being caused by whatever is in question. Here, I don't see it. — AmadeusD

Such a reluctance should be equally applied to a claim that all is caused by the choices of a single individual.

If you yell Fire in a crowded theater, but are mistaken, you are not culpable since you believed there was a fire. The resulting fracas and potentially injuries are not on your head, if you truly believed there was a fire. — AmadeusD

If it turns out that the calling out of fire served another purpose, that other purpose will be an intention to consider. That is the basis of Tort law in the U.S.

I think the romantic is involved with exclusivity. That is starkly apparent in sexual relations but has other lives in friendships. The experience of jealousy, envy, and betrayal seems to operate in every landscape. So does the desire to see another be happy for the happiness that brings. Grudges, curses, and blessings seem to have no problem occupying the same space simultaneously. Flirtation has aspects that happen in many places beyond attempts to get laid. When we see that our friends are no longer charmed, a light goes out.

So, I think of the exclusivity of being only for another and vice-versa as a prototype of monogamy. I don't know of any marriages that survive on sex alone.

Passing the Federal Civil Service Exam would be pretty darn objective.

That would account for how the idea has no room for harm to reputation.

Nor can any blame be assigned to slander, deceit, or cheating. In this imagined polity, EJ Carroll can only defame herself. Her telling a person to stop could be a way for the attacker to hear go. Each will only hear the sound of one hand clapping. It would make Hobbe's state of nature look like a knitting club.

You are right to think that this text has been studied carefully. I have a read a lot of Aristotle but this work is not one I have devoted time to. I will look around for attempts to unravel the text.

For Biden to be losing this badly at this point would make no sense if the median voter didn’t broadly agree with my subjective perception. — Chisholm

What higher standard of objectivity could one hope for?

I think this from Zahavi does not fit Kant's view:

"To recognize that all objects appear to us through the lens of some meaning (i.e., are, as Husserl calls them, intentional objects) does not mean that the further course of experience cannot confirm that they are indeed genuinely real objects."

When Kant argues against the 'idealism' of Berkeley and Descartes, the contact with 'real' objects is the immediacy of our outer sense:

Idealism assumed that the only immediate experience is inner experience, and that from that outer things could only be inferred, but, as in any case in which one infers from given effects to determinate causes, only unreliably, since the cause of the representations that we perhaps falsely ascribe to outer things can also lie in us. Yet here it is proved that outer experience is really immediate, *

(The following footnote goes to this sentence)

* The immediate consciousness of the existence of outer things is not presupposed but proved in the preceding theorem, whether we have insight into the possibility of this consciousness or not. The question about the latter would be whether we have only an inner sense but no outer one, rather merely outer imagination. But it is clear that in order for us even to imagine something as external, i.e., to exhibit it to sense in intuition, we must already have an outer sense, and by this means immediately distinguish the mere receptivity of an outer intuition from the spontaneity that characterizes every imagining. For even merely to imagine an outer sense would itself annihilate the faculty of intuition, which is to be determined through the imagination. — Critique of Pure Reason, B276

Trying to gain insight into "the possibility of this consciousness" is going to run afoul of the transcendental illusion discussed at A298 if that is going to require confirming "genuinely real objects." The objectivity of our experience is given. The conditions that make experience possible are beyond us. If reason is to be investigated in a different way, something in Kant's model has to go.

Edit to Add:
Reading the whole review, I see that a distinction is made between Husserl's and Kant's views:

Appealing to a notion of Kantian things in themselves in discussions of realism vs. idealism overlooks the fact that for Kant himself, the things-in-themselves to which we do have access in a positive sense are not the objects that physics describes. — Thomas Neenan

When we discover the indubitable, we've found it. — frank

How do you see that idea expressed in Kant's project?

But what does the way we're bound to think have to do with the way the world actually is? My answer is that Wittgenstein explains that in the Tractatus. What's your answer? — frank

I hear the Tractatus as an anti-explanation. We want what we will never get. Sort of a weird parallel with Kant. But definitely not the same.

If you can't conceive of objects without spatial extension, this shows that you don't learn about space through experience. Knowledge of space and time are a priori. That actually is Copernican! To me, anyway. — frank

In terms of the question of what Kant's view of the limits of empirical knowledge were, it seems to me to be a mistake to see that aligned to any theory of physics. How does one traverse the gap between space and time being posited as intuitions and having those concepts build a model of the world as it "truly" is?