It sounds like two separate events are being lumped together via a single explanation without much justification. The first event is response of the woman’s friends and the psychiatric community to her emotional distress. Without more information, the most likely account is that the second event is entirely independent of the first. For instance, you haven’t provided any details concerning whether the woman herself thought her initial
paranoia and her incarceration were connected. You also would need to explain how a subconscious feeling can predict an event that is not causally linked to what that feeling is about. It would be a different matter if the woman was paranoid about incarceration at a subconscious level due to her previous history with emotional illness. This would provide a context of justification. As it stands we would have to assume
the woman is clairvoyant.

I think Cognitive behavioural therapy is an off shoot of stoicism. Training people to cope rather than resist or examine.

It can reframe reasonable responses to trauma as pathological. It is using a biased notion of reason to undermine ones own instinctual reason. I don't people would develop trauma for irrational reasons. — Andrew4Handel

Cognitive therapy is a realist approach. It’s ‘ bias’ is in assuming there is a ‘correct’ and ‘realistic’ way to conform to the facts of the world. You should investigate client-centered and constructivist approaches , which jettison Cognitivism’s realism in favor of a situational , relativistic approach focusing on practical goal-oriented sense-making rather than correctness.

Unlike the Satrean existentialist notion of freedom and choice , they recognize that our choices come already constrained by our pre-existing frameworks of intelligibility that are formed through social interchange within our cultural environment. The point is that not all choices are equal. Some ways of sense-making will work for us better than others, and we discover this through trial and error.

The rules are not found, nor innate, but chosen, by you, and you have to choose.

Welcome to existentialism. — Banno

And the rules that are chosen by you come already constrained in their sense by the contingent intersubjective community you are immersed in as well as your own history of habitual construals. Welcome to postmodernism.

↪Joshs
Whether marxist or postmodernist they are pseudo-religious ideologies. Both have something valid to offer as critiques but neither offers anything practical. They aren't even preventative but act merely as a kind of cultural post traumatic therapy. Well done to Martin for making it so clear. — yebiga

Postmodernism is a big category, as is marxism. For instance, there is cultural postmodernism, which focuses on economic, political and social dynamics affecting large numbers of peoples. A TV show can be postmodern in this sense. Then there is philosophical postmodernism, also a very broad category, which is my interest. Summarized very generally , it includes much more than critique. As far as its practical applications , there an emerging movement of scientific thinking that applies postmodern ideas to the understanding of the nature of scientific practices , as well as to specific theoretical approaches within psychology( perception, neuroscience, schizophrenia ,mood disorders, autism), biology and even physics. This is anything but ‘pseudo-religious’. On the contrary, it reveals the remnants of religious thinking still influencing modernist forms of science.

we use time in the practise of physics, to restrict the things we can say about the progression of matter. So it is not a case of "piggybacking", it is a case of us saying, this is what time is, and time imposes limitations on matter, so our conceptions of matter must abide by these limitations which we say time enforces. — Metaphysician Undercover

Is time a mathematical construct external to matter , such that it acts as a generic and universal limit on matter , while matter itself has aspects or properties which can be understood independently of time? Is time external to and unaffected by the things located in time?

If you're saying metaphysical physics is the necessary pre-condition for physical physics, then how do you explain away the physical brain observing the physical earth being a ground for not only the discipline of physics, but also the ground for cerebration populated by metaphysical notions?

Is this an argument that grounds existence upon language (and thus grounds language upon itself, which reflexivity is an origin ontology puzzle)? I smell the presence of idealism herein. — ucarr

Idealism of a Kantian sort grounds most forms of modern empirical realism as well as postmodern critiques of that realism. Few in the scientific community today dispute the fact that the conceptualizing subject plays an inseparable role in the forms that what is called the physical takes. There is indeed a circularity between cognizing subject and what appears to us as physical.
This does not mean that linguistic conceptualization isn’t a natural part of the world. It just means that our scientific knowledge about that world amounts to the construction of a niche that we interact with. The world for us is always a world that has already been altered and modified to suit our goals.

Is the above an example of physics masquerading as metaphysics, or is it an example of authentic metaphysics sharing fundamentals with physics? — ucarr

.

This is like asking if physics masquerades as linguistic conceptualization, or if linguistic conceptualization shares fundamentals with physics. Of course, the answer is that these are not separate, potentially overlapping domains. Rather, the former is the pre -condition for the latter. There can be no physics without linguistic conceptualization, and there can be no physics without metaphysics as its condition of possibility.

Simone de Beauvior and Jean Paul Sartre had an existentialist view very similar/ influential to postmodernism. They believed, (or at least Sartre did) the opposite of the conventional view that postmodernism (in their case, existentialism) reduced moral responsibility. Sartre holds that each person is maximally free, since existence precedes essence, we are completely free to shape our life however we choose — SatmBopd

Keep in mind that poststructuralists like Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida situated their approaches in direct opposition to Sartre’s existentialist notion of subjectivity and freedom.

Fight fascism. Transcend the futurist utopia. Act ironically to the code (mostly discursive). Have fluid identities. Be conscious of what you are cooperating in constructing in terms state philosophy etc — introbert

Sounds anarchistic.

Eureka! Post-Modernism revealing itself as a philosophical Stream of Consciousness. There is no refuting this kind of writing - it is sublime and invalid at the same time. The tone is something confessional, psycho/religious — yebiga

This is a quote from Martin Hagglund, attempting to interpret Derrida. Hagglund is more of a Marxist than a postmodernist.

↪jgill So the project uses computers to pars arguments from ontology formally.

Like Russel's theory of descriptions, Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, Davidson's project, and so many others. It's an idea at the centre of analytic philosophy, to use logic to set out clearly the structure of our arguments. — Banno

Which is why the later Wittgenstein rebelled against it.
“ The more narowly we examine actual language, the sharper becomes the conflict between it and our requirement. (For the crystaline purity of logic was, of course, not a result of investigation: it was a requirement). We have got onto slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!”
The slippery ice of logical clarity provides no friction.

↪Tom Storm

Two previous threeads for you: Confirmable and influential Metaphysics goes into some detail concerning defining metaphysics in terms of the logical structure of propositions. Metaphysical statements are neither verifiable nor falsifiable, yet some are nevertheless meaningful and, some, true — Banno

As a counterpoint , I offer up a Deleuzian perspective on the limits of the idea of metaphysics as the logic of propositions, what Deleuze calls ‘the dogmatic image of thought’. He says that this image involves “the supposition that thought is the natural exercise of a faculty … the presupposition that there is a natural capacity for thought endowed with a talent for truth or an affinity with the true.”

“…the image of thought presupposes “the harmonious exercise of all the faculties upon a supposed same object.”The wax Descartes sees, touches, imagines, remembers, and thinks about is the same wax, and the “I” that doubts, understands, desires, imagines, and so on, the same “I.” The classical responsiveness of thought to being depends here on the agreement of different subjective powers and the sameness of their respective objects. This is a “modernized” version of the classical conception of truth. Certainly, it grants a new and supreme importance to the role of subjectivity, but the difference between classical and modern conceptions of truth is a matter of having replaced its expected “ontological a priori,” not of abandoning the expectation that truth requires such ontological support.Even Kant, whose critical turn would seem to prohibit dogmatically innocent statements about the human “talent for truth,” grants that truth is “agreement of knowledge with its object.”Although the existent object is constituted by, rather than simply disclosed to, the mind, the special relationship between thought or language and nature or “what is” is still what makes a judgment true.”
“…the linguistic turn in philosophy, like the critical or Kantian turn before it, did little to change the key presuppositions of the image of thought.”
“…according to Deleuze, Frege and Russell have started down a line of thinking that has the potential to overturn the image of thought, but, like Kant before them, they lose heart and use their freshly minted conceptual resources to reformulate its postulates anew.”
(Dan Smith)

The Stanford Metaphysics Lab attempts to put an element of solidity into the study of metaphysics, a topic of endless and entirely non-productive discussions.

The theory of abstract objects is a metaphysical theory. Whereas physics attempts a systematic description of fundamental and complex concrete objects, metaphysics attempts a systematic description of fundamental and complex abstract objects.
(Stanford Metaphysics Lab) — jgill

Why do you think the discussions are non-productive? Because they dont produce a clear unified vision of what metaphysics is? Can they be productive in the way that debates among competing approaches within the economic, political or psychological sciences are productive without producing a clear ‘winner’, expect perhaps in the eye of the beholder? Does the existence of competing visions mean there is not nevertheless an overall ‘progress’?

To invalidate this proposed state of affairs, simply present an empirical science in which no tacit use of effects or of identities take place. If not in practice, then in principle - taking into account that empirical sciences by definition make use of human awareness regarding the external world which, as such, is tmk not realizable in the absence of a presumed reality to causation and identity. — javra

I believe science will move in the direction of a self-reflexive awareness that causation and identity are derivative concepts originating out of the discursive niche-constructing practices of scientists in material circumstances. Crack-smoking insights are also embedded within , and represent specific modifications of material niches. Put differently, the manifest image of thought ( crack-smoking insights) and the scientific image of nature( empirical reality ) are not on opposite ends of a divide. Linguistic thought is inextricably intertwined with material circumstances. The reality that science ‘discovers’ can never be completely external to the discursive niche within which the world appears intelligible.

Here's physicist Sean Carroll:

Naturalism is a counterpart to theism. Theism says there's the physical world and God. Naturalism says there's only the natural world. There are no spirits, no deities, or anything else. — Tom Storm

“… a more basic trace of a theological conception remains in many philosophical accounts of science and nature. A theological conception of God as creator places God outside of nature. God's understanding of nature is also external to the world. Such a God could understand his language and his thoughts about the world, apart from any interaction with the world. Naturalists long ago removed God from scientific conceptions of the world. Yet many naturalists still implicitly understand science as aiming to take God's place. They interpret science as trying to represent nature from a standpoint outside of nature. The language in which science represents the world could then be understood apart from the causal interactions it articulates.”( Joseph Rouse)

While I find this kind of claim exciting, do you think this might be more outrageous than accurate? — Tom Storm

I was being a little silly. What I meant to convey was that the most creative aspect of science is not the mirroring of an extant reality but the invention of new ways of interacting with our world. The inspiration can involve a crackpipe or dream just as readily as direct observation. The difference between the inventiveness of something like poetry vs science lies in the peculiarities of the vocabulary used in each domain. Science generally prefers shared agreement on mathematizable behavior of objects.

A confession: metaphysics has always seemed to me like a bunch of men sharing just-so stories after smoking a crack pipe. — coolazice

To really grasp the nature of metaphysics and its role in our lives is to realize that , when it comes down to it, science also is nothing but a bunch of folk sharing just-so stories after smoking a crack pipe

↪Joshs I don't find conflating Cartesian algebraic geometry with Newtonian (or Leibnizian) calculus insightful or relevant. Besides, scientists build on the work of their predecessors in the sciences independent of any philosophical considerations. As CS Peirce or Paul Feyerabend shows, scientific practices are largely opportunistic "anything goes" endeavors which largely are n o t deductions from first principles. Philosophy from time to time may provide an impetus for "paradigm shifts" but it does not inform building and testing hypothetical models. As Witty exhaustively points out, philosophy does not explain facts of the matter, that is, is n o t theoretical in the way of empirical or formal sciences. — 180 Proof

I’m not comparing Descartes, Newton and Leibnitz on the basis of their contributions to mathematics, but to metaphysics.

As far as a science building on its predecessors, it does this within a larger set of changing metaphysical assumptions that it is not its job to make explicit, and that it usually not even aware of. This obliviousness to the larger worldviews within which scientists conduct their thinking leads to the idea that “anything goes”’. Not just anything can ‘go’ for a scientist. Their observations and evidence are constrained and made intelligible only with extant discursive practices and worldviews, and the development of these scientific worldviews move in parallel with ( because they are throughly intertwined with) the movement of worldviews in the arts and philosophy. So much for science ‘taking the lead’. It should be mentioned that the ideas that make their way into Darwin’s theory of evolutionnor Newton’s physics come from many aspects of the surrounding culture outside of science ‘proper’( if there ever was such a thing).

Whereas the sciences concern possible models for experimentally explaining transformations among 'aspects of nature', metaphysics, to my mind, concerns the concept – rational speculation – of 'nature as a whole' that necessarily encompasses the most rigorous findings of the sciences as well as all other human practices and non-human events/processes. Statements in metaphysics are paradigmatic and presuppositional, not theoretical or propositional; (ontological) interpretations of the latter are only symptomatic – insightful though still speculative – of the former (e.g. MWI, mediocrity prin
— 180 Proof

This is nice — Tom Storm

We’re taking about a spectrum of abstraction. Whatever makes the difference between applied
technology and hard science is the same
difference along a continuum that leads from the more scientific to the more philosophical. It’s just a question of the richness and comprehensiveness of the vocabulary being used. A philosophical vocabulary doesn’t just contain within it untouched the terms and factual findings of a science, any more
than a science simply co-opts the vocabulary of the technologies it spawns. A philosophical vocabulary, at the very least , enriches, from top to bottom , the terms of a science, or else completely transforms the meaning of a science’s terms.

In the former case, we could say with 180 proof that a philosophy accepts and incorporates the empirical discoveries of the sciences it relates to, but in the latter case we have philosophy taking a role denied to it by 180 proof , ucarr and other realists of a certain stripes. It discovers new truths that can challenge the sciences of its day just as powerfully and effectively as a new science can challenge an older one.

↪ucarr A philosophy is to a grammar as a science is to a library. IMO as complementaries, while the latter without the former is unintelligible (or less intelligible than formulating its problems requires), the former without the latter is ineffable (or less effable than clearly expressiing it requires). — 180 Proof

What is a scientific theory other than a grammatical
structure? To the extent that we can separate the scientific and the philosophical, which blur into each other in so many ways, it would. or be in the basis of grammar but the richness of the semantics. We should also be sensitive to Nietzsche’s question, and not limit either endeavor to a particular grammar.

“Shouldn't philosophers rise above the belief in grammar?” Nietzsche, Will to Power)

I don't see how such a statement can be true. Aristotle's The Physics preceded Isaac Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica by nearly two millennia withoit anticipating any of the latter's significant breakthroughs or findings. — 180 Proof

Descartes was born 100 years before Newton and anticipated the general framework within which Newton’s physics is intelligible.

“Newton was typically loath to admit the importance of Cartesian ideas for the development of his own thinking in mathematics and natural philosophy. For this reason, generations of students and scholars relying on Newton’s published work had little inkling of Descartes’s significance.” (Physics and Metaphysics in Descartes and Newton, Andrew Janiak)

If Newton’s metaphysical framework went beyond Descartes, and this is questionable, it certainly fell short of Leibnitz , Newton’s contemporary.

By fare better I mean that within the interweave of science and philosophy, hands on experimentation and practical vetting count for more than conversation and literature. The two disciplines are each of such complexity and difficulty as to compel specialization in one or the other. Of the two I think science can better stand alone. Banish the scientist from all contact with philosophy and I think the discipline will continue along its merry way without much faltering. As for the reverse, philosophy sans science is like a race car without an engine. No, the bailiwick of science is What is Life? whereas the bailiwick of philosophy is What is good life? When the philosopher correctly foresees the way forward for science such person walks in the shoes of the scientist — ucarr

What you’re describing isnt science, it’s scientism, which assumes that science, through its methods, has a privileged access to empirical reality. It doesn’t.
What you call ‘hands on’ and ‘practical’ is simply another way of saying that the conventionalized , generic vocabulary scientists use makes for consensus and thus a certain kind of agreement on its usefulness that eludes philosophy. Scientism makes an artificial split between fact and value ( what is life vs what is the good life), rather than realizing that all scientific models are inherently value systems and so establish normative ideas of the good in their theoretical framework.

Of course a cutting edge philosopher must have absorbed the most most advanced scientific ideas of their day. This is because those sciences are philosophical positions articulated via the conventionalized vocabulary of science. If they don’t, they will simply be repeating what a science has already articulated. The same. is true of science. If an empirical
researcher in psychology or biology has not assimilated
the most advanced thinking available in philosophy they will simply be reinventing the wheel. This is what most of todays sciences are doing now. They are regurgitating older insights of philosophy using their own specialized vocabulary.

If you allow your eyes to move from left to right there is an element of time change involved. But if you simply move back a bit and look at the entire screen what you see is yellow changing to red as an entity of its own, not requiring a period of time. — jgill

Are you talking about perceiving red and yellow as one simultaneous unity? Together but separate?

Henri Bergson argued: “duration is a principle of qualitative differentiation in a heterogeneous multiplicity.
— Joshs
...quoted in a paragraph of it's own as if it said something useful.

The only positive one might take from these appalling posts is the reminder that there are folk hereabouts who are not interested in clarity, in explanation, but have instead an active preference for the cryptic and esoteric. These are the folk who will explain the ineffable at great length, with no awareness of the irony involved. Historically such a thread runs parallel to, but against the flow, of philosophy, which seeks open rational explanation. — Banno

So let me get this straight. Are you arguing that the contributions to the understanding of time offered by the likes of Bergson, James, Whitehead, Husserl, Heidegger, Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty runs “against the flow of philosophy” and opposes itself to “open rational explanation”? Or are you just unhappy with the quality of posts on this particular thread?

I do think science without philosophy fares better than the reverse. — ucarr

How would you define ‘fares better’? If you want the next best thing to a crystal ball reveal of the future of the sciences, look to the leading edge of contemporary philosophy. This has always been the case. Philosophy has always taken the lead in sketching out the basis of new developments in the sciences, offer a century ahead of time. If I were to ask to you name the most powerful and radical new knowledge about the world, you might be inclined to list quantum physics, neuroscience and genetics, but each of these elaborates a metaphysics that has already been superseded by approaches in philosophy going back 100 years.

I think Kant and Leibnitz were both correct. Because Kants notion of time and space being absolute (controlled for/assumed constant) gives access to the formulation of Newtonian physical equations. — Benj96

Kant’s notion of time is a critique of Newton’s. Time is neither an absolute quatitative constant for Kant, not a relationship between material objects. It is the passive exposure of subjective intuition to an outside, to something existing. We generate time in apprehending, and must have something outward if there is to be apprehension. Time is the activity of pure self-affecting.

It’s the job of the scientific theoretician to envision, measure and discover cerebrally, real and important practical things unseen by common sense.

It’s the job of the scientist to envision, measure and discover practically, real and important physical things unseen by common sense.

It’s the job of the philosophical theoretician to examine, understand and narrate the mesh entwining empirical experience verified by science with cognitive cerebration arrived at by reason.

It is the job of philosophy to contextualize, experientially, the ever-contested concepts of reality guiding humanity through its daily activities.

Metaphysics over-arches these various activities.

It’s the job of the metaphysician to stand upon the practical foundation of scientific truth and spin a cognitive narrative of a cerebrally inhabitable world that imparts logical-conceptual coherence to physical things — ucarr

You only use the word ‘discovery’ in relation to what science supposedly does, but not what philosophy does. This makes it sound as if philosophy is parasitic on the discoveries of science, as if the methods of science give it a privileged access to the facts of true world unavailable to philosophy. Science ascertains empirical truth and philosophy clarifies the meaning of it.

I would argue instead that science was and always will be merely an applied , conventionalized form of philosophical inquiry. Any substantial development in scientific understanding of the world relies on a shift in metaphysical presuppositions grounding empirical explanation. The philosophical clarification doesnt come later , it is the precondition for the intelligibility and advance of a science.

Change requires the "energy" to do it, and the "time" for it to get done.
Change exerts change on everything around it but itself because the only way change could change itself is to become "unchange" .Change acts from a timeless state (speed of light). Here in the timeless state change is constant in its quality to change things around it. — Benj96

Since this is a philosophy rather than a physics forum, I thought I’d throw in some ideas on time from a few philosophers.

Kant attributed to Newton the notion that space and time are absolute qualities of the world , and to Leibnitz the idea that space and time are only relational qualities of matter. Kant argues instead that the quality of change you describe is an idea of the mind rather than an absolute or relative property of nature. Time is the form of inner intuition. Everything we will ever perceive will be perceived as being in time.

“ Now what are space and time? Are they actual entities? Are they only determinations or also relations of things, but still such as would belong to them even if they were not intuited? Or are they such that they belong only to the form of intuition, and therefore to the subjective constitution of our mind, without which these predicates could not be ascribed to any things at all?”(Critique of Pure Reason)

Henri Bergson argued: “duration is a principle of qualitative differentiation in a heterogeneous multiplicity.

“The concept of quality, in opposition to quantity, is not sufficient to understand nature. Both concepts lack what the other has. Pure qualities are perfectly individual but are not connected to each other (CII 430-435). This is why qualitivism leads to Leibnizian idealism of monads without windows, according to Bergson. Quantities, on the contrary, are related to each other but to such a degree that they do not have an individuality or inner principle. Bergson wants to avoid both (monadological) idealism and mechanism by understanding nature as “both participating in extension and force, in quantity and quality” (CII)”


Alfred North Whitehead followed this line of thinking further.
“The rejected Newtonian doctrine of simple location dovetails with the conception of space and time in terms of external relations, that is, the conception of space and time as absolute ‘immovable’ containers external to and unaffected by the things located in space and time (see Newton’s Scholium cited in PR 70). By understanding
spatiotemporal relations as external relations, Newton develops a “ ‘receptacle’ theory of space–time”
(PR 70)—which, for clarity’s sake, should not be confused with Whitehead’s later notion of ‘the Receptacle’.

Understood as such, space and time are ‘empty’ forms (PR 72) that merely ‘accommodate’ bodies, without affecting or being affected by what they accommodate. Mirroring the two inseparable aspects of the doctrine of internal relations, Newton’s externality of space and time entails, first, that bodies enjoy an independence from their spatiotemporal relations and are ‘simply located’, and, two, that space and time remain unmovable and unmodified by the extension of bodies.

Rejecting Newton’s doctrine, Whitehead takes precisely the opposite stance; Of the ‘Receptacle’— which in Adventures of Ideas is his concept referring to “the general notion of extension” (AI 258; see also AI 192)—he says: “It is part of the essential nature of each physical actuality that it is itself an element qualifying the Receptacle, and that the qualifications of the Receptacle enter into its own nature.” (AI 171) In other words, the fact that “the relata modify the nature of the relations” (AI 201) entails that extension as the “primary relationship” (PR 288) between actual occasions, is modified by these occasions. “

Analytic philosophy began as critique of Hegelianism. So, what did Hegelians learn from that critique? Apart, perhaps, from being overtly defensive. — Banno

And it is being buried by its own progeny, who associate the beginning of its demise with the drawing realization that its adherents were not able to read Hegel, so simply ignored him and stuck with Kant or Hume. This is why Rorty, in questioning the value and legitimacy of formal
logic, referred to his camp as ‘we Hegelians’.

“Reading McDowell's daring and original book side-by-side with Brandom's helps one to grasp the present situation in anglophone philosophy of mind and language. One way of describing that situation is to say that whereas Sellars and Davidson use Kantian arguments to overcome the Humean dogmas retained by Russell and Ayer, Brandom and McDowell supplement Kantian arguments with Hegelian ones. Most anglophone philosophers still do not take Hegel seriously, but the rise of what Brandom and McDowell refer to as their "Pittsburgh School of neo-Hegelians" may force them to. For this school holds that analytic philosophy still must pass over from its Kantian to its Hegelian moment.”

Are you upholding the analytic/synthetic distinction here?
— Joshs

I'm acknowledging it, not sure what you mean by upholding — Pantagruel

I had this in mind:

“The analytic/synthetic distinction” refers to a distinction between two kinds of truth. Synthetic truths are true both because of what they mean and because of the way the world is, whereas analytic truths are true in virtue of meaning alone. “Snow is white,” for example, is synthetic, because it is true partly because of what it means and partly because snow has a certain color. “All bachelors are unmarried,” by contrast, is often claimed to be true regardless of the way the world is; it is “true in virtue of meaning,” or analytic. The existence of analytic truths is controversial. Philosophers who have thought they exist include Immanuel Kant, Gottlob Frege, and Rudolf Carnap. The philosopher most famous for thinking that they do not is W. O. Quine.”

I would add that among those philosophers who follow Quine in rejecting the analytic/ synthetic distinction are Davidson, Sellars, Putnam, Brandom, McDowell and Rorty.

More on Quine from Wiki

“"Two Dogmas of Empiricism" is a paper by analytic philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine published in 1951. According to University of Sydney professor of philosophy Peter Godfrey-Smith, this "paper [is] sometimes regarded as the most important in all of twentieth-century philosophy".[1] The paper is an attack on two central aspects of the logical positivists' philosophy: the first being the analytic–synthetic distinction between analytic truths and synthetic truths, explained by Quine as truths grounded only in meanings and independent of facts, and truths grounded in facts; the other being reductionism, the theory that each meaningful statement gets its meaning from some logical construction of terms that refer exclusively to immediate experience.”

Reason is essential for moral development. Faith, or intuition without reason, is moral stagnation. — praxis

All faith has its reasons, which are wrapped up in what motivates the faith in the first place. One could use a concept of reason to refer to the elaborative articulation of the framework of a faith ( in the form of theory) , but I wouldnt claim that neglecting this articulative reasoning process prevents development. All one needs in order to be able to overthrow a faith is the minimum level of articulation to recognize that ones belief has been invalidated.

I said Dialectic is not logic. That is quite different.

After Frege, logic came into it's own, developing rapidly in many and varied directions. That's the topic oft he book linked previously. Whatever Hegel is doing, it's not what is now called logic. As explained above I'd be more inclined to count it as rhetorical. — Banno

Deleuze referred to this way of thinking about logic as ‘the dogmatic image of thought’.

“Dialectic is the art of problems and questions, the combinatory or calculus of problems as such. However, dialectic loses its peculiar power when it remains content to trace problems from propositions: thus begins the history of the long perversion which places it under the power of the negative.” Deleuze, Difference and Repetition).

I agree with those philosophers who link post-Fregean notions of logic to metaphysical presuppositions which confuse as much as they enlighten.

Could this be described as alternating phases of syntheticity and analyticity? Analytic thinking seems to fit the bill as a kind of framework of rationality. Whereas syntheticity, which in its very nature involves leaps, seems better described as a process of reason. — Pantagruel

Are you upholding the analytic/synthetic distinction here?

t standards of rationality change. Slavery was an accepted institution in ancient Greece. The slave Epictetus was a Stoic, which makes sense. But then so was Marcus Aurelius. So rejection of an argument at a social level could be the institution of a new rational standard. — Pantagruel

Use of the word ‘standard’ could imply the difference between more and a less rational forms of thinking. Is that how you meant it? Or did you just mean to indicate different kinds of rationality?

No way out of this. Put simply, the physicalist model has to be discarded, or amended. How can this be done? — Constance

Take your pick. We could follow Quine, Davidson , Wittgenstein , Putnam, Rorty or Nietzsche out of the trap of physicalism. We could embrace a Gadamerian hermeneutics , a phenomenological approach, poststructuralism. We could follow the work of neuroscientists influenced by Peirce, or those adopting enactivism. Lots of options here.

Do you have a view on the practice of meditation, Joshs? — Tom Storm

I can start by saying what I think meditation does not do.
1)It does not bring us to a state prior to desire or will
2)It does not precede intention or reflection
3)it does not achieve a state of neutrality devoid of affective coloration.

As far as what it accomplishes, I think that depends on what one believes it will do for one. One’s
beliefs about it will have a lot to do with how it seems to provide benefit( sort of like chiropractics). In general meditation is a concentrated form of attention on a goal.

Saying the past-present-future is really "of-a-piece" actually reduces the problem for the Buddhist who faces the singular event of realization which is ideally out of time because
the production of experience is terminated? This means that there is nothing to deliver the perceptual event to in order to bring something "to mind" and for the meditator, this task is singular. Once the occurrent experience is reduced, there is a broadening of the purely perceptual horizon, and a new interpretative occasion, something "wholly other" presents itself.

…this being ahead of myself is a useful heuristic from meditators trying to understand what lies before them, as they face the dynamic of thought intrusion. It is the intrusion of the future and the past; but this, I think, annihilates time altogether, for one is left, ideally, with no interpretative stand at all, which is the point. — Constance

I have written a critique of Varela and Thompson’s
understanding of mindfulness and their misreading of phenomenology. Your depiction of a subject awaiting the objects of experience seems to overlap theirs, as if the act of attention is distinct from what one is attending to , and as if there could be such a thing as a pure, pre-reflective , pre-intending, non-judging and non-willing mode of awareness, a bare feeling of being.

Here’s the abstract:

“Evan Thompson and Francisco Varela ground the affectively, valuatively felt contingency of intentional acts of other-relatedness in what they presume to be a primordial neutral point of pre-reflective conscious auto-affective awareness. Through meditative practice, we can access this pre-reflective state , and avail ourselves of ‘unconditionally intrinsic goodness', 'spontaneous compassion', 'luminosity', 'blissfulness', and ' a calm and peaceful life guided by the fundamental value of nonviolence'. But how do such feelings emerge as ultimate outcomes of a philosophy of groundlessness? Aren't they motivated by a sort of 'will to goodness', a preferencing of one affective dimension over others? It would seem that groundlessness for Varela and Thompson doesn't apply to the thinking of affect and desire. Despite their claim that nihilism cannot be overcome by assimilating groundlessness to a notion of the will, they appear not to recognize that the positive affectivities they associate with meditative practice are, as dispositions of feeling opposed to other dispositions, themselves forms of willing. Phenomenologists like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty show that attention, as a species of intention, is sense-making, which means it is sense-changing. Attention is affectively, valuatively and meaningfully implicated in what it attends to as co-participant in the synthesis, creation, constitution of objects of regard. As auto-affection turns reflexively back toward itself, what it finds is not the normative sameness and constancy of a neutral positivity( blissful, self-less compassion and benevolence toward all phenomena) but a newly sensing being. Thus, the basis of our awareness of a world isn't simply compassionate, empathic relational co-determinacy, but the motivated experience of disturbing CHANGE in relational co-determinacy.“

Just as when the hammer's head flies off and the hammering gives way to a pause, a wonder, here, taken to the level of basic questions where there are no alternatives that readily fill the space of momentary indeterminacy, and here, there are no possibilities that can retake the occasion with something familiar, and there is nothing to step in and affirm an existence, and one faces nothing: past is suspended — Constance

This is not how phenomenologists understand ‘past’. You are thinking in terms of traditional notions of the past as a separate entity from the present, occupying a separate position in a sequence.


For instance, for Heidegger, the past, present and future don't operate as sequential modes which mark distinct states of objects. They interpenetrate each other so completely that they together form a single unitary event of occurrence.

“Because my being is such that I am out ahead of myself, I must, in order to understand something I encounter, come back from this being-out-ahead to the thing I encounter. Here we can already see an immanent structure of direct understanding qua as-structured comportment [my experience of something ‘as' something], and on closer analysis it turns out to be time. And this being-ahead-of-myself as a returning is a peculiar kind of movement that time itself constantly makes, if I may put it this way.”(Heidegger 2010b)

The returning from a totality of relevance in the act of understanding something constitutes temporality not as a present object happening IN time but as temporalization.

“Temporalizing does not mean a "succession" of the ecstasies. The future is not later than than the having-been, and the having-been is not earlier than the present. “Dasein "occurs out of its future"."Da-sein, as existing, always already comes toward itself, that is, is futural in its being in general." Having-been arises from the future in such a way that the future that has-been (or better, is in the process of having-been) releases the present from itself. We call the unified phenomenon of the future that makes present in the process of having been temporality.”(Heidegger 2010)

Gendlin(1997b) echoes Heidegger's unification of the components of time.

“The future that is present now is not a time-position, not what will be past later. The future that is here now is the implying that is here now. The past is not an earlier position but the now implicitly functioning past.”“......the past functions to "interpret" the present,...the past is changed by so functioning. This needs to be put even more strongly: The past functions not as itself, but as already changed by what it functions in”(p.37 )

the understanding that is engaged is bound in a temporal dynamic of past/present/future, and it is not as if there really "is" such a thing" as the past or the future. Really, is it even possible to affirm the past AS the past? Past is neither an empirical nor apriori concept. In fact, it is a genuine fiction, as is the future. — Constance

Husserl believed inquiry can isolate this horizon if intuitions, and there discover absolute "presence". He — Constance

For Husserl , the past, in the form of the retentional , and the future, in the form of the protentional phase, belong to the present. The immediate ‘now’ is inseparably all three phases. This a priori tripartite structure of the now is no fiction.

But then meta ethical judgments like pain is bad: these do not change. This is important: Conditions in whcih the judgment takes place can change, and this does make our ethical issues so ambiguous; but in cases where the entanglements are minimal, and the value as such is clear, even pure, as when you stick your hand in a fire, value is an absolute. — Constance

Dewey had a good argument against utilitarian ethics based on pain-pleasure, as explained by Hilary Putnam.

“The assumption that people act only on self-interested motives was sometimes defended on the basis of the hedonist psychology of Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, which held that everyone ultimately "really" desires only a subjective psychological quantity (called "pleasure" by Bentham) and that this "quantity" was a purely subjective matter. As John Dewey put it long ago,

"When happiness is conceived of as an aggregate of states of feeling, these are regarded as homogenous in quality, different from one another only in intensity and duration. Their qualitative differences are not intrinsic, but are due to the different objects with which they are associated (as pleasures of hearing, or vision). Hence they disappear when the pleasure is taken by itself as an end."

This disappearance of the qualitative differences is (as far as importance to the agent's "happiness" is concerned), of course, just what makes it possible for the utilitarian to speak of "summing pleasures, "maximizing" them, and so on. But if Dewey's alternative view is right (as I believe), and if

“agreeableness is precisely the agreeableness or congruence of some objective condition with some impulse, habit, or tendency of the agent,"

then

"of course, pure pleasure is a myth. Any pleasure is qualitatively unique, being precisely the harmony of one set of conditions with its appropriate activity. The pleasure of eating is one thing; the pleasure of hearing music, another; the pleasure of an amiable act, another; the pleasure of drunkenness or of anger is still another."

Dewey continues,

"Hence the possibility of absolutely different moral values attaching to pleasures, according to the type or aspect of character which they express. But if the good is only a sum of pleasures, any pleasure, so far as it goes, is as good as any other-the pleasure of malignity as good as the pleasure of kindness, simply as pleasure.”