There are no intuitions (in the ordinary non-Kantian sense) that are not linguistically formed, or at least that can be talked about without putting them into words (and thus interpreting or distorting them). The idea that there are intuitions which directly reveal the "true essence" of reality is a discursively formed idea, which is itself not a "pure intuition". — Janus

And how are we to define a "true essence" of "pure intuition"? If you define this as a kind of qualia, then the question is begged: for "being appeared to redly" isolates the color red from the complete engagement. Keep in mind that calling something "red" is an analytic abstraction, a category imposed on the world to identify in a social context. Our concepts (and I follow Rorty here) are inherently social pragmatic devices that divide an "originarily" undivided world. I think this is clear: when thought is brought to bare on the bare phenomenon, thought's categories slip away, and the abstraction of the social construct yields to an engagement in the world that is affective/cognitive/pragmatic all at once. Here, affect is not dismissed, as philosophy has always tended to ignore it into marginalization. Affect is now IN the qualia. Or, Moore's "non natural quality" (the good; see Principia Ethica) is reintegrated with the whole experience.

No. An existential absolute. Or, apparently, just recently, your foundation of existence. Is one the same as the other? — Mww

It's an odd question to me. One is simply directed to purify one's gaze, deliver observation from the presumptive thinking that generally steps in and makes claims and argues. One don't argue about an intuition. One can deny that there are such things, and many do just this. They say that once an intuition is observed it is already embedded in context, and the "purity" (or innocence) of the observation is entirely undone. I see a sunset and I am already in a body of understanding that takes it in, identifies and classifies it. Innocence here is just an illusion that philosophy can undo just by talking about how impossible it is to observe something "stand alone" for observation itself is crowded with predelineated understanding.

But I argue that even though we face the world in a determinate historical way (educated and enculturated), the event of acknowledging something retains its original status as an intuition. case in point: the radical example of putting your hand in a pot of boiling water. One is not bound to a contextualized setting to understand this in the ways it intuitively presents itself.

The reason Dennett and others reject this kind of intuitionism is because they see only an abstraction in the intuition. That is, analysis places the intuition apart from the understanding, the former being affective, the latter cognitive, and the understanding is distinctively cognitive. Non propositional knowledge is not recognized.

So the main thesis does not concern foundational intuitions, but rather, an existential absolute with respect to the implicit and elusive something science is “about”?

Any idea what that would be, what form it would take? Is that the scope of your elucidation? — Mww

Foundational intuitions? We have to know what these are before choosing in favor of something else. It is important to see that it is not going to a continuity that runs through familiar paradigms, but rather will jump to the chase, so to speak. Such an intuition is accessible to observation. The access lies in the manner in which one takes up this ordinary world. One can observe that there is an error in one's taxes, but then one can turn away from this and ask more basic questions about taxes, their nature, justification, and so on. The latter you could call a "meta" observation about the former. Examining presuppositions of a thing is a move toward a meta review, a review that is about itself. Here, I take this term to the threshold of possible review: the assumptions about the world AS world, the place Wittgenstein wouldn't go, and ask for "review". But now the playing field is very limited. I mean, ask for a review of a language, you step into a metalanguage, perhaps another language, or within the same language, but examining a point of grammar or semantic--THIS meta position is rich with explanatory details. But to pull away from the world, one finds oneself in a kind of no man's land: what lies before one is the world, but any reference to an explanatory source is not available, for all such sources are IN the world and that would b question begging.

But then, one is still IN the world; one has simply arrived at a point where the understanding looses its footing. The question arises, what is there that one loses ones footing about? Here is the encountered intuitive landscape. The meta question turns out to be an encounter with the foundations of existence.

Of course, this has issues.

I have a philosophy degree, but you need to dumb it down for me. I have trouble understanding that. My position is that we can know a few things about reality. Cartesian truths. Mind, thought and consciousness exist. We can't be wrong about that. — RogueAI

But consciousness is a problematic term, because ask what it is, and you refer to something else, like knowledge relations and occurrent experiences, feelings and moods, anticipations, memory and so on; I mean, it is not as if conscious is irreducible, and so one then has to go to its parts, its judgments and affectivity and the structure in which we find these.

Mind is the same. Is this a reference to thought only? But even here, there are questions begged: What is it to think at all? Can thought be "about" what lies before the thinker to be witnessed? Is witnessing something a "pure" event such that the witnessed object imparts knowledge of its nature? Or, is the witnessing bound to the relational features of perception, such that perceiving as a subject act, passive or otherwise, is actually part of the object; the point here being that when I see my cat, the "seeing" is not some impossible transparency, or "mirror" as Rorty put it, but an act thick with epistemic qualifiers. Memory and anticipation appear to be a temporal dynamic inherent to consciousness: what about an analysis of this? How does conscious ever get to be a singularity when it is reductively reducible to many things?

Descartes thought he had found in the cogito an absolute grounding for knowledge claims about the world, because the "I am" cannot be called into question (and then on to God who doesn't deceive about things), but this "I am" is no simple given, is it? It is called 'I am' in the context of language; it is complex in that when you look for the 'I am" you find a multiplicity, not a singularity. One finds thinking, felling and the rest; but a single "I" does not show up.

No philosopher's' names here, save Rorty, in passing. No confusing vocabulary. Just straight thinking about consciousness.

When you visualize a sunset, how is that a "language presence of inner auditory qualities"? — RogueAI

To visualize anything is not to be an infant with eyes to see only. One implicitly KNOWS it is a sunset prior to witnessing, that is, sunsets, like trees and clouds, are already established in a ready to hand explanatory matrix and when one sees one understands, even if one does not actually utter the words. The words are "there" in the background. informing the moment and giving a sense of comfort and familiarity.
But do thoughts exist? Of course. They are clearly not heavy or large like physical existence, but their presence is undeniable. Do they exist when they are only implicitly there (per the above), in an unarticulated experience of a sunset or whatever? Of course, they are unconsciously attending, for the moment requires orientation to be a moment of human experience at all (contra an animal orientation, which carries familiarity, certainly, but no language contexts, save the occasional meow and chirp, that have no cognitive function, or at best, a proto-language function). So: it appears that one cannot take understand as a presence if it does not show itself as such, and implicit thoughts are by definition, not appearing. This is kind of question goes to the generative source of thought and experience itself. Such a generative source cannot be seen. We stand at the threshold of metaphysics.

Aren't you as certain that thinking/mind/thought exists as you are about the truths of logic? — RogueAI

As a thought "exists" and constitutes a presence, a language presence of inner auditory qualities, it stands irrefutable. However, what I can say about this is contingent and interpretative.

Hi, Astrophel.

As the quote from Anna and the King of Siam goes, "Is a puzzlement."

Regards, stay safe 'n well. — Torus34

Cheerio, old chap!

I don't see it as absolute. As i said, "an evolving web of multitudinous interacting intuitions." Recognition of the evolving aspect seem important to me, as it allows for paradigm shifts. — wonderer1

I have no issue with paradigms shifts and an evolving understanding. But there is an untested assumption in all of this, in whatever scientific field you choose (even the science of getting up in the morning. The world is a science laboratory) that it is not all, in the exhaustive analysis of it, "made". There is a confidence that science is "about" something, even if that something is implicit and elusive. It is here I wish to elucidate.

You are correct. The epistemic and ontological distinctions are of convenience.

Sadly people like Heidegger used this problem to talk meaningless twaddle :D — I like sushi

Well, I like sushi, that is a bold statement. I wonder if Being and Time can be called meaningless twaddle in the context of an examination of his thought. Or is this just bluster?

I am not correct because I think epistemic and ontological distinctions are of (mere?) convenience. I am saying quite the opposite: there is an ontology that stands behind, with, and in, all knowledge claims, rendering them epistemically non arbitrary. This is the point.

There is no wrong in speculative metaphysics; just coherence, and logical consistency to support it.

The notion of foundational intuitions initially became coherent, within its own logically consistent framework, in 1781.

Attempts to dismiss them as such, or maybe realign them as something else, began in 1818, been going on ever since. — Mww

I would first ask that the history of this thinking be put aside. Philosophical ideas are timeless, which is why even the pre Socratics still have relevance. Just argue the matter on its manifest merits.

Speculative? This, I am arguing, is not the case at the very basic level. I claim there is an existentialabsolute, that is, something in our contemplative midst that cannot be reduced to what argument can say, cannot be second guessed. This is the bare givenness of the world.

"If A then B; A, therefore B" is also a language construct. Are you a radical skeptic? — RogueAI

Of course not. But one has to see that, first, tautologies are vacuous. Logical validity says nothing about the world, but is self referential. Second, as rigorous as logic is, it is still conceived in an historical casting of terms. I may be very certain modus ponens is right, but when you ask me how my words represent this coercive intuition that binds parts of a proposition in logic, I am lost. This "binding" is simply given, and unspeakable.

I don't really know what you are trying to say here, and I don't know what "foundational intuition" would be. I'm inclined to think that rather than having a foundational intuition, I have an evolving web of multitudinous interacting intuitions.

Or if you prefer, a poetic take. — wonderer1

Well, you have just admitted to having intuitions. You find this kind of thing anathema among analytic philosophers, for it implies something directly apprehended, free of interpretation; and if this is what you mean by intuition, then you are making a very strong claim, the strongest, namely, that the world, through intuition, discloses its nature or essence. This stands apart from science's paradigms that are open to theoretical "progress"" one is already there, in possession of something of the same epistemological status as, say, the Ten Commandments. An absolute.

Isn't the following necessarily true: there exists at least one thinking mind? — RogueAI

Keep in mind that "one thinking mind" is a language construct. How, it may be asked, did one get this? And where does its authority find its basis?

It has recently been shown, rather convincingly [for me, at least,] that we cannot distinguish between living in a simulation and living in a 'real' universe.

That brings into question whether we can truly know anything at all.

Comments? — Torus34

There is a serious question begged here: what is the litmus of knowing at all? the very concept of one standard generating conditions for deviation brings that standard into sharp relief.

But really, if you can't tell the difference between one and the other, then there is no difference, and whatever difference you place OUTSIDE of the pov in question, as with yours and my shared understanding that one is right the other wrong, it is to be called metaphysics.

The modes of necessity are interrelated with the modes of contingency, so that perfect necessity is contingent in relation to a priore necessity, a priore necessity is contingent in relation to logical necessity, and logical necessity is contingent in relation to an "ur-contingency" that would transcend non-contradiction. Each mode of contingency, in turn, represents the possibility of something different from what we see in each subsequent mode of necessity. The very possibility that, in time, we can open the window or make some other alteration in reality is a case where we deal with the contingency of present time and our ability to bring about some new possibility. What this adds up to for universals is that as forms of necessity they represent the rules and guideposts that limit and direct possibility: Universals represent all real possibilities. Thus, what Plato would have called the Form of the Bed, really just means that beds are possible. What would have seemed like a reductio ad absurdum of Plato's theory, that if there is the Form of the Bed, there must also be the Form of the Television (which is thus not an artifact and an invented object at all, but something that the inventor has just "remembered"), now must mean that the universal represents the possibility of the television, which is a possibility based on various necessities of physics (conditioned necessities) and facts (perfect necessities) of history. — Meaning and the Problem of Universals, Kelly Ross

Well, I read most of it, and I know this history, though not as well as Kelly Ross. I don't get it, this is the kind of thing a Buddhist should run a mile from .

A Buddhist, and I am not consulting text on this, is first someone who practices a method (you can argue against all of this, of course), and that method is a withdrawal from conditions of normal experience, that day to day business with one's affairs. A radical withdrawal, not simply relaxing the mind; the kind of withdrawal that makes profound changes in the way the world is perceived, at the level of perception itself. This method has an end, which is the annihilation of time. Time is the everydayness of our affairs (not some absurd Kantian intuition). It is not the taking the trash out, making the dental appointment, and so on; it is the "taking" of the taking the trash out AS the real; it is the reification of our practical world into an ontology. By ontology I do not mean to discuss Plato or Aristotle or any of that philosophical heritage at all. As I see it, that presumptuous talk causes all of philosophy's problems.

Wondering if universals are real certainly does beg that impossible question, what do you mean by 'real'? Such question stops all inquiry in its tracks. If a particular or a universal is real, then 'real' has to have meaning in order for the proposition to make any sense. This brings the inquiry to unproblematic occasions of the real, and this leads to what is apprehended "most directly". This then is an obvious Cartesian turn, for what is MOST direct is what is immediate, unquestioned, intuitive, such that nothing can stand between the affirmation and what is being affirmed.

To me, this is where Buddhism begins. Buddha, the ultimate phenomenologist, who "reduces" the observable environment to what simply appears before one as it appears, and not as it is anything else. All else in meditation is radically suspended, and by this I mean annihilated. Time is annihilated, for though one may analyze the condition in terms of Kantian time (certainly the apriority of the succession of events certainly holds, if you want to talk like that) this analysis is suspended along with everything else. The radically reduced world looms large with all presuppositions in abeyance.

In the west we have phenomenology. Consider what Husserl says in his Cartesian Meditation about his method:

I have thereby chosen to begin in absolute
poverty, with an absolute lack of knowledge. Beginning thus,
obviously one of the first things I ought to do is reflect on how
I might find a method for going on, a method that promises to
lead to genuine knowing

Absolute poverty, of course, is never achieved here or in his Ideas nor in Heidegger, or anywhere else Only in Buddhism (and Hinduism. I drop the metaphysics and the "differences" it makes. I have little patience for the way people invent issues with religion and philosophy. Sit, observe the world. What you seek is a method, not an argument).

Entanglement is fundamental to quantum mechanics. The observer is entangled as is everything else. As I said elsewhere, there is no separation anywhere. — Rich

But notice when you refer to physics, there are the underlying terms of your perceptual/cognitive system that are always already there making the perception possible. One way to put it is that even to conceive of causality, it requires the, if you firmly hold to this ide in all things (as we must because we cannot conceive of an exception; causality is apodictic) causal matrixes of mind (not to put too fine a point on it) to do this, which is blatant circular reasoning. You could conclude that certainly the principle of causality is compromised since it cannot be conceived apart from it own application. But then, this applies to all claims about anything whatsoever. The conclusion is clear: no foundational terms like this can have meaning beyond their intuitive evidence, and this evidence is always compromised, undone, really.

Then the only course of action available is to examine the conditions of its undoing, knowing full we that this too is subject to the same objections. But at least the focus has reached a a more fundamental level, for now we are giving analysis to the very basis of this very strong knowledge claim, the principle of causality. Then all eyes turn to one place: language. Before quantum physics can be what it is, we have look at what it means know at all.

All problems in philosophy end this way. This is why science will never be philosophy.

The conversation has moved on but I wanted to adress this question: — Wayfarer

I'll have to read it. Just a bit...

Husserl’s notion of intentionality fragments the holistic weave of our frame of intelligibility into separated elements.

“It could be shown from the phenomenon of care as the basic structure of Dasein that what phenomenology took to be intentionality and how it took it is fragmentary, a phenomenon regarded merely from the outside. But what is meant by intentionality-the bare and isolated directing-itself-towards-must still be set back into the unified basic structure of being-ahead-of-itself-in-already-being-involved-in. This alone is the authentic phenomenon which corresponds to what inauthentically and only in an isolated direction is meant by intentionality.” — Joshs

It is care that unifies dasein. This is from The History of the Concept of Time, and I read the chapter and can see here why Heidegger might be accused of psychologizing in the way he deals with urges, propensities, love, drives and so forth. Seems convoluted but that is only because it takes a lot to get familiar; but so full of surprising entanglements as with with Augustine and the fable of Hyginus. What an extraordinary thinking person.

Still though, Husserl believed in a transcendental experience, as if, as I see it, if one were in the pov of divine omniscience, one would see it thusly.

I dont think Husserl understood what Heidegger was aiming at. Heidegger’s work was as transcendental as Husserl’s ( not in the Kantian sense) but more radically so. — Joshs

Heidegger more radical than Husserl? I wonder if you would say a few words about this.

Absolutely. That and that stupid farging noumena. Christ-on-a-crutch, how people can convolute that damn thing....like Savery’s ca.1620 dodo bird painting representing something the guy never once laid eyes on. — Mww

But the concept of noumena is not a fiction. But not Kant, rather Husserl et al.

Ah yes, Henry. I'm not a fan, nothing against him personally, but I really don't see what big contribution he made. One of my professors knew him personally, so he was frequently talked about in my program. Never managed to connect with his thought at all, but many others did, so, maybe I'm missing out. — Manuel

It really does depend on what a person is looking for at the outset. Phenomenology has this whole mysterious side that can be either be ignored or elaborated. It's not philosophical (wince!). Heidegger though Husserl was trying to walk on water (gotten from Caputo's Radical Hermeneutics).

I am guilty of this, too. I think being in the world rests of nothing but water, and we all are trying walk. (Wince, with emphasis!)

I tend to agree with your view and it's not many people who would claim that Husserl went beyond Kant. — Manuel

Way beyond, really:

...an infinite realm of being of a new kind, and a sphere of a new kind of experience: transcendental experience......a universal apodictically experienceable structure of the ego (Cartesian Meditations)

Husserl thinks one can experience something transcendental, not merely postulate it. This is why there is so much interest in the his reduction in the recent French Theological turn, so called. Michel Henry puts it like this: "So much appearing, so much Being...... (but then) appearing is everything, being is nothing. Or rather, being only exists because appearing appears and only to the extent that it does."

Henry takes the phenomenological reduction where it leads, to the primacy of the given. What is there and what can only be (as Kant would agree) but what appears before us, and any claim about what might not BE this can only have its basis in what appears. It sounds a bit like transcendental idealism is now clarified to transcendence IN the ideal, but the 'ideal" as a concept is obviated, for there is nothing to play against it, there is no Cartesian res extensa, nor is there a noumenal Other. The Other is appearance itself.
This is the final and radical relief from those absurd dualisms that haunt ontology.

Kant’s understanding of reason is logic relative to human experience. From our perspective, there’s no reason to consider logic beyond reason, and no real capacity to talk about it. But I would argue that an accurately practical understanding of reality is inclusive of unreasonable logic. It’s a further Copernican turn away from Kant. — Possibility

Here is what Eugene Fink (Husserl's protégé) had to say at the beginning of his 6th Cartesian Meditation:

.......instead of soaring up over the world "speculatively," we, in a truly "Copernican revolution," have broken through the confinement of the natural attitude, as the horizon of all our human possibilities for acting and theorizing, and have thrust forward into the dimension of origin for all being, into the constitutive source of the world, into the sphere of transcendental subjectivity. W e have, however, not yet exhibited the constitutive becoming of the world in the sense performances of transcendental life, both those that are presently actual and those that are sedimented,- we have not yet entered into constitutive disciplines and theories.

It is a radical thing to say. " Transcendental subjectivity" is an intuitively powerful concept. I don't agree with the attempt to "totalize" (Levinas) the world to make it make sense. One has to allow the world "its" freedom to present itself, and this requires a "turn" that radicalizes Kant's turn (noumena? what, I ask, is NOT noumenal?) Once the Cartesian turn has been examined for what it is, an attempt to discover an "absolute" ground in our existence and the world's, one is driven deeper into discovery on the interior side of the equation. "Absolute" deserves those inverted commas, of course. Language, the moment it is deployed, both cheapens and reveals.

I don't understand why you have gone from talking about cats to talking about brains. How do we know anything about brains if we don't know anything about the world? How can we say anything about brains if we can't say anything about the world? — Janus

What is the world? We certainly know it, but what is it that we can know it?

But Kant's a-priori presuppositions are, strictly speaking, false. We may individuate space and time as being different things, but they're not. We can't envision space without time, and maybe even time without space.

It's crucial to remember that Kant was a Newtonian, he took Newton's concepts of space and time to be a-priori, but these were empirical postulates made by Newton.

This doesn't mean that there's nothing a-priori, on the contrary, likely most things are, in some sense. But they're not obviously evident to discover, I don't think. — Manuel

But then, he wasn't talking about what is "really" there. His was an analysis, and he would be the first to say that such analyses are not true noumenally. They are true in analysis, and this of course is a conceptual matter about the intuitive structure of (representational) experience. Spacetime, on the other hand, is meant to be an a theoretical construct of physics.

Ask Einstein (who read Kant early on, I know) about the essential intuitions of time and space that are presupposed in putting together his theories and he will tell you this is apples and oranges.

Whether Husserl goes "beyond" Kant, is a matter of taste. Fair or not, we haven't really moved beyond the framework made popular by Kant. We have to modify some of his ideas, such as "spacetime" instead of space and time and most of us would say that his categorical imperative is impossible to live up to. — Manuel

That IS a loaded paragraph. For one, "spacetime" is an empirical concept. That is, its justification is traced back measurements of physical events, their quantities, relations and so on. Kant's thinking is strictly apriori: in order to even think about space and time at all, one has to have certain conditions in mind. It is the "presuppositions" of space and time, not how they are theorized about in science.

An accurate understanding of pleasure/pain, for instance, must take into account the relativity of reason — Possibility

This one I find curious. Is reason relative? Judgments are, but not in their form, rather in their content.

If you and I were in the presence of a fairly ordinary looking cat I can say 'look at the cat, what colour and pattern would you call that, tabby or tiger?' and I can be confident that the answer you give will be sensible and understandable. You won't say 'it's purple, no pattern at all'.

If that's not talking about something in the world, what would count? — Janus

But all eyes are on the process that produces the understanding. It's not like a person is some kind of epistemic mirror of transparency of the world such that the cat is there and I receive the cat in the relation. Quite the opposite: when I observe a brain's physicality, I see there can be nothing more opaque. If that brain can "see" the world as it is, so can a fence post. Yes, the lens in the eye allows light to pass through, and so on. But a brain is a thick organic mass. Nothing out there gets in here. (So how does one affirm the brain to talk about brains and their opacity if to observe a brain requires transparency? It does not.....or does it? Go with the latter, and you are inviting mysticism.)

I don't even know what that means. It seems to be some sort of weird inapt analogy between grasping with the hand and grasping with the mind; I'm not seeing the relevance. — Janus

You would have to consult Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason". He started it with his "Copernican Revolution". The matter turns on what he calls synthetic apriori judgments: The structure of the world is apriori.
But you don't really need Kant for this. Just ask in the most earnest and insisting way: how does anything out there get in here (pointing to the brain)? This would be a question that a physicalist/materialist would have to ask, framed like Neil DeGrasse Tyson would frame it. A brain is a physical thing. How can an epistemic relation exist between it and objects out there? It just makes no sense at all.

Doesn't this super-materialism just look like Christianity with the crust cut off? — kudos

Okay Foucault. And grades are the punitive consequences, the threat, that keeps you line. The classroom is a microcosm of Christendom.

Once you enter Hegel territory, I'm very suspect much of substance is being said. — Manuel

I occasionally go back to The Phenomenology of Spirit. I have to if I want to understand Kierkegaard, and it is not entirely nonsense, though it's not like he's not trying. I certainly do not understand him well, but K considers that Hegel didn't understand Hegel very well, which is the real problem.

Some of Heidegger is presented to us from his lectures, and these can be rambling, like his Parmenides, which I am reading now. Kierkegaard is frankly the worst offender. His style is filled with irony and metaphor and cleverness, combined with an extensive knowledge of the thinkers of his day.

All of the pre Kantians are pretty accessible compared to what came after. I just don't read them. Descartes is important, succinct. Should be read if one is going after Husserl and beyond. Everyone has a bone to pick with Descartes because his res cogitans and res extensa are so challenging. Now he was clear, I think.

Don't we see the same scene in philosophy when we allow freshmen to study Plato and give them a pat on the back even when they're totally off base? We see a light at the end of the tunnel, just as the religious people we snuff our noses at do. — kudos

If they're off base, they will fail the exam.

If you are studying the history of philosophy, then your exam will be dogmatic, you could say. The point would be to get you to understand something. More so if the course is about particle physics or genetics. The ground has to be laid. But with all of the paradigms you might be exposed to, there comes a point in your career at which you can actually put yourself at the cutting edge and see how those paradigms stand up to criticism. Human knowledge is, all of it, open.

Philosophy is different in that its foundations are less stable than science, more arguable. Popular religion is far worse. It doesn't require justification, only faith (and exegeses that are intra-justificatory, you might say) . What makes philosophy so important is that, like religion, it subsumes the whole of human knowledge claims (you know, God the creator rules over all, and so forth), all categories and disciplines, but it insists on objective justification. A tall order, you can say, obviously. The tallest, really. But note how philosophy and religion compete. Philosophy takes up thematically all that religion takes up, principally ethics! Science cannot touch ethics. Religion has ethics as its core concern. Only philosophy subsumes all.
Of course, you can say philosophy goes nowhere, or has no where to go since everything has been said. True and not true. Not much more to be said, but what has been said is hardly understood.

Of course it can; it talks about the world all the time. — Janus

That is a tough call. There are those who think explanations are all references to other explanations, not to put too fine a point on it. The proof lies in the way the answers to questions about any and all things in the world are provided in more language. What is a bank teller? A cat? Your understanding does not reach into the world and grab a cat. It produces definitions, descriptions, talk of properties, contexts, and all of this is language. Of course, we assume there is something out there that is a cat, but the meanings that id the cat are not out there at all.

s ordinary life not also a type of true inquiry? Not to sound offensive, but your zeal for true inquiry sounds a lot like a form of dogma. Why do you need this true inquiry? — kudos

To ask the question, e.g., why are we born to suffer and die can be authentically encountered, and can actually bring one to the threshold of deeper meaning, I would argue. Religious dogma keeps this kind of encounter at bay. (Having said this, I do see the value of a ready to hand dogma for those in crisis, and would not for a moment deny the the relief religion can give them. But this is another story.)

Ideas and concepts lead to actions, beliefs, notions. Don't you think so? — kudos

Of course. But they also lead to other ideas, and perhaps there are meanings in play that are not invented, but there to be witnessed, discovered. True inquiry can take one there. Dogma does not.

My own opinion is a mix of both of these perspectives, but fundamentally I believe that regardless of whatever merits a religious philosophy may have, in actual practice this intellectual apparatus functions as a propaganda device for the powers that endorse it. — _db

You sound like Foucault. Is there nothing substantive beneath the propaganda?

I think we in philosophy rely on dogmatism to the same extent that any religions we can name do. — kudos

Heh, heh....this certainly can't be true. It would assume authentic inquiry is no better than myth.

. I think much religion is dogma and antithetical to philosophy, in as much as wisdom isn't valued as much as obedience. — Tom Storm

Yeah, that is the despicable nature of popular religion. Philosophy, one like myself would argue, is the true religion. In the East they call in jnana yoga.

When I was reading some philosophy as a Catholic teenager I was not aware of the complexity of the relationship it had with religion. The first niggle was when a member of staff at my school said to me that he was worried that if I followed philosophy as a subject that I would end up questioning religious belief. That seemed strange and it was several years after that comment that I realised how the philosophy issues lead to deep questions about religious truth.

For many religious thinkers religion and philosophy were united, but as people have become aware that the assuumptioni of religion, especially Christianity cannot be accepted as evident truths it seems that the two have parted to a large extent, with the philosophy of religion being a branch of philosophy. Of course, there is theology, which is philosophy based, but from it's own reference point of certain 'truths' rather than from a wider angle. — Jack Cummins

At seminaries, Kierkegaard is only grudgingly taught. Thinking about religion both delivers one from the yoke of dogma, and puts the "reality" of religion in full view.

That's exactly right. In general, it's good to be clear and precise. But some people try to be so precise they end up saying nothing at all.

On the other hand - and this applies to Kant - one should be able to express these sophisticated ideas in a manner that most people would at least get a "flavor" of, if they wished to get the gist of the topic.

One can, I think, express Kant's basic notions without much verbiage, which is something he is guilty of. Look at Schopenhauer, for instance, he states many of Kant's ideas in a very clear manner (most of the time). — Manuel

The meticulous mind is very useful, but becomes fascinated by the turning of its own wheels. Thinking becomes inherently entertaining. But on the other hand, some of the most verbose philosophers are extremely insightful. For me, Kierkegaard, Heidegger and others. Verbose, did I say? Certainly. Sometimes after pages and pages, and you then get it, and then, why does he have to say it like that?

That is a very Buddhist observation. — Wayfarer

Right. And it never was the prerogative of language to BE what language talked about. The trap is hermeneutical: Can language ever talk about something other than language? For all my words have their meanings bound to one another, and without this "difference" among terms, meaning falls apart.
But deconstructing meaning leads to disillusionment with language, or, language's culture, history, science paradigms and so on, and a turn toward the presence of the world itself.

Miraculous, literally, that we can do this, because impossible. Meaning is supposed to be what can be said, and if being said is simply this contingent, assailable kind of thing, and if language is this "totality" that makes the world toe the line, then there is no hope for the understanding to step beyond this.

But this kind of thinking misses the point completely. The given actuality of the world is not given in language, but is given intuitively. It is language that has to toe the line to the world, and the world is magnificent, intractable, powerful, eternal, and note how words like this are so elusive, intellectually fuzzy. Analytic philosophers would NEVER talk like this. Hence, the failure of analytic philosophy.

Recall the origin of classical metaphysics with Parmenides. He was an axial age philosopher, contemporary of the Buddha. Parmenides is where the reality of the idea of the forms was first considered, so is the origin of metaphysics proper. (I suppose it is this that is the subject of Heidegger's criticism of Western metaphysics, although I've yet to study that in detail.) — Wayfarer

The flower blooms and fades, but the idea of the flower endures. Which is more real? This is where Plato started. I know Heidegger thought very highly of the Greeks, especially Parmenides and Heraclitus who he considered "primordial" philosophers. He was very interested in making fundamental changes in t he way we think and going back to these beginnings were part of this. But this idea that something deeply important has been lost through the ages of bad metaphysics is a good one. But for Heidegger the answer rested with language, as he thinks language carries forth meaning. But have never read that he could make that really interesting transition from language to intuition, which is one way to talk about what Buddhism is about. Putting aside the details and the mountains of academic work, Buddhism is THE primordial grounding for discovery. Of this I have no doubt at all.

I'm reading Heidegger's Parmenides now. He is always interesting, always leads us away from beaten paths.

I note your appeals to 'pure presence' and (I think) the pre-rational sense of being, which is somehow opposed to the rationalist view or the appeal to reason, of which you are generally dismissive. And I am intuitively sympathetic to that, as I did an MA in Buddhist Studies 10 years ago, and have pursued Buddhist meditation.

I reconciled some of my thoughts on the relationship of Buddhism and Platonic Realism on a thread on dharmawheel - see especially this post (only if you're interested.) — Wayfarer

On this that you wrote, apologies for getting carried away, but it is an interesting idea:

Vert sticky wicket. As with all philosophical questions, first, I say, drop the science. It has no place, nearly, in philosophy. Nominalists that I have read are generally guided by the lack of the "real" presence of concepts, numbers, but once this real is no longer defined in terms of physicality or materiality (whatever these could possibly mean; to me, they are just the reification of a scientist's perspective, an attempt to "solidify" science's claims into a foundation for all issues. But as foundational, they are instantly refutable), then ontological standards are turned on their head: the "out thereness" of physical objects yields to the "presence" of meaning. "Out thereness" doesn't vanish, it is simply understood as a contextually determined concept, which is often used. The salt is "over there" and Jupiter is many miles away.

Anyway, what does this have to do with numbers, concepts and ideas? Keeping in mind that even by a typical physicalist/nominalist's thinking, numbers exist, it's just that they are not numbers. They are reducible to, say, neurological events. I mean, a nominalist has to admit that thinking about a number is not the same as not thinking at all. But your realist (contra nominalists, adn this seems to be your position) wants to say numbers exist AS numbers. I agree with this, for I am convinced that if the number two is not real as the number two, than neither is a house or a chair, for a house is not a house apart from its "eidetic" constitution. The attempt to say the house has a physicality a number doesn't have forgets physicality is just a scientist's biased way of looking at things, and has no real meaning here, and has no foundational justification. Numbers have meaning, and further, meaning is the only real standard for ontology.

But then, all concepts are in essence interpretative entities, and so, a house is not eternally, platonically, a house. It is, as an "intuition of a house", apodictically real, but not in the Platonic sense of forms vs things that "have a share" of the forms. the former simply reduces my thought, talk, remembering, planning about houses, to the actual event of talking, thinking etc. The event did occur! And this is beyond doubt, this actuality of occurrent thinking is absolute. The taking up the givinness of sensible intuitions AS a "house" is no less real than anything one can imagine. BUT, in the way this thinking expresses truth, this becomes arbitrary. Truth in the everyday sense is pragmatic.

You say:

The Buddha (and the Bodhisattvas) are the archetype of all wisdom. And archetypes are, in fact, 'universals', of which individuals are examples or instances. And to my mind, that is how come the Buddhas and the Bodhisattvas are real beyond their particular, individual existence (which I certainly believe is so).


While you can see by the above I don't agree with the Stanford article that says, "universals are occult pseudo-entities that should not be taken seriously by a responsible thinker concerned with ontology," but I do think your claim needs more. Being an archetype of wisdom is something thick with questions, isn't it?
My thinking is very concrete, but the concrete is CERTAINLY NOT what science and its nominalist's take it for.

The point about pure mathematics, is only that it is a real subject, something about which can be completely wrong, yet it contains no empirical percepts whatever. It is a vast area of knowledge - not even to mention applied mathematics, which has had such enormous consequences for our age. And that is the theme of the often-discussed essay by Nobel Laureate, Eugene Wigner, called The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences - actually one of the first articles I encountered via philosophy forums.

And I'm still not seeing how Kant's philosophy of mathematics does justice to this subject, as I put it in this post, although I also recognise that nobody seems to understand what I'm talking about.

So - yes, I understand this approach I'm pursuing is different to yours, and also different to the general preoccupations of phenomenology. I'm trying to understand Platonic realism, which I think is real. I'm heartened by the fact that one of the pre-eminent scholars in that field, Lloyd Gerson, has recently published a book called Platonism and the Possibility of Philosophy, which 'contends that Platonism identifies philosophy with a distinct subject matter, namely, the intelligible world, and seeks to show that the Naturalist rejection of Platonism entails the elimination of a distinct subject matter for philosophy.' All of which is, I suppose, tangential to Kant, but nevertheless Kant is central to it. — Wayfarer

But Plato is metaphysics, Kant tries not to be. He doesn't think, as far as I've read (and this is certainly not everything) we can say anything about our mathematical truths issues from eternity. Plato says the world of becoming has a share of the eternal world of forms. Plato gets awkward when you pull away from things like virtue, justice, the good; see the "third man" arguments, e.g. Is there an eternal form of a cow? A toaster?
But I do see some light on universals in the Platonic sense, but it is not clear to me yet. The argument goes to agency, that is, being a person as an agent that can be aware in the essential way for enlightenment. There IS such a thing as enlightenment, but for this to occur, one has to experience a break with the world. This is another matter.