↪perhaps Wasn't Alain Badiou largely motivated by a strong critique of postmodernism and a concern about the rise of relativism and the disappearance of any commitment to truth? He was certainly critical of thinkers like Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault, whose work he saw as contributing to a loss of faith in universality and radical politics. In other words, Badiou had his own philosophical vision to sell, which as at odds with the above thinkers. Should we trust his assessment? — Tom Storm

What you say about Badiou’s disagreements with French postmodernist philosophers is true. The shared features of their thinking he highlights here are cherry-picked to be consonant with those he endorses. I wouldn’t say , though, that these features are at odds with the postmodernists, just that they are broad enough to encompass a very wide range of contemporary thinkers.

↪Joshs OK, I'll be the one to ask the obvious question: The idea that there is something that "philosophy should genuinely be concerned with" -- how does that enter the story? — J

That notion only begins to make sense when we have a way of peering within what is taken for granted as an irreducible basis for philosophy. In Williamson’s case, what is taken for granted is a set of abstractions common to mathematics, formal logic and empirical science. For him this is a genuine beginning for philosophy, because he fails to see the ‘plumbing’ making it possible. Now of course, this is just my assertion… that is, until you see what I see. Then Williamson’s efforts become a perfectly respectable superstructure. Not wrong, but not grounding questioning and thus not genuine philosophy, just the regurgitation of an unexamined technical method. Williamson is aiming to improve a technology, but technology is not philosophy.

↪Joshs To be sure, progress is a normative notion. So modal logic is an improvement on predicate logic, despite modal logic being in a formal sense reducible to predicate logic.

So nothing need "guarantee the fixity" apart from our own preferences. If we agree that modal logic represents an improvement on predicate logic, what more is needed?

You (or Tim) may argue that we need something external or absolute or a platonic form or some such to fix the judgement. But that there is such choosing to abide by such a thing is itself a normative judgement. And yet we judge. — Banno

We don’t need anything external to our preferences to fix them. While the analytic methods Williamson chooses to apply to world are considered as external to that world, this is not the case when we submit formal logic , mathematics and empirical methodology to a Wittgenstienian or Husserlian analysis. We can find the ground for analytic methodology from within the structures of our use of preference, judgment and norms, as what is being concealed, forgotten , ignored and flattened over.
Williamson illustrates how the distinction between analytic and continental is more than geographic. He believes we have made progress in understanding our analytic methods; we know much more about topics like modal logic, possibility and necessity, and the technical aspects of truth than previous generations.

In Wittgenstein’s sense , Williamson champions improvements in precision, clarify and integration in what for Witt is a picture theory of judgement. Williamson takes for granted methods derived from the natural sciences, mathematics and formal logic and uses themes as his starting point, but it never occurs to him to inquire back to the basis of those methods. Doing so allows one to take account of the possibility that those methods may at some point be replaced by a different set of methods without disturbing their ground.

Wittgenstein, Husserl and Heidegger would all agree that All three would likely agree that Williamson's "progress" is actually regress** - a movement away from what philosophy should genuinely be concerned with. They would also agree that mathematical/scientific methods are inappropriate for philosophy's fundamental questions, and that the problems philosophy addresses require a different kind of approach than the one Williamson advocates.
Williamson's critique of "continental" philosophy misses the point* the apparent obscurity reflects the difficulty of the phenomena being investigated, not methodological sloppiness.

Each would argue that Williamson's paper represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what philosophical thinking involves and what kinds of problems it legitimately addresses.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

So too for reason. It is oriented outside of itself. We have come to see logos as a finite tool, the creation of man and his culture, but it is rather, I would argue, that man participates in Logos. The nature of logos is to transcend; it is always already past its limits and with the whole.

The relevance to the larger topic here is that modern philosophy is defined by its move to "bracket out" all sorts of considerations as irresolvable by reason, or beyond the limits of reason. The boundaries vary, it can be the phenomenal, the mind, language, culture, etc., but in each instance the bracketing involves a methodological move that assumes much about the world and reason. — Count Timothy von Icarus

For Husserl reason returns to itself in the self-affecting presence to itself of the present moment, the speaking that hears itself speak in the same moment that it speaks. Once we bracket off all that consists of reference to all that which is not present and can never be present ( the idealizations of logic and empirical science) , what is left is the presence-to-self which grounds reason as pure self-identity.

↪Joshs I
I'll have to leave you to it.

Thank you for the example. — Banno

I admit that Husserl’s work is extremely arcane stuff without a proper introduction, but let me ask you this. Williamson is concerned with progress in method. What does a progress of anything presuppose? Doesn’t it assume that what it is that is presumed to undergo a progress be held still over the course of its development? I’m referring to the qualitative sense of meaning of the substrate for the progress. A progress implies the ability to to count differences of degree in something which doesn't undergo change in kind over the course of the counting. What would you say guarantees the fixity in qualitative sense of meaning of concepts and methods that we make use of, such that something as assured as a progress can be assumed?

All brute facts about things in the world are subjective, relative and contingent.
— Joshs
Is this to be read as a stipulation? It doesn't correspond to, say, Searle's use of 'brute fact" as mind-independent, non-institutional and (at least usually) physical — Banno

It does correspond if we follow Husserl in taking concepts like mind-independence, non-institutionality and the physical as subjectively constituted idealizations. Understood naively in their non-reduced forms, in the way that Searle does, brute facts and subjectivity are external to each other. But when we bracket the presuppositions of the naive attitude, we reveal the genesis of brute facts in processes of subjective constitution. The same method of bracketing reveal Williamson’s analytic method to be mired in naive presuppositions concerning the logic of progress in analytic method, which when reduced reveal its genesis in subjective syntheses.

Personally, I think a dose of Doctor Witt's therapy is a very good thing for all of us from time to time, especially when we get a strong hunch that our terminology is backing us into implausible corners. As I said to Banno above, I don't think all the important philosophical questions can be treated and dissolved in this way, but it's a fantastically useful technique to have at the ready — J

Understanding Witt’s ‘therapeutic’ project in the context of consonant efforts in phenomenology and poststructuralism allows us to see that he doesn’t so much dissolve all philosophical questions as shows us that scientific , logical and mathematical domains are not self-grounding but instead are contingent and relative products dependent for their grounding on an underlying process of temporalization. Unlike writers like Husserl, Heidegger and Deleuze, Wittgenstein was reluctant to call the questioning that uncovers this process philosophical. He thought of philosophy as the imposing of metaphysical presuppositions (picture theories) on experience but not the self-reflexively transformative process of experiencing itself.

I'm unconvinced. Mostly because I don't quite see what you mean. We might start with the brute fact of bread, presumably, and work from that. No need for Plato. — Banno

All brute facts about things in the world are subjective, relative and contingent. Even so, they rely on idealizations. Where does the conceptual category of bread come from, if not an abstractive construction? Whether I cite Husserl and talk about the fact that the moment to moment perception of a spatial object reveals continuously changing sense of phenomena which we idolize as ‘this self-identically persisting object’, or the sense of bread within a Wittgensteinian language game, one is dealing with the contingent and relative. To stabilize it for self-reflective analysis is to idealize it. The only aspect of experience which ‘escapes’ ( because it is presupposed by) the changeable and relative is the temporalizing process itself ( the synthetic structure of pat, present and future). This ‘general’ origin is at the same time utterly particular, because it is not itself outside of time.

I have to admit I fall into the camp that tends to dismiss 1960s French philosophy as a postmodernist dead end. Not because I'm hysterical about it, but because I haven't been convinced of its intellectual worth. I say this as somebody who isn't afraid to engage deeply with obscure thinkers when necessary. So I would be genuinely interested to hear what it is you think made that time so creative, and I guess the second question is how you think about the balance "creativity" in philosophy against other desiderata such as having good arguments and evidence for your theories — FirecrystalScribe

I’m sure you would agree that in order to justify dismissing the intellectual worth a philosophy, you have to first demonstrate that you have read it effectively enough to be able to offer a detailed summary of it. I know firsthand how difficult this can be. As someone brought up in anglo-american culture, I had no exposure to continental writers up through my graduate school studies in psychology and treated them with enormous skepticism, believing that the only kind of ‘evidence worth its salt was that which scientific empiricism relied on. It was only later, on my own, that I introduced myself to contemporary Continental modes of thought through Heidegger’s Being and Time. It threw me for loop. I had never encountered a method thought so rigorous, dense and compressive in its unification of history and domains of culture. I went from Heidegger to Derrida, who it would have been impossible for me to understand without my prior background in Heidegger. In mastering Nietzsche and Husserl, I came to see how Heidegger, Derrida, Focault and Deleuze were all the heirs of Nietzsche and phenomenology ( as well as Marx and Freud). Most anglo-American philosophy only pays attention to Kant and, if one is lucky, Hegel, so they offer one no exposure to the influences or modes of thought I have mentioned.

When you say ‘evidence’ do you have in mind the match between theoretical prediction and observation? I assume that when you say you are not afraid to engage deeply with obscure thinkers, that this includes philosophers of science like Thomas Kuhn. I tend to find that those who prefer Popperian falsification over Kuhnian paradigm shifts not only are not convinced of the intellectual worth of 1960’s French philosophy, but also reject those thinkers who follow in the wake of Kuhn, but are themselves still a fair distance away from the radicality of the French poststructuralist writers. Therefore, it is probably a waste of time to directly debate the merits of writers like Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida when we may need to focus on a preliminary debate concerning realism , the realism-antirealism binary , and positions put forth by anglo-american writers that critique both realism and anti-realism. In the U.S., that latter group includes new materialist philosophers like Joseph Rouse and Karen Barad, and phenomenological-influenced cognitive science writers like Evan Thompson (who does not consider himself to be a postmodernist).
So I need to know who are the paragons of contemporary philosophy for you, so I can fine-turn my response to what you are familiar with.

My response: Those who jump too quickly to an answer to "what are things made of?" fall; not water, not fire. The doubters have it right: we can intelligibly ask what bread is made of, but not, at least amongst the presocratics, what everything is made of. It is a step too far to ask what things in general are made of. — Banno

Whether we like it or not, and whether we intend to or not, we cannot will ourselves to confine our method to the study of bread rather than the world in general without already presupposing as its condition of possibility a general and primordial origin, that which is always and for everyone the case, regardless of how relative, subjective and contingent the experience. Subjectivty , relativity and contingency only emerge as what they are due to this ‘ general’ and primordial origin.

I do think that something happened around the beginning of the 20th century, roughly the 1920s, possibly as a result of disillusionment from World War I, possibly because we hit a cognitive bottleneck. But it does seem that even though creative new philosophical ideas were still being invented, the academic and wider social community stopped digesting them. This, in turn, may have led most academic philosophers to stop trying to create "big theories" and focus instead on micro-analysis. After all, what's the point of putting forward a big new theory if so few people are going to read or understand it? — FirecrystalScribe

Big new philosophical theories came pouring out of Germany for 200 years, until they destroyed their intellectual infrastructure through world wars I and II. The torch of post-war European philosophy was passed to French thinkers , beginning with Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Lacan, Levi-Strauss and Levinas and culminating in the Parisian scene in the 1960’s and 70’s ( Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Nancy, Badiou, Ricouer). Paris in the 1960’s was a very fertile intellectual environment, comparable to Germany in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and nothing comparable to either of these milieus exists for philosophy anywhere in the world in the 21st century.The digestion of these French ideas by the general public has been slow, to say the least, with liberals and conservatives alike in hysterics over the ‘wokist’ and ‘postmodernist scourge’ they beleive is to blame for everything rotten in society.

It sounds like you’re talking about the kinds of general social know-how that allows us to navigate in interpersonal situations without having to have in-depth knowledge of other persons’ motives and beliefs. Ordering in a restaurant, driving in busy traffic, dancing the tango or strategizing against enemy soldiers are all examples of this skillful coping. Blame would seem to mark the limit of the anticipatory usefulness of such coping, the point where a more in-depth understanding of the other’s perspective becomes necessary. Deceit would not appear to trigger blame unless it could not be accounted for as an element of the social practice. Misdirection is an expected strategy in football and war, but not in cooperative ventures. The enemy general who pulls off a successful subterfuge ( D-day) is to be admired, whereas the friend who betrays one’s trust triggers rage and blame.

Another observation is that “being at cross purposes” seems to play a fairly significant role in dismissal. Some kind of communal short-circuit occurs. For example, if someone tries to exterminate Jews and another tries to stop them, they are not at cross-purposes in the deeper sense, because they are engaged in a common pursuit of practical execution. Similarly, when two football teams face off, they are not at cross-purposes given that they are both engaged in the same genus of activity, even though they are opposed within that genus.

“Writing off” or dismissal seems to occur when the actual genus of activity differs between two people. For example, if someone comes to TPF to advertise their newest invention, they will literally be dismissed by the moderators because they are not engaged in the requisite kind of activity. Or if a musician aims only to make money rather than art, then her fellow musicians will dismiss and ostracize her in a way that they wouldn’t dismiss or ostracize a technically inferior musician who possessed the proper aim. Or if one person is engaged in a practical activity such as anti-racism, and another is engaged in a speculative activity such as studying racial characteristics, they will tend to dismiss and oppose one another. Other examples include the philosopher and the sophist, or the pious and the charlatan. It would seem that in order for moral indignation to fully flower the genus of activity must differ subtly, and in such a way that the second genus could be reasonably mistaken for the first. — Leontiskos

I am thinking of situations where, as you say, two gensuses ( genera) differ subtly enough that the second can be reasonably mistaken for the first. Your characterization of such situations seems to assume that nothing stands in the way of our recognizing and properly interpreting the meaning of the second genus, save for circumstances where the other intends to mislead. But what I have in mind are genera informed by conceptual systems that are not readily recognized and understood. Do you not believe that there are ideas floating around us which we are not prepared to assimilate because they are too alien relative to our background concepts? In the situation where someone tries to exterminate Jews and another tries to stop them, can we really say that they are engaged in a common pursuit of practical execution before we understand WHY they are doing what they are doing f from their own perspective? Opponents in a football game can easily switch sides because the game is understood in the same way by all. But the rescuer and exterminator of jews are not on opposing sides of the same game. They are playing different games, and neither side’s position appears justifiable to the other.

The thing is, my point holds in an even broader sense than you are interpreting it. As long as one separates the reasoning process from the conclusions/beliefs that are held, and also recognizes correctness and incorrectness with respect to reasoning processes, then what I say holds. Thus to, "Understand the other's reasons," is to understand the reasoning process being used, and to deem it at least partially correct — Leontiskos

I don’t have any disagreement with this. What I have in mind are situations where the other is ‘not even wrong’, where the opponents are talking past one another, where it appears as though the other has ‘changed the subject’. This may seem like an inconsequential circumstance, easily remedied by a careful clarification of the substance of the topic. But I suggest that such gaps between parties in construal of the nature of the topic are responsible for the lions share of social conflict, because they are difficult to detect. Before we can separate the reasoning process from the beliefs that are held, we first have to be able to recognize the underlying perspective on the basis of which those beliefs get their sense. If we mistakenly assume we both are interpreting the meaning of the concepts seeding the reasoning process the same way, we will pre-emptively move to looking for faulty reasoning in the other rather than making sure we are actually talking about the same thing.

I see science as a product of philosophy and I believe philosophy's power lies in creating disciplines. I’m not religious but for the sake of the analogy: it’s as if God tried to become more human. I don’t mean to say science is inferior, but that it does very different things. Copying the standards of science to apply them to philosophy makes no sense to me because I don’t believe philosophy’s goal is to understand the world around us, but to provide various tools to do so. — Skalidris

Which philosophers are exemplary in this regard, in your opinion? The philosophers I am most influenced by provide tools (a method) which presents a world strikingly different from the one we may take for granted. For instance, Husserl discusses how the transcendental-phenomenological reduction discloses a "new field of being".

In the *Crisis of European Sciences* he describes the reduction as leading to "a complete personal transformation, comparable in the beginning to a religious conversion" .
In *Ideas I Husserl writes that the reduction opens up "a new way of experiencing the world" by bracketing all natural assumptions and focusing on the *how* of givenness rather than the *what*. He states:
*"The phenomenologically reduced perceptual experience is not just a method but an *existential shift*—what he elsewhere calls "the philosopher’s genuine rebirth" .

Wouldn’t it be predicable that if each fails to be persuaded to cross over to the other’s stance, they will also have a great deal of difficulty in accepting the logic behind the opposing view?
— Joshs

Only if they cannot rise above post hoc rationalization, where reasoning is irrelevant and it's only assertions that matter. Anyone who understands what valid reasoning is should be able to see how a position possesses validity, coherence, and rationale, even if they do not agree with the conclusions. Anyone who cannot do that is more interested in ideology and "material positions," rather than true reasoning — Leontiskos

Isnt there a danger of relying too heavily on the validity of the other’s reasoning and too little on the possibility that the other is making use of conceptual senses of meaning you are u familiar with? Don’t many situations of breakdown in communication result from a confusion between reasoning that lacks validity, coherence, and rationale, and valid reasoning anchored to unfamiliar concepts?

That's cool, and you very well may be right, that enactivism is the way forward, but our present biological understanding of organisms actually saves lives on a daily basis. I'm not casting shade on enactivism at all. I'm just saying it's got a ways to go to supplant the scientifically rooted view that presently prevails — frank

What exactly is this scientifically rooted view of biology you claim prevails?

Let me characterize the most recent thinking in biology as I understand it. The endosymbiotic theory of Lynn Margulis showed that eukaryotic cells arose through bacterial symbiosis, challenging the traditional gene-centric view of evolution and emphasizing cooperation over competition as a driving evolutionary force. This connects to several broader shifts in biology that overlap significantly with enactivism, post-Cartesian thought, and free energy principles:

Modern biology increasingly views organisms not as discrete individuals but as ‘holobionts’ - integrated communities of host organisms plus their microbiomes. This dissolves the classical boundary between self and environment, much like enactivism rejects the subject/object distinction. Your gut bacteria aren't just "in" you - they're part of your extended phenotype, affecting everything from mood to immune function.

Researchers now emphasize that biological properties emerge from dynamic interactions rather than being reducible to component parts. This mirrors enactivism's emphasis on cognition as enacted through organism-environment coupling rather than internal representation.

Biology has moved beyond genetic determinism toward understanding development as emerging from gene-environment interactions across multiple timescales. This aligns with enactivism's rejection of pre-given structures in favor of enacted meaning-making.

Karl Friston's free energy principle suggests all biological systems minimize surprise by maintaining their structural integrity through active inference. This provides a mathematical framework for understanding how organisms maintain their organization while coupling with environments - a core enactivist insight. The organism doesn't just adapt to a pre-given environment but actively shapes its niche while being shaped by it.

All these developments dissolve classical Cartesian dualities: mind/body, organism/environment, gene/culture, self/other. They point toward understanding life as fundamentally relational and processual rather than consisting of discrete, bounded entities.

The convergence suggests biology is moving toward what some call a "process ontology" where identity emerges from patterns of relationship rather than essential properties - a view that resonates across these philosophical and scientific frameworks.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The better question to ask is, “How do we come to agree to disagree?” I want to say that if two people are to agree to disagree, then there must first be earnest dialogue, there must be honest irreconcilability, and each party must understand at least in part the reasons which prevent the other from agreeing. It is easy enough to see why such a thing is not possible where dialogue at all, much less earnest dialogue, is refused. — Leontiskos

Let’s say that two parties who embrace sharply opposing philosophical, political or religious positions are bought together to engage in earnest dialogue. Wouldn’t it be predicable that if each fails to be persuaded to cross over to the other’s stance, they will also have a great deal of difficulty in accepting the logic behind the opposing view? If I tell you that I understand the reasons for your disagreement with me, but in the same breath I find those reasons to be irrational and logically faulty, am I really understanding those reasons?

I was referencing the fact that we model the world and react to the model prior to reacting to the world, but more physiologically, the most powerful driver of emotion is dopamine. Activation of dopaminergic pathways starts within the organism, most fundamentally in architecture contained in DNA. — frank

Right. The idea that we only have indirect access to the world through internal representations is a cartesian, reductionist view of emotion, and stands in direct opposition to the enactivist claim that we don’t represent the world via internal schemes but are in direct contact with it by way of our patterns of activity and interaction.

I don't think there is much flesh connecting any philosophical outlook to an explanation for consciousness because there presently is no explanation for it. All we do is speculate. — frank

What matters isn’t whether you call it an explanation, the god’s eye truth or mere speculation, but what you can do with it. Today’s iron -clad scientific truth will be tomorrow’s superstition anyway, so what counts is how a perspective aids in guiding the understanding of oneself and others in real-life situations. There are an enormous variety of practical ways in which an activity-based view of affect can do this. Numerous theories of personality and psychotherapy are based on them.

↪Count Timothy von Icarus Or we could argue that for the most part emotions are the mind interacting with itself. Realizing that has the benefit of a kind of freedom. — frank

The key thing about affect is its character as change of disposition, as a being exposed to the world in a fresh way. That doesn’t seem to be adequately captured by the solipsistic connotations of a mind turning inward towards itself. Affect does the precise opposite, throwing us outside of ourselves by the way it affects us.

↪Joshs I talked to Pierre-Normand once about embodied consciousness. It's an interesting idea, but far from fleshed out enough to make assertions. You would want to frame it as a possibility that emotion can't be extricated from the organism-environment entity. That's certainly not the only way to view it. — frank

The relation between affect and cognition has been my thing for a long time, and I’ve collected so much ‘flesh’ for the enactivist view it would make Buffalo Bill proud.

A feeling is an activity?
— frank

:up:

Or more generally, "A passion is an action?"

A feeling is generally seen as something that happens to us, whereas an activity is generally seen as something we do. To define feelings as activities is a bit like saying, "Internal things that happen to us without our doing anything are things that we do." — Leontiskos

I’m going to be lazy and let CharGPT summarize the postings that I’m drawing from:

Yes — you’re touching on a central idea in enactivist philosophy of mind, especially as developed by thinkers like Matthew Ratcliffe, Evan Thompson, and Shaun Gallagher. Enactivism challenges the traditional view that emotions and feelings are passive, internal states (like private inner “qualia”) and instead argues that they are ways of engaging with the world. Here’s a breakdown of the view, especially through Ratcliffe’s lens:

⸻

1. Emotions as Active, World-Involving Phenomena

Enactivism holds that cognition (including emotion) is not just something that happens inside the brain but emerges through dynamic interactions between an organism and its environment. Emotions, then, are:
• Not passive receptions of internal states
• Active orientations or engagements with the world

Ratcliffe’s Key Idea:

In works like “Feelings of Being” (2008), Ratcliffe argues that emotions are existential orientations — they shape how the world appears to us. For example:
• Fear doesn’t just happen in you — it discloses the world as threatening.
• Joy opens the world up as rich and inviting.
• Grief makes the world appear irretrievably altered.

These are ways of being in the world, not just internal reactions to stimuli.

⸻

2. Pre-reflective and Bodily

Enactivists argue that emotions are embodied and pre-reflective — you don’t always notice you’re feeling them in the same way you notice you’re thinking a thought.
• They are felt through posture, movement, action-readiness.
• For instance, anxiety might be an attunement where the world feels uncertain or unstable — not just a “tingling in your gut.”

⸻

3. Affect as World-Disclosure

Ratcliffe expands on Heideggerian phenomenology by suggesting that affective experience “discloses” or “opens up” a meaningful world. This view means:
• Emotions are not added on to an already-existing, neutral perception of the world.
• Rather, they are how the world first becomes meaningful at all.

So, when you love someone, the world is full of promise, vulnerability, and care. You’re not reacting to a neutral world with love — you’re experiencing the world through love.

⸻

4. Emotion as Situated and Contextual

Emotions are always situated in lived contexts and cultural practices — they are not the same everywhere, for everyone, in every moment. This supports the idea that emotions are interactive and historical, not static mental contents.

⸻

In Summary:

For enactivists like Ratcliffe, emotions are not inner states that “represent” the world; they are ways of being in the world — bodily, situated, affective orientations that actively shape and are shaped by our interactions with others and the environment.

This approach invites us to rethink psychology and philosophy by moving beyond a mind/world split — and seeing the self, body, and world as deeply intertwined in the experience of emotion.

However, language games are embedded and make use of stuff in the world - apples and blocks and so on. Hence they presume the world is a certain way - that it contains blocks and apples — Banno

I don’t know that Witt would want to separate the perception of things from the things themselves. He discusses this in relation to the duck-rabbit drawing in his analysis of what it means to ‘see something as’. Rather than our perception being an interpretation or perception of something external to it (a pre-existing something), the ‘seeing as’ is fundamental.

I am skeptical, both of the press and what we are calling the decline of the arts. I just look around and see thousands of high quality books, movies, television shows, and popular music produced every year. I can't speak for visual arts. Is there a lot of crap, of course. But you don't have to read, watch, listen to, or look at it. We also have easy access to everything ever produced throughout history. There is more high quality literature, history, philosophy, art, music... than any of us could go through in a life time.

Wringing one's hands and crying "hell in a handbasket" is not evidence — T Clark

No, but there is evidence in how one feels about the movies, songs, plays and novels that one gets one’s hands on. You’re an engineer. I’m sure you’re also a lover of good music, movies and other forms of artistic creativity. But I dont know how picky you are about your entertainment. What does it take to move you? When I partake of an artistic product, my standards are based on memories of experiences with a song or film that shook me to the core, that changed in some small fashion the way I felt or thought about things. I remember stepping out of a theater after watching a life-changing film and everything around me seemed a little different. My favorite music gave me ideas about new possibilities, and acted as a guide to the future I wanted to create or discover. I’m selfish about my artistic experiences that way. I will settle for superficial entertainment, but I crave the kind of art that unsettles me, surprises the hell out of me, disturbs me. And where do I find such art today? In small rarified circles closely aligned with academic environments, where the art is intertwined with philosophical notions which themselves are mostly isolated from the mainstream. I would say, then, that the innovative art and philosophy are out there, but they are produced and consumed by an increasing guy smaller segment of the general culture.

Explanation - or justification - requires a contrast between what is explained and the explanation. For an explanation to function it must take what is being explained as granted - an explanation as to why the wasabi plants are thriving grants that the wasabi plants are thriving. The explanation explains and accepts something external to itself.

What our explanations - justifications - have in common is that there is something to justify. What our language games have in common is that they are embedded in the world, and together they make a form of life — Banno

Are language games explanations-justifications or are they structures of intelligibility providing the criteria for justification?

I'm pretty sure you could argue that anything is grounded in philosophical worldviews but that's besides the point. Art and philosophy don't depend on each other, one could stop evolving while the other could keep on evolving. Where did you get the idea that the innovations are dependent on each other? Sure some innovation in art could inspire something in philosophy and vice versa but it's far from always the case. — Skalidris

There are no hard and fast distinctions to be made between what passes as art and what is considered philosophy, or between philosophy and poetry, fiction, science or any other domain of creativity. This is why cultural movements (classical, renaissance, Enlightenment ,Romanticism, modernism, postmodernism) encompass all of these domains, not simply because they all belong to the same chronological period, but because they express different facets of a shared set of worldviews, via their own unique vocabulary of expression. So yes, each domain of creativity within an era depends inextricably on the others, since they are not separated to begin with except artificially.

I disagree, the ways to do art for example have completely exploded in the last century, basically anything is "allowed", and you can share anything you want online anyway. The internet has allowed so many odd things to be created, and there are entire communities of these odd things that could have never existed before.

I think the lack of creativity in philosophy comes from the fact that it now has an authority that only allows a specific type of content, and that academia is considered to be the only "serious" way of practicing philosophy, so independent thinkers wouldn't be taken seriously unless the authority recognizes the value in it. — Skalidris

Artistic movements are themselves grounded in philosophical worldviews. Any innovation in rhe former presupposes annd reflects innovation in the latter, and vice versa. All you have to do is examine a list of the most acclaimed new talents in philosophy and you will find all sorts of cross links between their work and the arts and literature. And for their part, many artists today draw heavily from critical theory, phenomenology and other recent strands of philosophy. Perhaps one could say that , rather than a deficit of innovation in philosophy or the arts, the trajectory of innovation in both domains is moving farther and farther away from the concerns of popular culture. Rather than popular culture embracing these new ideas, it is hellbent on suppressing and censuring it, as witnessed by the actions of many states and the current federal government of the U.S. to eliminate anything smacking of ‘wokism’.

The irony being that the popular press itself is among the most decadent and stagnated institutions. It makes it hard to take it seriously. — T Clark

Just because the press is a victim of the same phenomenon doesn’t mean they don’t have a point.

I just think when a person asks what it's like to live in a city, they're asking how it feels to live there. You'd want to help them connect it to feelings they already know about. Wouldn't you want to describe scenes, rhythms, tastes, colors, etc? Compare and contrast to other locations? Yes, you probably gathered that information by doing things, but that seems incidental. Consciousness is filled with feelings, right? — frank

Feelings aren’t inner senses sprinkling their subjective coloration over experiences , but activities, doings. They are our ways of being attuned in situations, the way things strike us.

And I would add, this death of innovative thought is apparently not restricted to philosophy, judging by the popular press. There have been so many books and articles in recent years complaining about stagnation in the arts, literature, cinema, music and the sciences they I have lost count. It is a phenomenon of our times thar is in need of explanation. Here’s some examples courtesy of A.I. For the record , I don’t believe the. current situation can be explained on the exclusive basis of the stifling effects of corporate capitalism.

### **Books & Articles on Creative Stagnation**

1. **"The Creative Drought"** (2024) – An essay by Ted Gioia and others discussing the decline of artistic innovation, citing corporate consolidation, nostalgia-driven content, and algorithmic homogenization in film, music, and literature .

2. **"Is Old Music Killing New Music?"** (2022, *The Atlantic*) – Ted Gioia’s viral Substack post (later republished) argues that streaming platforms favor older songs, stifling new musical innovation .

3. **"Is This the Worst-Ever Era of American Pop Culture?"** (2025, *The Atlantic*) – Examines the dominance of reboots, franchises, and algorithm-driven content, questioning whether we’re in a "cultural dark age" .

4. **"The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" (comparisons in modern critiques)** – Referenced by Gioia as a metaphor for cultural stagnation, where modern entertainment recycles past successes like the Arch of Constantine reused older monuments .

5. **"The Creative Act: A Way of Being" by Rick Rubin (2023)** – While not directly about stagnation, Rubin’s book critiques formulaic creativity and urges a return to raw, unfiltered artistic expression, implying industry-wide creative decline .

6. **"The New York Times Magazine" (2023)** – Declared the 21st century the "least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing press" .

7. **The Guardian (2023)** – An art critic proclaimed that "the avant-garde is dead," lamenting the lack of groundbreaking movements in contemporary art .

8. **"The Honest Broker" (Ted Gioia’s Substack)** – Regularly critiques stagnation in music, literature, and film, highlighting how private equity and corporate control suppress originality .

9. **"Where Has Artistic Innovation and Creativity Gone?" (Inside Higher Ed, 2024)** – Discusses how economic pressures and nostalgia cycles (e.g., franchises, reboots) have replaced bold experimentation in arts and academia .

I’m not saying there aren’t any new ideas in philosophy, but philosophers generally seem very reluctant to drift away from the concepts they’ve read about. They seem hesitant to create new ideas altogether because such ideas likely wouldn’t meet the academic standards. — Skalidris

The situation is even worse than you depict it. It is not just that new ideas in a chronological sense are in short supply, but philosophical ideas which are already more than 100 years old have yet to be absorbed by a large percentage of the general population. Furthermore, most of what passes today for the leading edge of philosophical thought merely recycles and repackages the work of 19th century figures like William James, Charles Peirce, Wilhelm Dilthey and Kierkegaard. Meanwhile , the fresh ‘isms’ of 50 years ago (deconstructionism, postmodernism, poststructuralism) have been followed by regressive, reactionary movements like object-oriented ontology.

↪Hanover, ↪Joshs I picture language games as more or less discreet, seperate enterprises. The examples are things like the builders calling for a block, buying an apple, and so on. A form of life is an aggregation of these.

So, not synonymous.

And calling for a block or buying an apple would look more or less the same, in various different cultures. — Banno

Perhaps a form of life can be understood via Witt’s description of a family of resemblances, which ties together discrete games on the basis of commonalities that are intertwined but not reducible to a single shared thread:

66. Consider for example the proceedings that we call "games". I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all?—Don't say: "There must be something common, or they would not be called 'games' "—but look and see whether there is anything common to all.—For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but
similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don't think, but look!—Look for example at board-games, with their multifarious relationships. Now pass to card-games; here you find many correspondences with the first group, but many common features drop out, and others appear. When we pass next to ball­games, much that is common is retained, but much is lost.—Are they all 'amusing'?

Compare chess with noughts and crosses. Or is there always winning and losing, or competition between players? Think of patience. In ball games there is winning and losing; but when a child throws his ball at the wall and catches it again, this feature has disappeared. Look at the parts played by skill and luck; and at the difference between skill in chess and skill in tennis. Think now of games like ring-a-ring-a-roses; here is the element of amusement, but how many other characteristic features have disappeared! And we can go through the many, many other groups of games in the same way; can see how similarities crop up and disappear. And the result of this examination is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.

67. I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than "family resemblances"; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way.— And I shall say: 'games' form a family.

What I would like to do is develop an epistemology based on JTB, but with a Wittgensteinian twist - for example, demonstrating how our methods of justification apply across various language games within our form of life. — Sam26

What’s you think is the difference between a language game and a form of life?

If there are variable language games, are there also variable human forms of life that play those games, or is there but one? — Hanover

I’ve always thought that language games and forms of life were synonymous.

If there are many, then we cannot know who shares our form, and so we cannot know that we are playing a language game at all. My conversation with a parrot isn't public use. — Hanover

I beleive there are many. But if so, how did Wittgenstein come to know that there are language games? Perhaps from the experience of initially finding a set of discursive practices within a foreign community to be incoherent, and then later learning how to engage with that form of life. This may have led him to surmise that if the sense of meaning of word use is only contingently grounded within a particular language game, then even within that game, reference to pre-existing rules and criteria of meaning of words do not guarantee how they will be understood.

With regard to my conversation with a parrot (or with an A.I.), to the extent that I claim that I understand the parrot and the parrot understands me, I must be drawing from some already available normative discursive structure of meaning, which is likely to come from the language games I share with my human discursive community. Isnt this what we do when we interpret our pet’s behaviors in anthropomorphic terms? Which is not to say that we can’t enter into a language game directly with our pet dog.

Let me lay my cards on the table regarding these questions of "switching positions with someone else." Humans are enormously adaptable, and they all have the same nature. I think we can switch positions with others, whether linguistically, culturally, scientifically, etc. There are a few limitations and immutabilities, but when we are speaking about volitional realities I don't see much in the way of per se impossibility of switching positions — Leontiskos

The above caught my eye. Given that you believe humans have the same nature, and by this you apparently have in mind a powerful facility to understand the world from the other’s point of view ( linguistic, cultural, scientific), what sort of explanation is left in order to account for profound disagreements concerning ethical, epistemological and philosophical matters ( not to mention day to day conflicts with friends and family members)?

It seems that what is left falls under the categories of medical pathology, incorrect knowledge and irrationality, and moral failure. Is this characterization close to the mark?

Sorry. I don't get it. In the context of the question at hand, why does it matter whether human cognitive systems evolved in response to the environment or coevolved in concert with the environment? — T Clark

The issue is whether it is possible to make a distinction between the organism's perception of its environment and its evolution with respect to its environment. Put differently, is perception the organism’s representation of a reality, or is it the enacting of a reality? In the first case, what is represented is presumed to be external to the perceiver. In the second case, the real is produced through the organism-environment interaction.

So... living organisms, including humans, affect the environment and organisms and environments evolve together. Agreed. That's not "missing from Lorenz's account." It's just not particularly relevant to the specific point he, and I, are trying to make which is - human minds, including our intellectual capacities, evolved in the same manner that our physical bodies did. Logic is something we brought to the world. — T Clark

I get that that is your point, but the point of Lorenz’s comment is that we evolved sense organs for adaptive purposes , organs which allow us to see only those aspects of reality we need to see in order to achieve our evolutionarily shaped goals. Unlike recent biological thinking, he does not claim that the very reality of the organism’s environment is co-constructed by the organism’s patterns of functioning in it. Instead, he assumes the reality of that environment is external to, and independent of, the organism’s limited, adaptive perception of it.

My point was that the phenomenological perspective is not the default. I think the overwhelming number of readers would agree that Husserl or Marion provide far more abstract descriptions of experience than common narratives about what one sees in the woods. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Interesting that you would use the word abstract to describe an approach whose aim is precisely to bracket and see beneath the abstractions that are commonly used to think about everyday objects. In doing so, one does not privilege the part over the whole. On the contrary, one arrives at an enriched understanding of the whole. I certainly agree that empirical reduction relies on abstraction, which is why Husserl warned against what Evan Thompson in his recent book called the blind spot of science, the tendency to forget that its idealizations are convenient simplifications derived from the actually experienced lifeworld (is temperature nothing but the kinetic motion of molecules? Is color simply wavelengths of light?).

Doesn't Merleau-Ponty's point only hold in cases where one intentionally seeks to "get behind" judgement—to attempt to enter something like Hegel's analysis of sense certainty? In everyday experience, we walk through forests full of trees and squirrels, rooms with tables and chairs, etc., nor streams of unmediated sense data. When we see an angry dog, we do not have to abstract from sense data and think: "ah, that sense data incoming from over there can conform to a large, angry dog, I better run away — Count Timothy von Icarus

For the phenomenologist, there is no ready-made world of objects. To perceive trees, squirrels and rooms with tables and chairs is to constitute them through the interplay between expectation and response.

“We must now show that its intellectualist [idealist] antithesis is on the same level as empiricism itself. Both take the objective world as the object of their analysis, when this comes first neither in time nor in virtue of its meaning; and both are incapable of expressing the peculiar way in which perceptual consciousness constitutes its object. Both keep their distance in relation to perception, instead of sticking closely to it.