↪Joshs a
Absence of emotion is an interesting area. In particular, the philosophy and spectrum of autism, raises this question. However, if does come down to what the absence of emotion signifies. Is it about being overwhelmed by the conflicts of the dichotomy of emotion. — Jack Cummins

Autists don’t lack emotion. No one on the planet lacks emotion. Autistics have difficulty in interpreting the meaning of emotion cues in others. Affect is never absent in our lives. What we call absence of feeling is a neutral or blase mood , but this is far from an absence of feeling. All experience is meaningful, and all meaning is valuative. All valuation is affective.

One can become angry, yet not allow anger to dictate or motivate one's responses. Becoming angry does not entail displaying anger. I guess anger could be viewed as a "motivational challenge". — Pantagruel

So the way I would construe anger is as a rapid , multi-step construal of a situation that begins with loss and disappoint, and is immediately followed by assessment of blame. The instigator of my disappointment deliberately did what they did , knowing i would be hurt by it. Alongside this blamefulness assessment is the mobilization for action to get them to change their ways. Given that anger is this complex of assessments , what would it mean to not allow anger to dictate or motivate one’s responses? If anger is preventing us from thinking or doing something else, isnt it because the way we are assessing the situation is preventing us from responding differently ?
1)that it is disappointing and violating
2) that the person responsible for our letdown did what they did deliberately.
3) that we may be able to coax, shame or force them to change their attitude or behavior.

Yes, we could choose not to ‘display’ anger , but that would involve modifying assessment 3, that we have a chance of correcting the other person. It would be a matter of employing the most effective strategy of provoking improvement in the other’s attitude. We could , for instance, decide that physical assault , while possibly effective, may land us in more trouble than it’s worth. But only if we changed assessment 2, that the other was completely culpable, would we be motivated not to display anger at all.

Anger can be legitimate and yetq still unhelpful. It can be a source of strength, courage, and motivation, but only if effectively sublimated. — Pantagruel

But this description seems to separate anger from the perceived meaning of a situation. In your paragraph above, what would happen if we removed the word anger and attributed legitimacy, strength , courage and motivation to the nature of the situation as it is construed , rather than to some separate device we call anger adding these qualities as some special spice? It is the world that is angering, not our physiology.

Would the absence of emotion and anger lead to indifference, and a consequent philosophy of ideas of indifference? — Jack Cummins

The absence of emotion would lead to the absence of experience. Emotion is not some coloration added to thinking, it is the ground of thinking. Every perceived distinction and differentiation is intrinsically affective in nature.

Discussions on the philosophy forum often deteriorate into angry exchanges. In those cases, anger is counter-productive to philosophy — Pantagruel

Bitch

where human emotions come from is also an important question. Emotions, and the instinctual aspects of human life may go back to the instinctual aspects of physiology. This is about lower and higher needs, as suggested by Maslow's in his hierarchy of needs. — Jack Cummins

Yes, I think the physiological and evolutionary aspects of anger (and emotions in general) won’t tell us the central things we need to understand about anger. Even if we could entirely remove what people think of as the ‘instinctive’ or reflexive physiological responses associated with anger, the essential features of anger would remain , which, as I mentioned above, have to do with a cognitive assessment of blame and culpability. The cool , rational judgement of culpability is just as much a product of anger as is uncontrolled flailing about in rage. To understand the origin of anger is to understand the basis of goal-directed cognition.

↪Joshs I'm of the opinion it's determinate of the person venting, regarding a strong or weak will. One can be angry at things that can't apologize. — Vaskane

I think , in a sense, when we are angry at things that can’t apologize, we are anthropomorphizing them. We angrily kick the chair that got in our way to punish it, as if it had a personality. We dont really believe this in a later moment of lucidity, where we realize the one our anger was directed at, the one we are trying to punish, isnt really the chair, but our spouse or our boss, orthe gods who put that chair in our way, or maybe even ourselves for being such a spaz. But as long as there is anger, there is a desire to teach a sentient being a lesson.

↪Joshs If one does not feel the effects of their power from venting, perhaps. Which, one's power tends to be easily felt, in the midst of an apology — Vaskane

I would think venting is only a first step toward dissipating angry thinking. It moves one from a state of active to passive anger without resolving the cause of the anger, so the anger will continue on as seething resentment. Getting the other’s contrition, or forgiving them, takes one further. But even these don’t tell us why the other deviated from our expectations of them. Only discovering that the other’s actions were not deliberately meant, or were justified in our eyes, can our anger be completely eliminated.

Hatred leads to formulated values? Anger is something the rises up, and can be overcome upon venting. — Vaskane

It is only reliably overcome by attaining the other’s sincere apology. Venting achieves only temporary relief.

In some ways, anger may be seen as something to be overcome emotionally, or as an idea,or frequency. How does it stand in connection with philosophical ideas and ideals of love and hatred? — Jack Cummins

I believe the affective spectrum of anger includes irritation, annoyance, hostility, disapproval, condemnation, feeling insulted, taking umbrage, resentment, exasperation, impatience, hatred, fury, ire, outrage, contempt, righteous indignation, ‘adaptive' or rational anger, perceiving the other as deliberately thoughtless, rude, careless, negligent, complacent, lazy, self-indulgent, malevolent, dishonest, narcissistic, malicious, culpable, perverse, inconsiderate, intentionally oppressive, anti-social, hypocritical, repressive or unfair, disrespectful, disgraceful, greedy, evil, sinful, criminal, a miscreant. Anger is also implicated in cooly, calmly and rationally determining the other to have deliberately committed a moral transgression, a social injustice or injustice in general, or as committing a moral wrong.

So what do all of these have in common? Anger is a complex multi-step process of assessment. It always begins with a disappointment of expectations , the perception that another has violated or fallen short of our standard of conduct. But this recognition is not enough to produce anger. Anger implies blame, and in blame we believe the other knew better than to do what they did to us in breaking a bond of trust . In other words, in anger we perceive that the other succumbed to some arbitrary , capricious impulse or temptation to deviate from how they knew they should have behaved with us. Thus, built into our angry assessment is the hope that we can sway the wayward other back into the fold, to return them back to where we believe they should have been, to ‘give them a taste of their own medicine’, ‘teach them a lesson’ to coax them to ‘mend their ways’, to repair a lost trust or intimacy. This hope is what gives anger its active quality. But the impulse of anger is not fundamentally aimed at destroying the wayward other , but toward achieving the other’s remorse, apology, repentance.

One could say it, but whether or not they would nonetheless be contradicting Augustine's standpoint is another matter. If I claim that "truth is absolute," and you in turn claim that "yes, truth can be absolute, but only ever relatively," this seems more like negating my claim than "subsuming" it. Further, the claim that "truth can be absolute, but it is only ever absolute in relative terms, based on presuppositions that are taken-for-granted, and people can always accept multiple equally valid, but different presuppositions," itself appears to be an absolute statement about truth to the effect that "there can be no absolute statements re truth." So aside from contradicting the position it claims to still affirm, it also refutes itself — Count Timothy von Icarus

Earlier, I commented that an absolute statement about truth to the effect that "there can be no absolute statements re truth” isn’t really how I see what I do when I find constant change in my experience moment to moment. An absolute statement is absolute only because the person who makes it has already decided that it will always be the case and doesnt have to be re-affirmed. When one believes a meaning is absolute , they don’t believe it has to be checked against the contextual changes that time brings. When I declare that the world continually reinvents itself moment to moment, this ‘truth’ is only applicable this moment. You’ll have ask me again next moment , and the moment after that , if I still find this to be the case. I am letting time, history and actual events dictate for me whether this ‘truth’ continues to be valid, and in what form, rather then deciding in advance what is absolutely the case.

Since l don’t believe there is any aspect of the world that sits still, that persists as itself, that isn't changed by a change in any other aspect of the world, truth and refutation mean something different for me that for you. Contradiction, in the sense of fundamental difference that precedes any notion of identity or the same, is thus the basic ‘fact’ of being. Can one understand something that contradicts itself every moment , yet continues to be the ‘same’ differently , through and as a result of this endless self-contradiction, as a style, pattern, theme? If we say that something is validated in the sense that it belongs to such a continually self-contradicting, temporally unfolding theme, pattern or style, then what do people mean when they say that something is refuted or is self-refuting?

Thompson would look at his approach as continually self-contradicting, but in a way that maintains a relative ongoing thematic unity. He would also consider Augustine’s model of truth as a continually self-contradicting thematic that maintains its own validity.
Augustine’s assertions already deconstruct themselves internally. When he depicts truth as presence, it is presence relative to a context of use and relevance, and this context of relevance re-affirms itself by altering itself. It may sound like I’m adding things that are foreign to and contradict Augustine’s assertions, but all I’m
doing is drawing out explicitly what is already implicit in his own thinking.

So what would Thompson consider to be the difference between his valid thematic and Augustine’s valid approach? It can’t simply be that they contradict each other, since everything exists in a state of contradiction with respect to everything else. He might say that Augustine’s self-contradicting thematic approach unfolds more slowly and ploddingly than his own, and he prefers approaches that transgress into new territory more aggressively since they bring him pleasure and a richer sense of meaning. We could say Thompson swaps out the ethical notions of refutation , truth and falsity for fast vs slow speeds of transformation.

if we are to embrace a position like Thompson's we must have some way of determining between it and Saint Augustine's formulation that "truth is equivalent with being; what is true is, and what is false is not." To say that Thompson is right is to say that Augustine is wrong. To say that they are both right, is still to say that Augustine is wrong. — Count Timothy von Icarus

One could say that Thompson’s position subsumes and enriches Augustine’s without invalidating it. Each offers a valid, workable guide to navigating the world by anticipating events. To say that Thompson’s approach enriches Augustine’s is to say that Thompson understands from his vantage , and can effectively summarize and live within, Augustine's approach. But he can also place the dimensions of Augustine’s model within a more intricate structure of understanding that accomplishes what Augustine’s does, but exceeds it in of anticipatory power.

All validation cannot depend on metaphysics, and metaphysics in turn necessarily be based on unquestionable presuppositions we take for granted. If this were the case, then all judgements re validation/truth/accuracy etc. would be equally valid, merely a matter of which presuppositions we have embraced — Count Timothy von Icarus

They are equally valid, but not at the same time and in the same context. We only inhabit one social milieu at a time, and each dictates its own unique ways of making our way around. We may take these ways of sense making for granted. That is , their presuppositions may be hidden from us, but they are nevertheless always being put into question in subtle ways in the way our language continually shifts the sense of its meanings within a given culture. This is what Wittgenstein’s language games point to. Every time we use a word, its conceptual meaning subtly shifts its sense in response to the novelty of the context of interaction. Word use is thus a kind of questioning concerning what is at stake and what is at issue whenever we use a word concept. Wittgenstein said that these subtle shifts in sense of words via their use can be seen to share a family resemblance. But this resemblance is not a general category of meaning supervening on the particular senses. There is no common element among all the senses.

We take for granted that words just mean what they mean, that they are merely tools that hook onto a reality independent of the words. But this taking for granted doesn’t prevent actual word use from continually shifting. We simply don’t notice this in the way we tend to talk about the relation between concepts and reality. As we alter our milieu with our arts , sciences and technologies, the way these changes feed back to us requires us to alter our metaphysical assumptions and along with it the basis of our scientific truths. Again, we may take for granted that the truths about the world we describe with our word concepts remains constant as we adjust those concepts, because we simply don’t notice the subtle way that our paradigm shifts alter the very foundations of those truths.

This is what makes paradigm shifts revolutionary rather than evolutionary.
— Joshs

Can you elaborate on this evaluation? Why could a paradigm shift not be both? — Pantagruel

Actually, Kuhn would say yes. Paradigms shifts are revolutionary in the sense that the content of new schemes and standards of measurement and validation are not logically commensurate with those they replace. But they are evolutionary in that new paradigms solve more puzzles than older ones.

↪Gnomon I'm closer to saying that there is no metaphysical speculation; it is rather metaphysical imagination. We speculate only about that which might later be confirmed or disconfirmed. — Janus

A metaphysical position is closely related to a scientific paradigm. To empirically confirm a paradigm is just to tighten up the definitions and boundaries that were formed prior to confirmation . Such validating procedures allow us to identity what it is we are overthrowing when we eventually dump that paradigm in favor of another. But the movement from one paradigm to another is not driven by confirmation. It is driven by a wholesale qualitative reconceptualization of premises, the fabricating of a new world. This does not have to do with what is ‘true’ but with how the world can be organized to make sense in a qualitatively different way. Truth is then a secondary procedure within the newly created frame.

Much of metaphysics consists in playing dialectically with language—what if such and such (such and such that is the dialectical opposite of what we actually encounter) is really the case.

For example, we appear to be mortal...but...what if we are really immortal? We appear to be finite intelligences...but... what if there is an infinite intelligence...and further what if that is our real nature? We appear to encounter only the physical...but...what if what appears physical is really mental? And so on. — Janus

You seem to be attempting to shove all metaphysics into the particular slot of a dialectical metaphysics. The change from one metaphysical scheme to another is not a matter of dialectical opposition. For instance, it is not the opposition between mortal and immortal , finite and infinite, the physical and the mental, since moving from one pole to the other of this binary is merely a matter of slot rattling within an already given frame of meaning. To move from one metaphysical worldview to another is arriving at a different world, a new frame. Rather than simply choosing one term over the other, both what it means to be mortal and what it means to be immortal take on an entirely new sense within a new metaphysics. This is what makes paradigm shifts revolutionary rather than evolutionary.

↪Joshs

Perhaps my stance appears to be an unquestioning taking for granted because it appears so alien to your way of thinking. But I continually question everything about my philosophy.

It doesn't seem unquestioning at all. I was referring back to your statement that: "only within a taken-for-granted , unquestioned set of normative presuppositions concerning the nature of the real can empiricist notions like proof and validation be considered as definitive."

I am having trouble understanding how validation, proof, evidence, demonstration, etc. can rest only on what is taken-for-granted. If this was true, I don't get how radical relativism and skepticism wouldn't follow. Epistemology can be circular and falliblist, but it cannot be arbitrary without epistemic pessimism seeming to take hold. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Ah, now I understand. Well, let’s compare Popper’s falsificationism with Kuhn’s Paradigm shifts. The former is a favorite among scientists because his approach seems to explain how empirical results can be both self-reflexively questionable and yet allow for progress in the ascertainment of truth. It is circular and falliblist, and it would appear to avoid arbitrariness and skepticism by assuming that what allows us to identify any theory as having been falsified is a method of verification that transcends the contingency of the theory itself.

But Kuhn argues that falsificationism’s assumption that the methods of verification are independent of the content of the theory amounts to a taken-for-granted , unquestioned normative presupposition. Kuhn’s alternative does not amount to arbitrariness , but neither does it treat scientific understanding as epistemological belief in what is the case. Our attempt to make our way around a constantly changing world is not fundamentally a matter of belief, but of engaged coping. Engaged coping has nothing to do with conceptual representation. It is more like intuiting the next move in a dance as it contextually unfolds. As Even Thompson writes:

I would give up both realism and anti-realism, then, in favour of what could be called a pluralist pragmatism. What the pluralist insists on is that there is no foundational version, one which anchors all the rest or to which all others can be reduced. The pragmatist insists that the world is both found and made: it is made in the finding and found in the making.To erase the boundary between knowing a language and knowing our way in the world gives us a fresh appreciation of the world. That world, however, is not given, waiting to be represented. We find the world, but only in the many incommensurable cognitive domains we devise in our attempt to know our way around. The task of the philosopher is not to extract a common conceptual scheme from these myriad domains and to determine its faithfulness to some uncorrupted reality; it is, rather, to learn to navigate among the domains, and so to clarify their concerns in relation to each other.

One might find metaphysics to be a confusing mess and accept no metaphysical theory, and yet still find statements about truth and falsehood intelligible and use them effectively in their daily lives — Count Timothy von Icarus

There is a difference between being able to articulate one’s metaphysical presuppositions and the very existence of those presuppositions. Metaphysics is not simply a game academic philosophers play, not a theory to be falsified. It is a precondition for any kind of experience of the world. It is precisely what makes statements of truth and falsity intelligible. We no more falsify a metaphysics than an organism falsifies its environmental niche.

Right, and this is validation of what? Validation that something is or is not the case. Or in more fallibilist terms, that something appears or does not appear to be the case. But what is broadly meant by "appears true or false" is precisely that something appears to be the case. This difference just seems like semantics — Count Timothy von Icarus

When a new event validates my anticipation, what this means is that I construe it along dimensions of similarity and difference with respect to that anticipation, and it appears more similar than different to the expected result. It can, however, never duplicate what is anticipated, and the remembered expectation never duplicates its sense from moment to moment. It seems to me that declaring an event to be “the case” implies comparing two cases, what one holds in memory and the new event, and finding them to be the same with respect to some criterion.

So validation is referential consistency on a relevant
(anticipated) dimension, where neither the anticipated, remembered meaning and the actual event duplicates their sense from moment to moment , whereas being the case is a match, replication or identity between comparators. When we believe we can determine something to be the case, we ignore the fact that the sense of meaning of the subject and predicate subtly transform themselves at every stage in the comparison. The naive understanding of predicative truth depends on not delving into the basis of the idealizations ( such as the persisting self-identity of a sense of meaning) that such logical constructions are built on.

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But is such "making sense" necessarily based on unquestionable presuppositions that must be taken for granted? Fallibilism, allowing for uncertainty, is not self-refuting, but the statement that all claims are ultimately arbitrary appears to be. I couldn't really tell which you were advancing here. Is "all [you] can say is that [your] way of construing matters has continued to be relatively consistent," because the only thing that can be known is the contents of your own past experiences (in which case, why even trust your own memory?) Or is this simply a claim about how we can always be surprised by the future — Count Timothy von Icarus

I must stress that the way that experience transforms itself
moment to moment is never arbitrary , but motivated. It produces neither arbitrariness nor identical self-persistence. Can I trust my memory? I don’t trust it to be an archive of veridical, unchanging facts. I trust it to be, because I continually experience it as being, a reconstruction of a past shaped by my present interests and goals. It is a continually morphing guide to the future. To say that experience is never arbitrary is to argue that we are always surprised in some fashion by the future even when it appears most predictable and familiar to us, and by the same token, even the most unusual and unprecedented series of events is recognizable at some level. The moment the world ceases to appear to us as at least minimally interpretable and meaningful is the moment experience vanishes completely. This is why most of the time our experience of our world has the character of a relative ongoing consistency

Predicative logic and truth statements produce arbitrariness in the form of contradictions, because they fail to understand the grounding of their terms in a background mesh of contextual relevance that gives sense even to the irrational. Causal empirical models produce arbitrariness and skepticism for the same reason.

Stating that I find myself born anew ( thrown into) a world that is at the same time built from my presuppositions and a subtle displacement of those presuppositions, is this itself an unquestioned presupposition, or am I continually questioning and reforming this supposition? If I say I continue to be the same differently , is this an unquestioned presupposition that I take for granted? If so, what aspect of the presupposition remains unchanged over time? Certainly not the content of my experience, since it is a requirement for the continued survival of my presupposition that the world will always appear to be changing for me. I would argue only the empty categories of past and present remain unchanged, since no matter how much my view of myself or the world changes, this will always presuppose a relation between memory and the now.

Perhaps my stance appears to be an unquestioning taking for granted because it appears so alien to your way of thinking. But I continually question everything about my philosophy. It’s just that events as I construe them bring me back into its fold rather than pulling me in the direction of an empirical realism.

I am aware of the existence of para-consistent logic. I would not call that metaphysics, I would not even say that it hinges on metaphysics. It is simply a different syntax — Lionino

The critical analyses of the principle of non-contraction I have in mind were conducted by Witntgenstein, phenomenologists like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, and poststructuralists like Heidegger, Deleuze and Derrida.


For instance,

In his Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics Wittgenstein tells us that it is his aim "to alter the attitude to contradiction." We should lose the superstitious fear of contradiction and cease to think of it as the bogy. He writes:
There is one mistake to avoid: one thinks that a contradiction must be senseless: that is to say, if c.g., we use the signs ‘p’, ‘n’, ‘.’ consistently, then ‘p and not p’ cannot say anything.

When Wittgenstein poses the question of whether the law of non-contradiction is a fundamental law governing all conceivable language-games, his answer appears to be negative. Although a language-game may lose its sense through a contradiction, this need not necessarily be the case. Wittgenstein imagines several situations in which a contradiction would have a definite function and sense.

Consider the following three cases:

Why should not a calculation made for a practical purpose, with a contradictory result, tell me: "Do as you please, I, the calculation, do not decide the matter'?

The contradiction might be considered as a hint from the gods that I am to act and not consider.

Let us suppose that a contradiction in an order ... produces astonishment and indecision-and now we say: that is just the purpose of contradiction in this language game.

Whether these be actual or merely possible uses of a contradiction is a matter of no consequence.
Wittgenstein's point is that a contradiction may be given a use and hence acquire a sense. Our use, or lack of use, of the expression ‘p and not-p’ is no sure indicator of the necessity of erecting a "super-fence" around contradiction.

These suggestions concerning contradiction seem to constitute a special case of Wittgenstein's more general thesis in the Remarks and, to some extent, the Philosophical Investigations' that logical rules, although made necessary by human convention, are suggested by contingent facts of experience. If these facts and/or our purposes were different, we might engage in entirely different language-games.

Every human has some conception of truth or falsity, even if they have never spent much time pondering metaphysics. There is a naive sense of true and false that is endemic to the human experience — Count Timothy von Icarus

I would agree that humans have a conception of validation and invalidation, but I would distinguish this from truth and falsity in the following way: as anticipatory sense-makers, we are able to determine the extent to which new events are are referentially consistent or inconsistent with our expectations. Included in this claim is the assumption that experience never repeats itself; it is always in motion with respect to itself from moment to moment. This does not mean that there are not robust regularities and patterns to be construed within the flux of time. It is these regularities that make science, and human communication in general , possible. We always find ourselves ensconced within these normative regularities, and even when there is revolutionary change , this takes place not as a completely arbitrary event , but against the backdrop of an already structured, if always changing, understanding of the world which , while differing from one person to the next and one moment to the next, avails itself of relative social consensus for given periods of time.
If the notions of truth and falsity presume we can experience events that sit still, that persist self-identically over time in their content such that we can refer back to them in order to compare them with other events, then I would say that conception of truth is something that emerged at some point in human history as a contingent assumption , but that such a notion of truth as correctness cannot be said to be pre-metaphysical , universal , a priori or anything of the kind.

Do I claim that my theory of validation is true? I can only say that it is the way that my experience of events makes sense to me in this moment. A moment from now i will have to retest my construal of events to see if how I interpret things to be is inferentially compatible with my current anticipations, based on my current schemes of thought. All I can say is that thus far my way of construing matters in a metaphysical sense has continued to be relatively consistent from moment to moment, day to day and year to year. I can’t make any claims beyond this. I will say that this structured , regulated and patterned self-transformation is the case for all people at all times , but in making this claim I have to put it to the test every moment. It can never be a settled fact for me but only a construal that must re-validate itself against new events. At least this is how I construe it to be right now. You can see how self-reflexive change is built into my very notion of knowing.

What I have offered concerning the difference between validation and truth doesn’t invalidate for me the claims you have made about how language works, how scientific truth is grounded, the nature of subjective experiences like pain. Instead , when I hear you talk about objects , be they linguistic, subjectively felt , intersubjectively agreed on or independent of all human experience, I burrow beneath the alleged intrinsicality, fixity and self-sameness of these objects as ‘truths’ to locate a rich , hidden realm of subtle changes in my construing of such things, and I imagine such changes taking place within your awareness of them, but at a level that is deeply implicit. What you explicitly identify are static , temporarily unchanged objects that can be manipulated via logic and mathematics, without recognizing either their flux or the dependence of their sense on your anticipatory construing. In deconstructing your concepts, I leave intact everything you are trying to preserve about truth , but enrich these concepts.

The reward I get from my endless testing out of my anticipations is not truth, but the validation that the fresh new event in front of me bears a reasonable resemblance to the previous, that it makes sense, that it makes my world familiar, recognizable , intimate, relevant and meaningful.

Do we infer the unperceived existence of what we perceive from the nature of our experience? If so, how? If not, why not?

Can anyone point me in the right direction as I have no idea how to help her? — OwenB

Check out Husserl’s analysis of the constitution of spatial objects in Cartesian Investigations and other works . In particular , see his distinction between perception and apperception , where he explains how we draw from memory aspects of an object which are not actually perceived ( the backside of a chair), and use that memory to anticipate further details of the object which we also don’t directly perceive ( how the object will change when we walk around it).

… there belongs to every external perception its reference from the "genuinely perceived" sides of the object of perception to the sides "also meant" not yet perceived, but only anticipated and, at first, with a non-intuitional emptiness (as the sides that are "coming" now perceptually): a continuous protention, which, with each phase of the perception, has a new sense. Furthermore, the perception has horizons made up of other possibilities of perception, as perceptions that we could have, if we actively directed the course of perception otherwise: if, for example, we turned our eyes that way instead of this, or if we were to step forward or to one side, and so forth. In the corresponding memory this recurs in modified form, perhaps in the consciousness that, instead of the sides then visible in fact, I could have seen others naturally, if I had directed my perceptual activity in a suitably different manner.

Moreover, as might have been said earlier, to every perception there always belongs a horizon of the past, as a potentiality of awakenable recollections; and to every recollection there belongs, as a horizon, the continuous intervening intentionality of possible recollections (to be actualize on my initiative, actively), up to the actual Now of perception. Everywhere in this connexion an "I can and do, but I can also do otherwise than I am doing" plays its part without detriment to the fact that this "freedom", like every other, is always open to possible hindrances. The horizons are "predelineated" potentialities…. the die leaves open a great variety of things pertaining to the unseen faces; yet it is already "construed" in advance as a die, in particular as colored, rough, and the like, though each of these determinations always leaves further particulars open.” (Cartesian Meditations)

Like we assume any viewpoint has metaphysical presuppositions, but then the validity of those presuppositions is ultimately borne out...in a metaphysical sense. In other words, a metaphysical theory is consequential… having a theory about the nature of reality (if it is accurate) ought to prove useful in some way, or lead in some direction. So I'd say metaphysics is about the relationship between our understanding of reality and reality. — Pantagruel

Doesn’t any viewpoint or theory implicitly lead us in certain directions and prove useful in the sense that it organizes our world in some fashion? What does it mean to ask if a metaphysics is ‘accurate’ in its depiction of the real? Can’t different metaphysical systems be ‘accurate’ in very different ways?

What do you think about the placement of logic outside the circle of metaphysics?
— Joshs

Valid, no metaphysics can make a married man a bachelor. — Lionino

Metaphysics can’t put into question the law of non-contradiction?

But the most salient is that metaphysics is about what is real. — Pantagruel

You don’t think the history of metaphysics has to do with the changing ways we think about the sense of meaning of what is real? In other words, isn’t metaphysics more about sense than reality? For instance, if one can claim that the change in physics from Newton to Heisenberg is a change in metaphsical presuppositions, then this involves a subtle transformation in the sense of meaning of terms like mass and energy, rather than whether mass and energy are real.

Only within a taken-for-granted , unquestioned set of normative presuppositions concerning the nature of the real can empiricist notions like proof and validation be considered as definitive. A metaphysics is the basis of the intelligibility of truth and falsity, not the product of empirical ascertainment of truth and falsity.

So the truth of what you just wrote only holds within the context of taken-for-granted, unquestioned presuppositions? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes , if I were to claim what I wrote as a truth , rather than as an invitation to try on for size a particular way of thinking about matters.

First principles seem eminently questionable. It also seems eminently possible to put forth first principles that can clash with reality — Count Timothy von Icarus

But the reality they clash with is already contaminated and interwoven with the schemes of understanding represented by the principles themselves. We will only ever know reality as constraints and affordances that are responsive to our schemes.

The issue of betrayed trust is sort of besides the point. A person can utter an obvious falsehood without intending any deception, and our senses can also deceive us. The point is that notions of truth and falsity are prephilosophical. Obviously, such things are context dependent. One cannot be told false statements outside of some sort of social contact, but that broad context is also universal to the human experience.[/quote

You seem to be thinking of truth in terms of correctness , a match between what seems to be the case and what is really the case. This assumes that what is the case maintains its sense over time such that we can compare the ‘real’ with the seeming. Formal logic is based on putting into symbolic form this assumption concerning objects that they retain their original sense independent of the continually changing ways we are interacting with them and with each other. In the case of a lie, the breakdown of trust is not peripheral to the ascertainment of truth. What is perceived as a deliberate falsehood by one party may be the result of a difference of interpretation. And in the case of a deliberate lie, it is assumed by the lying party that that they will not be understood as they wish to be understood. In other words, the lie is an attempt to compensate for a breakdown in shared values, goals and understandings. You might counter that i. the case of Grug and Ugg, their breakdown in trust doesn’t negate that there is a basic fact at stake, but I would argue that even the seemingly simplest and most straightforward example of a factual situation involves a change of the sense of meaning of what is at stake , and thus a change in the interpretation of what is the case. This is what the later Wittgenstein was trying to teach us about how language doesn’t just act as a connector better subject and object, but always refreshes the sense of what an object is in the very act of using words. — Count Timothy von Icarus

So as a separate subject from physics, metaphysics would have to talk about whatever is inside the circle of metaphysics and outside the circle of physics — Lionino

What do you think about the placement of logic outside the circle of metaphysics? What kind of logic are we talking about here ( Continentals use the term in a much broader way than Analytic philosophers) , and what aspect of logic could be considered superordinate to metaphysics? There has been much written in recent years on the dependence of formal logic on certain kinds of metaphysics presuppositions.

If Grug tells Ugg not to eat the last mammoth ribs, goes to get fire wood, comes back, finds the mammoth ribs gone and mammoth grease and bits of ribs hanging from Ugg's beard, and Ugg tells him "I did leave the ribs," Grugg's judgement that this is false doesn't rely on metaphysics. I would say rather than truth appears to be one of the things metaphysics and epistemology must explain. That statements might be true or false is a basic fact of the world to be explained. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What is it that makes a state of affairs true or false, that makes basic facts of the world what they are to us? Is it something separable from language , or is it only within the premises set up by language games that what is or is not the case can reveal its sense to us? What must already be understood between Ugg and Gregg, and in what way, in order for them to share the notion of violation of trust that applies here? And is not this understanding formed on the basis of contextual interactions between the two actors, rather than the facts pre-existing their co-determination of what is at issue and at stake?

I mean, this really depends on what you mean by "proven." Certainly, some metaphysical theories might be shown to be contradictory via actual proofs, but in general they get shot down in a more abductive manner. You can't prove that Ayn Rand's Objectivism isn't good metaphysics with an abacus, but you can certainly make very good arguments that it's fatally flawed — Count Timothy von Icarus

Only within a taken-for-granted , unquestioned set of normative presuppositions concerning the nature of the real can empiricist notions like proof and validation be considered as definitive. A metaphysics is the basis of the intelligibility of truth and falsity, not the product of empirical ascertainment of truth and falsity.

For Husserl, the real objects whose constitution Sokolowski wrote about are themselves idealities

Would it be fair though to say that such a project requires positive metaphysical assertions that they might be either rejected or granted a stay of execution? I — Count Timothy von Icarus

Ate you suggesting that a metaphysical scheme is the kind of thing that can be proven true or false?

The philosophy of mathematics is a rich area.

(1) Unfortunately, cranks, who are ignorant and confused about the mathematics post incorrect criticisms of the mathematics, from either a crudely conceived philosophical or a crudely imagined mathematical perspective. That calls for correcting their misinformation about the mathematics itself. — TonesInDeepFreeze

I agree with your points. I just meant that this particular thread doesn’t seem to be getting beyond the correcting of wayward mathematical assumptions in order to deal with the philosophy. I might add that even at the level of securing consensus concerning ‘standard’ mathematics there is likely to be more disagreement than many might expect, perhaps due to the inseparability of philosophical presuppositions and mathematical principles.

↪Rob J Kennedy A collection of semantic games — some based on reality and empirical observation, others based on fantasy — Lionino

And empirical observation isnt grounded in any kind of presuppositions of the sort that Collinwood is getting at , a mesh of implicit, pragmatic relevance relations that make what we observe intelligible to us in connection with our larger goals and purposes?
Collinwood seems to be borrowing from Heidegger, who uses the example of a hammer to demonstrate how we come to know objects. The hammer as a persisting thing with attributes and properties is secondary to, because derived deom our actual use of the hammer in goal oriented activities. And this use is itself inextricably bound up with a larger totality of relevance relations between us and our world. As Thomas Kuhn showed with respect to scientific knowledge, these larger relevance relations define what is recognized as evidence of the real , and informs all our observations. Such superordinate schemes of interpretation, or paradigms, are what contemporary philosophers mean by metaphysics.

Sure, we know that at least a world exists, the world being our mind. But we do not know whether there is an outside world (brain in a vat), that is usually what people talk about when we say the world exists or not. — Lionino

Isn’t that like saying that we know an organism exists but we dont know if the organism’s environment exists? If the organism is a self-organized system of exchanges with a world, then any line we attempt to draw between inside and outside is arbitrary. This is the way psychologists are beginning to think about the concept of mind. The mind is not the brain, it is the reciprocal interactions among brain, body and environment.

I said math and philosophy have different way of doing things — Corvus

They certainly do, which is why I’m wondering what a thread on mathematics is doing on a philosophy forum.

It could be that Rawls only citation is Hegel - but unless he's specifically trying to elucidate Hegel in his own work, I can't rightly justify a reading-acorss — AmadeusD

I’m not sure how easy it is to differentiate between being strongly indebted to and influenced by a philosopher in one’s work on the one hand, and ‘trying to elucidate’ a philosopher in one’s work on the other. Isnt this merely the difference between an implicit and an explicitly articulated overlap between Rawls and Hegel? If I tell you I am strongly indebted to the work of Kant, and you then claim that Kant’s work is non-philosophy, then it seems to me you're indirectly invalidating or failing or understand an aspect of my own work.

But whether I take him to be X level of successful in his work shouldn't reflect his influences unless they are seriously direct influences (i.e he was writing about Hegel in his career generally — AmadeusD

…a consistent reference to the Hegelian political philosophy appears in the last writings of Rawls. Only there does Rawls mention his intellectual debt to Hegel. Indeed, the last part of the Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy is devoted to Hegel. These lectures are the last that Rawls gave in Harvard in 1991. In this last chapter on Hegel, Rawls stresses the criticisms Hegel directed at the ‘atomistic’ liberalism of social contract theoreticians and declares that he fully shares the judgement of the author of the Philosophy of Right (Hegel, 1821). According to Hegel, this form of liberalism ‘fails to see ( . . . ) the deep social rootedness of people within an established framework of their political and social institutions’. Rawls does not hesitate to stress also: ‘I see [Hegel’s] as an important exemplar in the history of moral and political philosophy of the liberalism of freedom.

If Rawls stands on his own, and works Hegel into reasonable insights, that's his success, rather than Hegel's. The Dialectic might be really useful for working through potential legal ramificati — AmadeusD

I understand. It’s just that, for whatever it’s worth, I imagine Rawls protesting vigorously to your characterization of Hegel’s thinking as non-philosophy. I guess how much this matters to you depends on in how high of a regard you hold Rawls’s judgement on such matters.

As i take it, you are very much a thinker of the left where writings of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Zizek and continental philosophy, generally, have a fairly high status. We're just running in dissimilar circles intellectually, I think — AmadeusD

This is an interesting point, because I see Hegel as a dividing line between political conservativism and today’s progressive liberalism. Andrew Breitbart articulated a similar position:

“A line was becoming clear. Marx and Hegel had paved the way for the Progressives, who in turn had paved the way for the Frankfurt School, who had then attacked the American way of life by pushing “cultural Marxism” through “critical theory.” In the middle of his popular memoir, the American reactionary editor Andrew Breitbart offers a critical appraisal of so-called “critical theory.” As he reflects, “The Frankfurt School thinkers had come up with the rationale for radical environmentalism, artistic communism, psychological deconstruction of their opponents, and multiculturalism. Most of all, they had come up with the concept of “repressive tolerance,” aka political correctness.” Here Breitbart reads a paralyzing structure in what he labels as “critical theory,” pointing to it as the source for the dangerous utopian imaginaries of the contemporary left. In this reflection, critical theory seems to promote a paralysis of thought, limiting discourse by foreclosing the speech of the right.

But as a lawyer, do you also reject the ideas of legal
scholar John Rawls, who was influenced by Hegel?

↪Joshs Of course - at the expense of not telling the truth — Banno

Can one put into question the notion of god’s eye truth without that questioning itself being assumed to be oriented by a god’s eye perspective?

The way I see it, these paradoxes show in a nice way how all truth is an idealization.
— Apustimelogist

Trouble is, that's just an idealisation. — Banno

One can deconstruct idealizations without one’s deconstruction itself being an idealization.

You are saying that Hegel’s work is not philosophy?
— Joshs

Very much so. It is an attempt at philosophy by a theosopher — AmadeusD

I appreciate that Hegel’s mode of thinking is profoundly alien to what you are used to, but I’ve been involved in studying, writing and publishing philosophy most of my adult life, and although Hegel is far from my favorite philosopher , I consider him to be without question among the greatest thinkers of the modern era.

it seems to me you are jumping through hoops to validate your own political prejudices — Lionino

Let’s talk about your political prejudices because, tbh, that’s what I’m really interested in here. What do you think of the value of Marx, Antifa, wokeness, intersectionality and other current interests of the political left?

After going through the first 15 episodes of the Cunning Of Geist and scanning all of Spirit in hte last three months, I have to agree. Whether its philosophy is debatable, at best. — AmadeusD

You are saying that Hegel’s work is not philosophy?