A recent New Yorker article exposed neurologist Oliver Sacks as a fabulist (and apparently a sexual abuser), putting into doubt his famous case studies — NOS4A2

First of all, neither the recent New Yorker article nor any other reputable publication has accused Oliver Sacks of sexual abuse. There is no documented allegation, charge, or credible claim in the historical record that Sacks sexually abused patients or anyone else. So who is the fabulist here?

Secondly, Sacks’ most famous account was captured in the book , and later film, Awakenings. It was about a group of patients in a state of dormancy for years as a result of the Great flu epistemic. who were briefly ‘brought back to life’ with the use of L-dopa. There is hard medical documentation that something like Sacks’s awakenings happened. There are contemporaneous medical reports, Sacks’s own clinical papers and the later neurology literature documenting the trials and typical outcomes.The characters depicted in the book were fictionalized for dramatic effect, which Sacks readily acknowledged, but this doesn’t invalidate the claim of the book that a kind of small miracle took place.

As to the title of the OP, The Man Who Never Mistook his Wife for a Hat, there really was a patient who persistently misidentified his wife as a hat. The way Sack tells that story combines a mixture of clinical observation and literary shaping.

The patient was a music teacher suffering from a severe visual agnosia. Dr. P. could see clearly in a basic optical sense, but he could not integrate visual information into coherent wholes. Faces, objects, and scenes failed to appear to him as unified meaningful entities. He identified people by voice, clothing, or movement, and objects by isolated features rather than by form.

Within that clinical framework, the famous moment of reaching for his wife’s head as though it were a hat is not implausible, nor is it contradicted by what we know about visual agnosia. Patients with this condition can and do misidentify objects in striking, sometimes bizarre ways because the perceptual system that normally binds features into “things” is compromised. From a neurological standpoint, nothing in that incident requires fabrication to make sense.

What later critics and the recent New Yorker discussion complicate is not whether Dr. P. existed or whether he had profound perceptual deficits, but how literally we should read that scene as a verbatim, isolated, camera-ready moment. Whether that exact gesture occurred precisely as written, or whether it condensed multiple confusions into one memorable scene, is something Sacks himself would likely have regarded as beside the point.

The New Yorker piece never claims that everything Oliver Sacks wrote about his patients is false or purely fictional. What it does is discuss previously unpublished journal entries in which Sacks admits to altering or embellishing aspects of patient experiences in his writing to make their stories clearer or more dramatic in the service of empathy or narrative power. It frames his case studies as blending observation with his own emotional, autobiographical perspective, rather than being strictly objective clinical reports. This is something I always was aware of in reading his work, and for me it enhanced the power of his accounts compared with a dry and sterile clinical description.

Some advice: Don’t slip into the extreme tendency of worshipping your heroes as ethically pure and you won’t be catapulted into the opposite extreme of discarding everything they accomplished. It also helps not to make up slanderous accusations about their sexual behavior.

So a relativist can definitely hold moral positions. It's just not about whether the position is right or wrong. It's about who you expect to agree and who you expect to disagree, and how important the position is when measured against the trouble you're likely to run into. Whatever you decide is going to be influenced by culture, but it's also going to influence culture. You're part of the ongoing process of righting and wronging of human activity. — Dawnstorm

I like what you say here. What do you think about relativism with respect to science? There is a kind of morality associated with it, not just in the sense that the proper application of science can be debated, but that the notion of scientific truth rests on valuative criteria. Some argue in the same breath that morals are culturally contingent and relative but that scientific objectivity is not. They can thus claim that some of Hitler’s views can at the same time be judged as morally relative but empirically incorrect.

I’ve never understood deontology. I think Kant would consider me morally rotten. — Tom Storm

I love it. You’re absolutely right. From the vantage of the OP Kant is the enemy.

Is there a meaningful difference between relativism and anti-foundationalism, or is the latter simply a sophisticated version which ultimately fails to avoid the former's traps? — Tom Storm

One difference is that almost all major philosophers who are accused of moral or epistemic relativism explicitly reject the label. What they reject is the following formulation:
truth or moral validity is relative to a framework, such as a culture, language, historical epoch, or conceptual scheme, and there is no non-relative standpoint from which competing frameworks can be judged. Many critics of relativism understand this as entailing either equal validity of all moral claims or an inability to criticize other moral systems. It is this package that thinkers like Rorty, Heidegger, and Derrida reject.

For instance, Rorty abandons the idea of objective, ahistorical foundations for morality and knowledge, which is why he is constantly labeled a relativist. But he insists that his view is not relativist but ethnocentric: we always reason from within our own inherited practices, vocabularies, and moral sentiments. For Rorty, the key point is not that “anything goes,” but that justification is always to someone, to a community with shared norms, without implying that all communities are equally good or beyond criticism.

Heidegger rejects relativism because he doesn’t think the disclosure of Being is a matter of subjective or cultural “points of view.” Historical “worlds” are not interchangeable frameworks chosen by agents; they are ontological conditions that shape what can count as intelligible at all. The difference between epochs is not a difference between equally valid beliefs, but a transformation in how being itself is revealed. From Heidegger’s perspective, calling this “relativism” already presupposes the modern subject–object scheme he is trying to overcome.

Derrida likewise rejects relativism. Deconstruction does not say that meaning or value is merely relative to perspectives, nor that interpretations are equally valid. Derrida insists instead on undecidability under conditions of responsibility. Ethical and interpretive decisions must be made without final, grounding guarantees, but this lack of foundations does not mean arbitrariness. On the contrary, responsibility becomes more demanding when one cannot appeal to absolute rules. Derrida consistently distances himself from relativism by arguing that justice, unlike law, is not relative, even though it cannot be fully present or codified.

What unites these figures is that they reject foundationalism, the idea that morality needs an ahistorical, metaphysically secure ground, while also rejecting the relativist conclusion that norms are therefore merely subjective or interchangeable. The label “relativism” is typically applied by critics who assume that if universal foundations are unavailable, then only relativism remains. But these thinkers reject that forced choice. They are trying to articulate forms of normativity that are historical, situated, and contingent without collapsing into “anything goes.”

re you suggesting, then, that the timbre of a pitch is affected by what happens when another pitch is sounded simultaneously?
— J

Yes. This is an empirical fact. You mentioned overtones yourself. — Pneumenon

Just thought I’d mention that if one is taking a strictly Husserlian approach to phenomenology, all empirical facts are subjective rand relative. Not subjective in the sense of mere opinion, and not relative as merely arbitrary, but subjectively constituted from the perspective of consciousness , and relatively stable across time. But empirical facts about the world can never have the apodictic certainly of knowledge about the grounding transcendental structures of consciousness. They can always be otherwise, and Husserl’s analyses are intended to show this contingency by bracketing as reducing them to more primordial conditions of possibility, not to nail down empirical facts about perceptual experience.

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↪Paine Jamal as the pusher man.

I can quite any time I like... — Banno

I wonder if he has to attend philo-anon meetings now. “Hello everybody, my name is ProtagoranSocratist and I’m a phil-aholic.”

I'm suggesting that "disability" is largely a social construct based around socially enforced expectations of what an adult ought do — Moliere

Is medical disease also a social construct? If not, how do we draw the line between social construction and empirical fact?

One of the tensions in that literature is around the nature of disability. We might focus on that here.

It might seem obvious that disability is a medical issue. On this understanding, it is the body of the person that is the source of the disability. On this account, an amputee is disabled because they are missing a limb, a para is disabled because they cannot move their legs, the blind are disabled because they cannot use their eyes, and so — Banno

The ‘dis’ in disability can be compared to the dis in dis-ease. It serves different purposes depending on the context of use. It can be a socially imposed determination of failure on the part of the so-labeled individual to fit in. Or it can be an internally generated perception of loss of capability. Instructive here is the difference in perception between someone born without sight or hearing and someone who loses these capacities at some point in their life. The former person has never experienced a loss of sight or hearing, and so never experienced few themselves as having become disabled. The latter individual may eventually transition from mourning such a loss to adapting to a new normal. But this process of normalization may never be complete in some persons, regardless of how accommodating the social environment is to someone the culture is happy to label differently abled rather than disabled.

In a philosophical register the absolutely crucial thing is to understand why life matters. Neitszche and Heidegger both foresaw the upsurge of nihilism, which is basically 'nothing matters'. People who think nothing matters often do appalling things - because it doesn't matter. So we have to find a way for life to matter for us. Having a family often does that, as your children's wellbeing will matter, but of course it's not limited to that. A sense of wonderment, and of gratitude, also helps.

Our 'cosmic context' also matters. This is what religion provided: a cosmic story that you were part of — Wayfarer

For Heidegger and Nietzsche, relevance and mattering aren’t optional, they are a priori conditions of possibility for any kind of experience. We don’t begin with non-relevance and then have to find ways of making life matter. Relevance is the pre-condition for the experience of meaninglessness and nihilism. That is, they are privative forms of mattering. Nihilism results from trying to place mattering under a totalizing cosmic ideal of the true or the good.

The X in X=X is already an abstraction from the world we perceive because nothing remains the same from one moment to the next. If we take that pre-linguistic understanding to things like logic, truth and the law of non-contradiction, then its easy to see why these would have limits — ChatteringMonkey

Good point. But when we say that perceptual or felt experience is pre-conceptual, this doesn’t have to indicate there is no ideal component to it. Rather, conceptuality understood as formal, representational predication is a derivative modification of the more primary idealizing process of sense-making.

- Has anyone explicitly used mutual exclusivity at a point as a criterion for when two qualities belong to the same phenomenal space?
- I.e. something like: “red and green are two positions in one and the same space because they cannot co-occur at the same place and time without introducing variation in some orthogonal dimension (e.g. temporal succession, spatial division, etc.)”? I’d really appreciate references (specific texts/sections if possible). — Pneumenon

In Husserl’s Ding und Raum manuscripts (Husserliana XVI), Husserl explicitly analyzes what he calls “Inkompossibilität” of sensuous qualities; two different color-sensings cannot occupy “the selfsame point” in the visual field. In several notes he states that two incompatible color-sensings (e.g. red vs. green) cannot be given together at one identical spatial point. For them to “coexist,” the phenomenological presentation must introduce another mode of variation, typically temporal succession (first red, then green), or
spatial differentiation (red here, green there), or phantasy or imaginative layering, which is not literal co-givenness at the same actual place.

Two chromatic data cannot literally coincide at the same point in the visual field; their “coincidence” is imaginable only by introducing another dimension of variation; temporal, spatial, or modal.

Also check out sections §14–20 in Ideas I.

Lecture by Peter Hacker: “On Certainty Some remarks on the new edition” — Antony Nickles

I’m sure it will be thought-provoking, although Hacker is problematic for me, for reasons his former writing partner Gordon Baker has laid out since he broke from Hacker on Wittgenstein.

Good, but note that my argument says nothing about a so-called "view from nowhere." The reductio does not arrive at, "there is a view from nowhere." It arrives at, "there is a truth claim that is not context dependent." — Leontiskos

How does "there is a truth claim that is not context dependent” not imply a view from nowhere, or sideways-on, or God’s-eye?

Enaction is speculative and experimental, not assertoric.
— Joshs

Sorry, but this makes no sense. It is an attempt to have one's cake and eat it too. You are basically trying to assert without asserting, and then call this "enacting." One can have all the experiences they like, but the assertion of a predication is the assertion of a predication, whether or not it is believed to be based on those experiences. "Truth claims are always context dependent," is an assertion. Style, rhetoric, and neologisms don't change this… The attempt to pretend that, "Truth claims are always context dependent," is not itself a truth claim does not even rise to the level of plausibility. — Leontiskos

I already agree with you that "Truth claims are always context dependent”’takes itself as a predicative assertion. The key word here is ‘always’, because it makes a claim to generality or universality. You see enaction as equivalent to predicative assertion. A relativist sees what you see ( a statement of generality) but sees something else there too, something that particularizes the general and predicative in such a way that they notice what the statement is doing right now. Whenever they encounter what would conventionally be called a general statement, claim or assertion, they cannot help but notice a new ‘how’; how the statement is working right now, in this immediate context. The particularizing ‘how’ isn’t added onto to something called generality, it defines anew what it means to be something like ‘general’, categorical or objective.

You are equivocating between experience and assertion. We could construe an assertion as, "Reporting my experience and extending an invitation to you to experience something similar," or the "foundationalist" could simply take your equivocations into his own mouth and respond to your objection with similar fiat, to the effect that he is "enacting" and not "asserting," so there is no problem to begin with. — Leontiskos

I am making a distinction which is invisible to you, probably similar to the distinction between ‘continuing to be the same’ and ‘continuing to be the same differently’. But there are important implications for the difference between what a foundationalist is doing when they ‘enact’ and what the relativist is doing. The former is representational rather than simply presentational. Because what is enacted is supposed to represent something else, it can correspond to that something else correctly or incorrectly. A kind of ethical judgement is implied. Did the ‘enaction’ get it right or wrong?

By contrast, relativist enaction is not attempting to represent anything. It is instead bringing something new into existence. While the foundationalist uses the representationalist nature of their ‘enactivism’ as a cudgel to coerce conformity to what is ‘true’ in a correspondence sense, the relativist can only invite others to see things in a new light.

You contradict yourself because you say something like, "Truth claims are always context dependent." This means, "Every truth claim, in every context, is context dependent." It is a claim that is supposed to be true in every context, and therefore it is not context dependent. If you want to avoid self-contradiction you would have to say something like, "Truth claims are sometimes context dependent." — Leontiskos

I agree with you that if the relativist-postmodernist is treating their assertion that “truth claims are always context dependent” as itself a truth claim, then they are attempting to achieve a view from nowhere. You might then ask how else one could mean such a statement except as a general claim. The answer writers like Heidegger, Deleuze and Derrida give is that what they are doing is not asserting or claiming but enacting. What’s the difference? A truth claim purports to encompass within its purview a transcontextual temporal span. What I claim to be the case at this moment must be assumed to hold beyond my immediately present experience. Enactment, by contrast, is the experience of the present moment itself as ‘fat’ or specious.

In noticing what takes place right now, I simultanously notice the passing of the previous moment and anticipation of a future moment. If I then draw from this experience of the fat present a notion of primordial ‘contingency’ I can only rely on the present as it repeats itself to confirm and reconfirm this notion of contingency. How do I know the next moment and those that follow it will not lend themselves to truth claims which validate themselves? I only know this by attempting to think such a conception and then notice whether it unfolds itself as self-identical or as self-transforming. Enaction is speculative and experimental, not assertoric.

My submission of your utterance of a truth claim to enaction does not result in a contradiction or refutation of your assertion. It allows me to understand the meaning of your assertion and at the same time to experience it as being buoyed by a current which allows it to remain the same always differently. When I then express this to you, I am reporting gmy experience as it renews itself moment to moment and extending an invitation to you to experience something similar. Either you do or you don’t. If you don’t this does not make your belief in truth claims false. It simply means you will not likely be inclined to participate in the community ofnrelativists who together, each in different ways, are exploring the implications of their experience of the specious present.

Renowned British science columnist Bryan Appleyard thoroughly explores each of these provocative topics in a book that has incited the ire of the scientific community. He points out that while scientists have shaped our lives and our beliefs, they have consistently failed to explain human consciousness, the soul, or the meaning of life. From Galileo to Darwin, from Copernicus to Oppenheimer, countless scientists have proclaimed a universe in which human beings are only an accidental presence. The unwitting result is that science has cast humankind adrift, paralyzing us with fear and cutting us off from personal or religious truth. In Appleyard’s view, science has done us “appalling spiritual damage.” — Understanding the Present, Bryan Applyard

Here’s key claims about the limits of science from Appleyard, and my critique of them:

Appleyard argues that rather than being a neutral method, science has turned into a kind of “mysticism” that only it can address its self-created questions. Pre-Newtonian worldviews (Aristotelian/Christian) provided meaning and moral grounding; the scientific revolution replaced that with a mechanistic cosmos ruled by universal “laws.” Human beings are increasingly viewed as biological machines (genetic coding, deterministic systems), which undermines the sense that we have free will, purpose, or a “soul.” Appleyard doesn’t call for abandoning science. Rather, he argues science should be “humbled”: recognized as one way of knowing, not the only or supreme one. He suggests we need a worldview that allows for meaning, value, and humanity beyond what science currently offers; a balance between scientific insight and spiritual/moral depth.

Appleyard focuses on science, but what he’s really attacking is a range of philosophical worldviews supporting the scientific approaches he disapproves of. Physicalism, mechanism and determinism (which seem to be his targets) belong to an older era of philosophy and science, but have been put into question by more recent philosophical and empirical approaches.

I confess, I'm lending more credence to your point than I think it deserves. — Philosophim

As you know, philosophy is divided into distinctly different communities, camps, cultures. What arguments you think deserve credence and what arguments don’t is to some extent a function of which of these communities you identify with and which ones you don’t. The question of the relation of philosophy and science has been at the center of the cultural wars which reached their peak in the 1990’s. On one side of the debate stands those writers who believe the sciences never actually separated themselves off from philosophy, and instead represent elaborations of philosophical worldviews.

On the other side are those who believe that the sciences function independently of philosophy, and that the role of philosophy is merely to clarify and organize the discoveries of scientists. The first group ( Heidegger, Deleuze, Wittgenstein, Husserl, etc) has written much about the naively held philosophical presuppositions of particular sciences. The second group believes it is the job of the sciences to lead the way toward new knowledge, and the job of philosophy to try and keep up. You are apparently unfamiliarity with the arguments of the first group, but my guess is you would probably find that they don’t deserve any more credence than mine, which may factor into your negative experience in academic philosophy.

If most people are moving in a world of ideas that are 200 years old, then aren't modern day problems really the problems of 200 years ago? And if the world is 100 years behind modern philosophy, doesn't that mean philosophy is 100 years behind where we expect it to be? That would seem to lend credence to my point. Also where did you get the idea of shoving ideas far removed from people's world view when the point is about philosophy being behind and not addressing the current world view? Finally, where did MAGA come from? — Philosophim

When I refer to the ‘cutting edge’ of philosophy of 100 or 200 years ago, I have in mind a tiny handful of thinkers. When you talk about modern day problems, you have in mind the culture as a whole, whereas I’m talking about isolated thinkers. Those thinkers typically become known within the larger academic community ( and from there to the wider community) within a short time and their ideas are written about and taught. But Heidegger’s point stands (“ …a philosophy is creatively grasped at the earliest 100 years after it arises. We Germans are now precisely beginning to prepare ourselves to grasp Leibniz”).

It can take the academic community 100 years or more to effectively understand the radicality of the most important philosophers, even though they have been studying and teaching their work over that period of time. That’s why when you complain about the philosophical community being fixated on the ideas of writers from earlier times I must counter that this is as it should be be as long as the implications of those ideas have yet to be fully appreciated. And buttressing philosophical ideas with the results of the latest sciences is not going to accomplish the ‘modernization’ of philosophy when those very sciences unknowingly ground themselves in philosophical
presuppositions dating back a century or more.

Do you think many either praising or doom-mongering about current A.I. realize that the philosophical underpinning of today’s cutting-edge computer technology can be traced back to the era of Leibnitz?
— Joshs

And if philosophy departments were doing that, then that would be attempting to solve modern day problems with older philosophy — Philosophim

Modern day problems are generated by modern day people. And if most modern day people are moving in a world of ideas produced by cutting edge philosophy of 200 years ago, then it is that older philosophy which defines the very meaning of the modern world, and dealing with those problems requires meeting people where they are at in terms of their worldview. That means beginning from the philosophers they already relate to and moving the needle forward at a pace they can manage. It doesnt mean trying to shove down their throats ideas so far removed from their worldview that they are prompted to respond with a mix of incomprehension and hostility. That is a recipe for political disaster, and in fact it is a large part of the reason MAGA emerged.

Liebniz would laugh at a professor wasting time on his old monad theory if he had the understanding of modern day chemistry and physics we do — Philosophim

My point is that all scientific theories are expressions of underlying philosophical worldviews, and the cutting edge of today’s physics and chemistry is based on philosophical presuppositions harking back more than 150-250 years. Heidegger wrote:

…a philosophy is creatively grasped at the earliest 100 years after it arises. We Germans are now precisely beginning to prepare ourselves to grasp Leibniz.

Heidegger wasn’t just referring to the general public but to the scientific community as well. So the best way to move the needle forward on our ‘modern’ chemistry and physics is to introduce those chemists and physicists to the next era of philosophy they are ready to absorb relative to the philosophy they already understand. That means going back to cutting edge philosophy of at least 100 years ago. For instance, Lee Smolen is an example of a physicist who believes his field desperately needs an infusion of newer philosophical ideas. And if you examine which philosophical era he wants the field to transition from (Kantian) and which era he wants it to enter into (post-Hegelian), you’ll see what I mean.

Btw, nothing I’ve read from you suggests to me that your own philosophical perspective has moved significantly beyond Leibnitz. Can you tell me what philosophers you think have gone beyond his thinking and why?

So then you agree with me that philosophy as a whole is woefully out of date and not with the current times? That was pretty much what I covered above — Philosophim

What I meant was that the full implications of the ideas of thinkers like Kierkegaard, Dilthey, Gadamer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Husserl, Foucault, Deleuze and the later Wittgenstein have yet to be absorbed by many doing philosophy today. The idea of most people today of what it means to be philosophicallly ‘up to date’ is regressive with respect to the above thinkers. Most are still living in the world envisioned by, at best, certain early 19th century writers and , at worst, much older thinkers. So before we can talk about the need for creative innovations in philosophy we have to make sure we aren’t reinventing the wheel. You said you work in programming. Do you think many either praising or doom-mongering about current A.I. realize that the philosophical underpinning of today’s cutting-edge computer technology can be traced back to the era of Leibnitz?

I left the dust bins of history to actually make a positive difference in the world, and have pursued philosophical writings here and there for my own and maybe someone else's use. But why would I ever join the field as more than a hobby when it shuns people like you and I — Philosophim

Did I detect a hint of anti-intelllectualism?

The field will die on its insistence on tradition and fear of creative, relevant progress. — Philosophim

Before the field can make creative, relevant progress , those who fashion themselves as philosophical thinkers need to make sure they are caught up in its acheivements-to-date.
It has been my observation that the vast majority of those writing philosophy today are recycling philosophical ideas from 150-200 years ago.

I would love to read philosophical takes on morality, or gender, or liberty that are grounded in anthropology and evolutionary biology, for example. — Jeremy Murray

Would you also love to hear how anthropological and biological takes on gender are grounded in philosophical presuppositions? For instance, did you know that Queer theory originated in the genealogical-ethnographic-historical studies of Foucault?

Harry Frankfurt's notion of "second-order volitions" may not be very original, but it is advanced with exceptional clarity, which is something analytic philosophy has sometimes done much to improve. And of course, one needs a philosophy for one's own era. Plato could hardly speak to the nature of the modern state, consumerism, capitalism, and the educational system they foster the way Byung-Chul Han, C.S. Lewis, Mark Fisher, or Autumn Kern can. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What I’m interested in is the issue of originality, not with respect to capturing what is particular about one’s own era, but thematizing what is universally and transculturally true. Do you believe modern philosophers such as Hegel are not very original in this regard in comparison with their Greek and Medieval predecessors? Were pre-modern philosophers and theologians the originators and modern philosophers merely the clarifiers and cultural
particulizers?

Even if the origin of trolling is not malicious, it results in a breakdown in trust and in cynicism. — Colo Millz

I’m just skeptical about the idea that we can define ‘trolling’ as a thing, apart from the intersubjective dynamics between the alleged troller and the annoyed accuser. One person’s trolling is another’s critique. From one vantage, it is the troll which produces breakdown in trust and in cynicism. From another vantage, the troll
is merely an adaptive response to breakdown in trust and in cynicism.

It can also explain the particular shape/structure of one's existential crisis. That is, an existential crisis is not the same for everyone who describes themselves as having an "existential crisis". For example, an existential crisis will look different for someone with a Christian background, as opposed to someone with a Hindu background; and their respective solutions to those crises are going to be shaped differently as well. (For example, one can recognize whether a self-described atheist has a Christian or a Hindu background, even without mentioning anything about them having such a background.) — baker

Good points.

↪Joshs The point that interests me is his refutation of the ‘is/ought’ distinction. He phrases it in terms of relevance realisation This revolves around discerning relevance - perceiving what features of a situation could be important in each moment. It puts questions of value, importance, significance and the sacred at the center of the ‘salience landscape’ — Wayfarer

I’m all for dissolving the is/ought distinction, and I agree that Vervaeke challenges this distinction as it relates to the fact/value separation. But I wouldn’t say he dissolves the binary in the radical way that poststructuralists do. Evan Thompson’s comments illustrate the limits of this attempt:

“Nyanaponika juxtaposed descriptive claims about the mind with statements about how one should shape the mind and life, according to the Buddhist path. The second kind of statements are ethical injunctions based on value judgments. In philosophical terms, they are normative claims rather than descriptive ones. Science pursues disinterested explanatory knowledge of the mind, whereas Buddhism also seeks to shape the mind according to certain norms and goals. But this juxtaposition of the descriptive and normative aspects of the Buddhist viewpoint hides a problem, one that still haunts the Buddhism-science dialogue today. On one hand, bare attention—the method of the supposed Buddhist mind science—is said to reveal how the mind truly is. It's said to reveal the truth of the Buddhist doctrine of “no-self” or “nonself”, that there is no abiding self or soul and that the “mind is nothing beyond its cognizing function.”

The no-self doctrine isn't presented as an antecedent normative framework that tells us what ought to happen as a result of practicing bare attention, namely, that we should no longer identify with the mind as the self. Rather, bare attention is presented as disclosing the antecedent truth that there is no self. Bare attention is likened to a scientific procedure or instrument for observing and establishing how things are. On the other hand, mindfulness meditation is a practice that shapes the mind according to certain goals and norms, such as making the mind calmer and less impulsive. Nyanaponika writes that “Bare Attention slows down, or even stops, the transition from thought to action,” and “the plasticity and receptivity of the mind will grow considerably.”

How are these two ways of thinking about bare attention—as disinterested disclosure of how the mind truly is versus as shaping it according to a valued standard—supposed to be related? They seem to be in tension. To disclose something requires not changing it as you disclose it. To shape the mind is to change it. How can bare attention reveal the mind if it also changes it? Consider scientific observation compared to bare attention to one's own mental processes. Scientific observation, like meditation, is a practice and an acquired skill. You need to learn how to see through a microscope or a telescope. But these kinds of instruments are separate from the objects they provide access to, and they don't change them (except, perhaps, at the quantum scale).

Buddhist exceptionalists typically conflate the descriptive and normative aspects of Buddhist doctrines and meditation practices. For example, Sam Harris writes: “a person can embrace the Buddha's teaching, and even become a genuine Buddhist contemplative (and, one must presume, a buddha) without believing anything on insufficient evidence.” He thinks Buddhism is like science: “One starts with the hypothesis that using attention in the prescribed way (meditation), and engaging in or avoiding certain behaviors (ethics), will bear the promised result (wisdom and psychological well-being).” Harris makes it sound as if there is empirical, scientific evidence for the Buddha's normative teaching, including the ideal norm of buddhahood and the possibility of its attainment. I disagree. The concepts of nirvana (nirvana ) and awakening (bodhi ) aren't scientific concepts; they're soteriological ones. They aren't psychological constructs whose validity can be established through measurement. (Why I Am Not A Buddhist)

Vervaeke argues that normativity doesn’t need to be imported from a cosmic telos or moral law.
It’s implicit in our very capacity for rational, self-corrective cognition.

Our “is” — our biological and cognitive architecture — already entails competencies that can be exercised well or badly. “Ought” simply names the direction of self-correction toward more adequate realization of those competences. — Wayfarer

Vervaeke’s view fits squarely within the German Idealist tradition, especially Hegel, with Kantian roots, in his understanding of autonomous reason, freedom as self-determined alignment with rational norms and internalized moral standards. It doesn’t seem partially compatible with the existentialist move to deconstruct the metaphysics of rational subjectivity inaugurated by Kierkegaard. For him, faith involves a personal “leap” beyond reason, sometimes even against ethical universals. Vervaeke’s insistence on autonomous rational standards contrasts with Kierkegaard’s focus on faith as transcending rationality. We are responsible for what matters and how it matter to us, but this isn’t a ‘rational’ responsibility.

If bullshit marks a disregard for truth, trolling marks a disregard for dialogue itself - a symptom of a digital culture that values power more than understanding. — Colo Millz

I would counter that your post confuses cause with symptom by positing the motive for bullshit and trolling as the valuing of arbitrary power for its own sake. You don’t seem to allow that lying, bullshit and trolling may not be primarily intended to cause breakdown in understanding, but may arise as adaptive coping responses to such breakdown. The problem then would not be lying but the deterioration of trust that makes one believe lying is the only recourse. I find the accusation of ‘trolling’ to be most often used as a dismissive weapon to delegitimize the reasoning and justifications of those who we disagree with.

I'm mostly familiar with the notion of a "meaning crisis" through the usual suspects, Nietzsche and his successors, Dostoevsky and later Russian writers like Pelevin, Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre (the slide into emotivism in ethics and aesthetics being a sort of special case of the meaning crisis thesis), William Stace, Bertrand Russell, the New Athiests, etc.

Pierre Hadot's approach to "spiritual exercises" and his focus on Epicureanism and Stoicism as more accessible to moderns, as well as the neo-stoic renaissance in the world of "tech culture" are also good concrete examples of the phenomena.

I would tend to agree with Charles Taylor though that the epistemic and metaphysical presuppositions that leave people "spun" open or closed to "transcendence" are themselves largely aesthetic (which is not to say unimportant; the idea that Beauty is of secondary importance is of course merely the presupposition of a particular sort of Enlightenment "world-view.") I think you can see this clearest in people from a solidly materialist atheist frame who nonetheless recoil from the difficulties of the "sheer mechanism" doctrines of the eliminativists and epiphenomenalists, and find themselves open to the notions of God in Spinoza, deflated versions of Hegel, or—most interesting to me—a sort of bizzaro-world reading of Neoplatonism where the One is a sort of "abstract principle" in the same sense that the law of gravity might be (suffice to say, I don't think this reading survives contact with the sources in question, which is why it is interesting that it arises at all, or why the material must be transformed as it is). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Am I right to surmise that for you the history of Western philosophy since at least Descartes amounts to little more than a reshuffling of older theological concepts, and that you would not feel particularly intellectually or spiritually deprived if you had not been exposed to modern philosophy?

I think it's obviously false that 99.99% of Trump's influential supporters are "traditionalists" however, since many in the camp I am referring to are outspoken transhumanists or post-humanists, who see custom and tradition simply as tools, and who want to move beyond humanity itself. Likewise, "tradition" in the American context normally refers to Protestantism, or at least Christianity, and yet these folks tend to refer to Christians as "Christcucks" or Christ as a "Jew on a stick" (if they are even that polite). — Count Timothy von Icarus

They are traditionalists relative to the kind of thinking that falls within the postmodern philosophical sphere. If one wants to be generous, one can point to Kierkegaard as the first postmodernist, or proto-postmodernist. By traditionalist I mean a perspective which is at least prior to Kierkegaard, Marx and Hegel. Please name specific figures associated with this alt-right trans or post-humanism (Curtis Yarvin, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel?) and I'll offer my take on where their philosophies belong on a historical spectrum. Elon Musk and Peter Theil’s advocacy of that old movement called ‘technocracy’ envisioning a rational, scientific society run by experts, can be traced back to the French Encyclopedists (Condorcet, Saint-Simon). Saint-Simon’s idea of a technocratic elite managing production and social welfare was revived almost verbatim by the 1930s technocracy movement.

↪Joshs I’m interested in your thoughts on this meaning crisis. Do you think that, if it exists, it’s because we’re in a transition period, still haunted by the old beliefs and struggling to adapt to new ways of understanding? What are projects like Vervaeke’s trying to accomplish? It feels to me like they’re trying to put the genie back in the bottle. But as someone who isn’t looking for his kind of answers, it’s perhaps easy for me to misread the material. — Tom Storm

Vervaeke’s’Meaning Crisis’ project stems from a personal crisis he experienced in his 20’s. He grew up in a fundamentalist Christian home, but rejected that faith as an adult. He embraced science instead, but found that it only described what is the case rather than how to live, what Aristotle called phronesis and Buddhist traditions call wisdom. He found the answer to his meaning crisis by combining cognitive science, wisdom traditions (Buddhism, Stoicism, Neoplatonism) and meditative practices. This is what he teaches others in his meaning crisis courses.

So is the world in a meaning crisis? I would say only those who find themselves adrift with respect to former belief systems. This does not include those who are happy with their traditional religious beliefs. But what about the majorities in Europe, the U.K., Australia and other places who consider themselves atheists? While Varvaeke is coming late to the game, Europe has had lots of practice, with atheism having become a popular alternative to faith decades ago. I imagine many of those who consider themselves post-theistic existentialists find meaning in what they choose to do. In my own case I became an atheist at age 15 and transitioned immediately from religious faith to finding meaning in creating my own purposes.

I found embodied cognitive science, and later phenomenology, to be very helpful here, since they deal both with questions of how one should live and what is the case. Still, there are many like Vervaeke who grew up relying on a rigid belief system and found themselves in existential crisis when they abandoned that faith and had nothing to replace it with. The craving to replace one totalizing purpose with another is one explanation for the attraction of cults, and Verveake’s project does have some cult-like characteristics.

A big part of what has defined MAGA as against the W. Bush coalition is the outsized role played by the post-religious, post-modern "nu-right" or "alt-right." They tend to recognize something like a "meaning crisis" but are often themselves nihilists, hence the naked embrace of "might makes right" ideologies. Everything is just a sort of natural selection, etc. Hence, accelerationism coming into vogue among — Count Timothy von Icarus

You’re seriously going to try and pin MAGA on ‘post-modernism’? If by this term you’re just referring to a historical era that we all inhabit, then I suppose that’s innocuous enough, but it also doesn’t say anything about the wide variety of viewpoints that belong to our post
modern condition. If on the other hand you’re referring specifically to postmodernist philosophy, I’d make two points. First, about 99.99% of MAGA adherents are philosophical traditionalists and hew socially conservative. They not only would not consider themselves postmodernists but are vehemently opposed to anything they see as even tangentially connected with it (marxism, wokism, intersectionality, post-colonialism, gender and queer theory, relativism, critical theory). Second, theorists such as Nick Land, and movements such as accelerationism, have been tagged with the label ‘postmodern’ simply because some of them studied or mentioned in their work postmodern figures like Deleuze and Foucault. This does not mean that their own work is in any sense postmodern from a philosophical perspective. Ive read Nick Land. His own philosophical orientation is anti-postmodern and rooted in older, more reactionary traditions of thought. He reads postmodern writers like Nietzsche and Deleuze in ways which are directly opposed to a postmodern reading.

Witt even grants the line of inquiry into the “casual connections” of the brain. “Supposing we tried to construct a mind-model as a result of psychological investigations, a model which, as we should say, would explain the action of the mind…. We may find that such a mind-model would have to be very complicated and intricate in order to explain the observed mental activities….” (p.6)

But he does say that “the method of their solution is that of natural science” and that “this aspect of the mind does not interest us” which is related to one of two aspects of this lecture that I think is the hardest to wrap our heads around. This is just before saying that “For what struck us as being queer about thought and thinking was not at all that it had curious effects which we were not yet able to explain (causally). Our problem, in other words, was not a scientific one; but a muddle felt as a problem — Antony Nickles

My reading of this is the following: Witt isnt simply allowing for a peaceful division of labor, where science does its empirical work and philosophy diagnoses conceptual confusion. Instead, he’s diagnosing the impulse to construct “mind-models” as a grammatical temptation. Our very desire to “explain” thought as if it were a causal process is already the problem. Is this your interpretation too?

Do you think that full reflection is possible for a person who is inside a paradigm? — Astorre

The same processes that embed individuals within social paradigms shape the nature and direction of ‘reflection’. The split between the purely private and inner (reflection) and the socially constructed (paradigm) is artificial.

Horkheimer argues that in this transformation, reason has been stripped of its substantive and ethical content; it has become a tool for calculation, efficiency, and control. This marks the “eclipse” of reason—the point at which rationality itself becomes irrational, serving domination rather than enlightenment, and leaving modern civilization powerful in its techniques but impoverished in meaning and purpose.

This later becomes one of the main themes of Horkheimer and Adorno's critique of the Enlightenment. — Wayfarer

Kant and Hegel took the split between a mechanistic world and a representing subject and united the two on the basis of rational freedom of the Will. Schelling went further by eliminating mechanism from nature. But he retained the metaphysical unity of the willing subject. It seems that Horkheimer and Adorno do the same in grounding meaning in rational thought and rational thought in dialectical materialism. The metaphysical unity of reason doesn’t come into question until the irrational, the unconscious and the historical are given equal billing with rationality in the work of Kierkegaard, the hermeneuticists, phenomenologists and Nietzschean poststructuralists. Meaning as affect becomes the ground for meaning as reason. Kierkegaard is where that metaphysical project breaks down. He refuses the reconciliation between reason and the irrational, faith and knowledge, the finite and the infinite.

↪Ludwig V
To be clear, Bateson falls on the "psychology" side of what Wittgenstein is considering. And so does Chomsky. I don't mean to imply that their ideas are adequate responses to what Wittgenstein is trying to do. — Paine

George Lakoff’s embodied alternative to Chomsky’s innatism comes a bit closer to Wittgenstein.

Well, at lease since Parmenides, "nothing" certainly is a "philosophical issue", we agree on that.
— 180 Proof

Ha! Clever reply 180 Proof. — Philosophim

Das nicht nichtet.

I remember Chomsky saying something like, if W stays away from science, then science will have to return the favor.
— Paine
Well, one sharp put-down deserves another. But the map of academia is contested - what map isn't, particularly when it comes to border territory, where both sides have relevant expertise? We need both sides to recognize where territory is contested, not pretend that everything can be decisively settled. — Ludwig V

Yes, I think Wittgenstein (as well as Husserl, Heidegger and others employing phenomenological and hermeneutic approaches) would respond that it is only by keeping a distance from and bracketing the facts of science that one can see the sense of those facts differently. The fact that science has stayed away from the kind of philosophical clarification that Witt’s work represents is the reason for what Evan Thompson calls its ‘blind spot’ concerning its relation to the Lifeworld that generates it and makes it intelligible.

As for Hegel, I'd say that Will is the culminating synthesis of self-determining awareness that coincides with these 'wordless and indescribable existences.'
— Pantagruel

Huh, i thought that was the hallmark of shopenhauer. I suppose we would have to consult the german translation. — ProtagoranSocratist

You see the beginnings of that in Schelling’s “dark ground”, a pre-rational, primal force or will. It is the non-rational foundation that makes freedom, personality, and consciousness possible. Kierkegaard was influenced by this, and studied with Schelling, but went beyond Schelling’s and Schopenhauer’s Idealism of the Will with his existentialism.

…three persons-in-one deity, which includes God's Son, who is nonetheless begotten not made, one in being with the Father, born of a virgin, both God and man, who was cruelly killed for our salvation, descended into Hell, then resurrected, etc. — Ciceronianus

I think I saw that movie. It was part of Halloween month.

A quick Google search reveals that several authors have applied Gadamer's hermeneutics to theology, making your statements seem extraordinary — Colo Millz

What can i say, I’m an extraordinary person. Any author can take a philosophical position in a theological direction. Gadamer didn’t object to theologians making use of hermeneutical interpretation as long they didnt attempt to treat it as a method grounded in a theological foundation. The fusion of horizons he described can only include such foundational theological tropes as revelation and grace if these are stripped of their authoritative god’s eye grounding and treated instead as horizons located entirely within the contingency of historically mediated, linguistically conditioned, open-ended discursive practices.