You find meaning in your life through psychology texts? — Hanover

It’s kind of hard not to when those psychologists are Gene Gendlin and George Kelly. Gendlin’s major work was ‘Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning’, and Kelly wrote papers with themes like ‘A Psychology of the Optimal Man’, Psychotherapy and the Nature of Man’, ‘Sin and psychotherapy’ and The Psychology of the Unknown’. I can’t think of any better aids to finding meaning in one’s life.

Habituation occurs when we learn not to respond to a stimulus that is presented repeatedly without change, punishment, or reward.
Sensitization occurs when a reaction to a stimulus causes an increased reaction to a second stimulus. It is essentially an exaggerated startle response and is often seen in trauma survivors.”
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-psychology/chapter/biological-basis-of-learning/ — Michael McMahon

This sounds like a stimulus-response model of perception A bit outdated, considering the wide range of Gibsonian-influenced models of perception ( O’Regan and Noe, for instance) that have emerged over the past few decades. Expectation plays a fundamental role in perception , which is why the concept of qualia is incoherent when applied to perception.

art can depict reality, but that doesn't make it science or an academic study. And nobody should have any problem with this. — ssu

Tell me what you think the relation is between science and the progress of knowledge , and then compare it with your sense of whether philosophy progresses and if so , how is this progress different from the progress of science. Once i get a sense of your views on this matter, I can expand the terrain to include the arts and literature.

I’m curious as to why you thought this would not be a popular view. I agree wholeheartedly with this description, and I think you’re being quite cautious in how you express it. The way I see it, to describe something as ‘evil’ is to admit ignorance, isolation or exclusion of some aspect to our experience. It identifies a limitation in our understanding. — Possibility

That’s very refreshing to hear. Let me be sure I understand you, though. Tell me what distinctions you might make, if any , between evil and blame in general.
I include within the boundaries of blame the following: all feelings and expressions of blame aimed at another (or oneself in self-anger). These include: irritation, annoyance, disapproval, condemnation, feeling insulted, taking umbrage, resentment, exasperation, impatience, hatred, ire, outrage, contempt, righteous indignation, ‘adaptive' anger, perceiving the other as deliberately thoughtless, lazy, culpable, perverse, inconsiderate, disrespectful, disgraceful, greedy, evil, sinful, criminal.
My argument is that the concept of evil. particularly in its theological guises, is a more foundationalisr version of blame ,but all of the varieties I mentioned above share central structure features with evil. I’m aware of only one writer who seems to support my view of blame as a failure of understanding. Every other philosophy I know of is essentially a philosophy of blame i. that it relies on a notion of capricious and arbitrariness at the core of human intent. This takes a wide variety of forms, ranging from concepts of social influence on the individual ( Marx, Foucault, etc) to internal sources of bias and influence such as drives and emotions.

Faith based reasoning is properly limited to how one ought live one's life in terms of meaning and value, questions science does not address. — Hanover

Certainly the natural sciences don’t address these questions , but I wouldn’t say the same for certain approaches within psychology, such as clinical psychology.


“Suppose we regard clinical psychology as if it were the purest of sciences." George Kelly

Still Sokal was a leftist, similar to actually others that are politically on the left and worried about postmodernism.) — ssu

It should be mentioned that Sokal’s brand of leftism identifies itself with classical Marxism, which is a central object of critique by French postmodernists. So we are talking about two distinctly different ideologies of leftism, as different as classical liberalism ( now dubbed economic conservatism ) and social democratic liberalism.

Nature causes nature itself (e.g. creatures, exploding stars, slipping tectonic plates, lightening strikes, mass extinctions, etc) to suffer? :roll: — 180 Proof

Hmm. I like that idea. I was watching a blackbird attacking a crow today, and it made me think of the cognitive assessment the blackbird was making about the ‘evil’ the crow represented. Higher animals are fully capable of differentiating between playful
fighting , an attack to show annoyance and a desire to kill
the opponent. That is, they can to some extent understand the context of the other’s behavior as being benign or malevolent. Note , however, that what they share with humans who see evil all around them is a failure to see past the immediate harm to their interests.

can you drill down without getting too theoretical — Tom Storm

Not sure I could. But arent there all sorts of
fundamental discoveries about human nature bound up with the changes in religious doctrine over the centuries? What about the shift from Platonic (Augustine, Philo) to Aristotelian rationalist approaches (Aquinas, Maimonides) to faith? What about the abandonment of fundamentalist readings of scripture in favor of interpretive ones? And more recently the abandonment of the trinity? Or Spinoza’s pantheism? Or Tillch’s existentialism? I wouldn’t know where to begin to mark the dividing line between theology and philosophy , or for that matter, between philosophy and empiricism.

. I could read Einstein through Kant and Kant as the proponent of a certain form of liberal theology. Or I could connect Newton and Galileo with certain theological assumptions.

I know that’s something Dennett and his band of atheists would say but I disagree. I think this misses the central role of faith and values in science. I could read Einstein through Kant and Kant as the proponent of a certain form of liberal theology.

Faith is not a reliable method of justification because it is content free. — Tom Storm

I don’t think faith is content-free. It is the expression of a value system. A particular faith can only generate the assumptions you listed above because it generates predictions and anticipations based on the content of the faith. Religious culture in the west evinces a parallel evolution of understanding in relation to the history of science. This isn’t primary because those religions availed themselves of the latest empirical
evidence, but because on its own tems , within its own language and methods of inquiry it is capable of invalidating older views and replacing them.

Nobody ever asks about my middle and last names... :sad: — Amity

Ville Horror?

I didnt see that. He edited that last part out .

My definition of evil won’t be a popular one, but here goes. First of all, even though it may seem that the concept of evil isn’t necessarily associated with any particular affectivity, it is inextricably bound with the emotions of hostility, anger and guilt. We see others as evil when they violate our expectations or standards within the social realm. Feithemore, we believe that the perpetrator is ‘guilty’. That doesn’t mean they feel guilty, it means we believe they should feel guilty. That is, we believe
the other knew bette than to do what they did to hurt us or other members of society. We believe
they knew their actions would cause others pain but disregarded this and went ahead callously, thoughtlessly, maliciously , malevolently. Notice that these terms don’t explain anything, they just point to a strange arbitrariness and capriciousness in intent, what is typically referred to as freedom of will. The connection between evil and emotions of guilt, anger and hostility is that they all are based in the same structure of thinking. To put it simply, they are all concepts of blame. When we blame someone or ourselves , we believe there was an arbitrary succumbing to temptation , a being led astray from
doing the ‘right’ thing.

Here is where I’m going to be very unpopular. I believe that the thinking of blame and evil always represent our failure to understand the other’s motives
from thei pint of view, and never represent an accurate depiction of the other’s thinking. Blame and evil aren’t explanations , they are nothing but question marks nWby on earth did the other want to do something so terrible? Why didn’t they feel strong enough guilt at the prospect of performing those actions so as to prevent them from going through with it? I know that I have been tempted by such things but I was able to resist. This question mark of blame flies by many different labels and accusations. For inatancw, when we call the other lazy, inconsiderate , selfish, recalcitrant , immoral, criminal.

In sum, we blame the other for our failure to understand them. Perhaps this failure on our part is the true basis of ‘evil’ and all of the violence that emanates from it

Just you just say that Jack used low battery as a relative
example of evil?

I do think that it is likely that good and evil go beyond our own psychologies. — Jack Cummins

It sounds like you’re pointing to a theological dimension.

st wanted to point out that Pomo should not be taken a coherent doctrine or school of thought, as evidenced by this opposition between him and Foucault. — Olivier5

I can’t speak to pomo culture, but pomo philosophy, or more specifically poststructuralist philosophy is a range of ideas united by a common overarching set of themes. You make it sound as though Derrida and Foucault’s ideas are utterly incompatible, which just isnt the case. Derrida often pointed out commalities between his work and those he deconstructed. For instance, in this comment Derrida both knowledges a shared focus on force in general and and a specific difference in articulation this concept.

2. The words "force" and "power" also pose, as you can well imagine, enormous problems. I never resort to these words without a sense of uneasiness, even if I believe myself obligated to use them in order to designate something irreducible. What worries me is that in them which resembles an obscure substance that could, in a discourse, give rise to a zone of obscurantism and of dogmatism. Even if, as Foucault seems to suggest, one no longer speaks of Power with a capital P, but of a scattered multiplicity of micro­powers, the question remains of knowing what the unity of signification is that
still permits us to call these decentralized and heterogeneous microphenomena
"powers. " For my part, without being able to go much further here, I do not believe that one should agree to speak of "force" or of "power" except under
three conditions, at least.”

Would you have an example of a specific point that Derrida made and Foucault misunderstood?

Also, would you mind pointing me to a Derrida text that you find clear and insightful? — Olivier5

Here’s what I suggested to Manuel:


If you were to ask me what Derrida books to read to get the most consistent and clear sense of what he is trying to tell us , I would immediately answer , skip the formal works and go for the interviews( Points, Positions , Limited, Inc, Arguing with Derrida) . Here he was forced to do what he hated most, to summarize in a succinct sentence or two his major themes.

There's different levels and then there's wrong? No? If we say Derrida says nothing is true and nothing matters, do we not challenge and to some extent scorn that reading? — Tom Storm

Sorry to trot this out again if you’ve already read it, but I think it demonstrates the difficulty of attempting to distill deconstruction down to ‘ nothing is true’. it neither can we err in the opposite direction and interpret the comments below to mean that truth transcends local normative contexts.

“ For of course there is a "right track" [une 'bonne voie "] , a better way, and let it be said in passing how surprised I have often been, how amused or discouraged, depending on my humor, by the use or abuse of the following argument: Since the deconstructionist (which is to say, isn't it, the skeptic-relativist-nihilist!) is supposed not to believe in truth, stability, or the unity of meaning, in intention or "meaning-to-say, " how can he demand of us that we read him with pertinence, preciSion, rigor? How can he demand that his own text be interpreted correctly? How can he accuse anyone else of having misunderstood, simplified, deformed it, etc.? In other words, how can he discuss, and discuss the reading of what he writes? The answer is simple enough: this definition of the deconstructionist is false (that's right: false, not true) and feeble; it supposes a bad (that's right: bad, not good) and feeble reading of numerous texts, first of all mine, which therefore must finally be read or reread.

Then perhaps it will be understood that the value of truth (and all those values associated with it) is never contested or destroyed in my writings, but only reinscribed in more powerful, larger, more stratified contexts. And that within interpretive contexts (that is, within relations of force that are always differential-for example, socio-political-institutional-but even beyond these determinations) that are relatively stable, sometimes apparently almost unshakeable, it should be possible to invoke rules of competence, criteria of discussion and of consensus, good faith, lucidity, rigor, criticism, and pedagogy.”

Derrida, Limited, inc.

I agree with Strawson here as well as Chomsky and Russell. I think Dennett's account can't actually be formulated. — Manuel

I meant in particular that I find Dennett’s account of color perception much more exciting and useful than Strawson’s intrincality-qualia formulation. Like the phenonenologists. , he gets that the blue sky appears to each of us. it as an intrinsic bit of qualia , but as defined by its associations to a rich web of relevant experiences. Each of these associations we remove
from the experience of the blue sky reduces its meaning for us.

I also think Russell could have learned much from Wittgenstein about intrinsicality.

I'm just not inclined to like Derrida. I don't like his followers, I've read a few of his essays and I didn't think them to be particularly interesting. Just like some people dislike or don't think much of Hegel, Heidegger or anyone else.

It's just not the type of philosophy I'm attracted to. But thanks for the pointers. — Manuel

I want to point out that philosophical work is both utterly particular , in its style and language , and an exemplar of a broader approach to thinking. I see Derrida’s thought as closely ties to Heidegger. If you enjoy Heidegger I’d say you are already in touch with much that is central to Derrida. I could widen that scope a bit to include current thinkers associated with the cognitive sciences who have attempted to naturalize Heidegger and Husserl( Gallagher, Varela, Thompson, Fuchs, Slaby, Ratcliffe). If you like their work, you have moved some distance towards Derrida.

Strawson goes over this view in his Realistic Monism. I mean, it ends up becoming a verbal dispute, because even if experience is not at the very bottom of things, it has the potential to become experience given certain interactions, which is almost the same as saying that they are found in the bottom stuff in nature. Only that it arises via certain quantum processes. — Manuel

I was recently following the dispute between Strawson and Dennett concerning Qualia and panpsychism. There are philosophers I prefer to Dennett, but I do think that he is closer to the right track than Strawson in recognizing that it is not what is intrinsic that makes consciousness what it is , but what emerges out of a relational web of mutual influences. These reciprocal causes require a different account than that expressed in the language of quantum physics.

I put most effort in trying to understand Deleuze. — Manuel

If you were to ask me what Derrida books to read to get the most consistent and clear sense of what he is trying to tell us , I would immediately answer , skip the formal works and go for the interviews( Points, Positions , Limited, Inc, Arguing with Derrida) . Here he was forced to do what he hated most, to summarize in a succinct sentence or two his major themes. With Deleuze I’d be hard pressed to come up with anything similar. I’d be inclined to suggest the early books without Guattari (there’s no way two abstract thinkers were on exactly the same page in their thinking. I’m convinced their collaborations are deliberately designed to give us a collage of two minds that frequently strains against itself).

If some of our great minds, who are sympathetic to the French writers, don't get it right, what chance for the rest of us? You can see how people come to a view that this is an exclusive cultural activity for those in academe whose business it often is to pars the ostensibly inscrutable and talk to each other about it. — Tom Storm

No one should worry about getting a philosopher right. A great philosopher is able to reach a wide variety of readers on many different levels. One’s goal should be to learn from a philosopher something that shows the world in a new light.

Rest assured that not every French philosophers tries to impress his or her audience with jargon, and I'm pretty sure there exist obscure charlatans in English-language philosophy too. — Olivier5

This just smacks of anti-intellectualism. If you can’t understand the French writers, then so be it. But don’t blame them for your difficulties. I admit there are some French philosophers whose style so do find obscure , such as Badiu and Lacan. But not Derrida or Deleuze. They were trying to convey new and difficult concepts, so the appearance of obscurity goes along with the territory.

Searle admired Foucault. And Foucault was a brilliant thinker. His critique of Derrida is that obscurity is a way to avoid critique and accountability, because it makes it facile to say that the critique 'does not understand'. He did not say that any and all of Derrida is books was worthless, but that Derrida was too facile in his rejection of other philosophers' critique.

That's the main problem I personally see with some pomo texts and authors, which tend to think 'en roue libre' (free wheeling) i.e. without subjecting their thought to empirical refutation or critical analysis. Too facile. — Olivier5

Searle may have admired Foucault but he utterly rejected the common themes of postmodern thought. I am saying that Foucault didnt understand Derrida based on
my own reading of both Foucault and Derrida. I have never found Derrida to be obscure or trying to avoid critique. I agree with Derrida’s critique of Foucault, such as his tendency toward historicism, turning history into a pre-determining scheme. I’m not sure what empirical refutation has to do with postmodern philosophy , other than the fact that postmodernism as well as phenomenology digs beneath the presuppositions of empiricism in order to expose its limits.

Foucault could be quite clear
Agreed, and he lambasted Derrida's 'obscurantist terrorism', as reported by Searle. — Olivier5

That’s because Foucault couldn’t understand the ideas, and Searle was and is hopelessly behind when it comes to any of the postmodernism, including Foucault.

Chomsky's criticism is pretty well known and well-quoted, and it's... huh?!? When something makes very clever people say very stupid things, it's worth checking out. — Kenosha Kid

You can add John Searle and Steven Pinker to that list.

it's a question of dispute to claim that the postmodernists achieved something of which few people have caught up on. I think Susan Haack, Galen Strawson and Raymond Tallis do very, very good work and none of them agree with Kant on much. — Manuel

I agree they do good work and I think the difference between them and the postmodernists is slight but still important.

Any female pomo theorists other than Kristeva? — Tom Storm

Judith Butler comes to mind , also Hanne De Jaegher, but there are many more.

Joshs, what I am really interested in is do you have a view on Wayfarer's tentative historical timeline QM to postmodern thinking? — Tom Storm

My comments only apply to the range of thinking that I believe is common to the French philosophers who emerged in the 1960’s (although I do see the ideas of Nietzsche , Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty as also post-modern). Their thinking is also referred to as post-structuralist , since they specifically targeted and used as their source of contrast the fad of structuralism which was popular in political theory, anthropology , psychology, literary theory , philosophy and linguistics in the 1950’s ( Althusser, Marx, Levi-Strauss, Saussure, etc).

As far as relativity and quantum theory is concerned, in my opinion these approaches in physics belong to Kantian and neo-Kantian idealism, which may very well be considered by certain historians and others within the humanities as postmodern based on how they are defining the term. But if one wants to define it strictly in relation to the thinking of the philosophers I mentioned above, then it belongs to an earlier era of philosophy and falls under their critique.

So I'd have to know who you have in mind when you say postmodernism. That's just the thing, is postmodernism over? I have no idea. There's talk of post-postmodernism, I don't know what that means. — Manuel

I only use the term postmodern in reference to a core group of French philosophers (Derrida, Focault , Deleuze, Nancy, Lyotard) and those they influenced or who offer similar ideas.

Most of the world hasnt yet caught up to these writers, in my opinion. I know of only a tiny handful of thinkers who have gone beyond them. Gendlin is one of them.

“An enormous gap called postmodernism has recently been created between experiencing and concepts. I want not only to examine the nature of this gap, but also to attempt to move beyond it. Of course there are many strands of postmodernism. It is best known for denying that there is any truth, or that one can claim to ground any statement in experience. Postmodernism is right in that one can not claim to represent or copy experiencing. But this does not mean that what we say has no relationship to what we experience—that there is no truth, that everything we say is arbitrary. In contrast to postmodernism, I show that we can have direct access to experiencing through our bodies (Gendlin 1992). I maintain that bodily experience can not he reduced to language and culture. Our bodily sense of situations is a concretely sensed interaction process that always
exceeds culture, history, and language.”

“ The Postmodernists were wrong to deny the objectivity of scientific concepts (especially when they wrote the
denial on computers, and took airplanes to conventions to say it). Their real contribution was destroying the representational assumption. But since they saw no alternative, they glorified ‘limbo’. We see exactly how logic builds the world further, and how logical consequences add to implicit understanding. We see why our two systems must be kept apart, and also how
they relate.” Gene Gendlin

t if you can't make your own case without name dropping, I'm going to be suspect. — James Riley

All I meant was , Heraclitus said, "You cannot step into the same river twice, for other waters are continually flowing on“ and James said “ Consciousness... does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life. Source of the expression 'stream of consciousness’.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. — James Riley

Or things continue to be the same differently. You’re not a fan of Heraclitus or James?

There are no valid p0m0 arguments (Sokal, et al), they echew 'logocentric' discourses; so what's your point? — 180 Proof

Well, to begin with , a good thing to point out would be that there ARE valid and invalid arguments from a pomo perspective, as Derrida just told you. But their validity is relative to the norms of intersubjective communities, which can remain more or less stable for long periods of time. Think of Kuhn’s paradigms. If epistemes has no relative stability there could be no science.
Logocentrism is the belief that objects are present-to-themselves things, locatable as independent of their relation to a subject.

there's no "need to prove" my/any "point" when the meanings of all "points" are episteme-relative or deferred. (Anyone who has read Derrida & Foucault against themselves (i.e. in Nietzschean fashion) would "know" that.) :wink: — 180 Proof

Not quite:

“ For of course there is a "right track" [une 'bonne voie "] , a better way, and let i t b e said i n passing how surprised I have often been, how amused or discouraged, depending on my humor, by the use or abuse of the following argument: Since the deconstructionist (which is to say, isn't it, the skeptic-relativist-nihilist!) is supposed not to believe in truth, stability, or the unity of meaning, in intention or "meaning-to-say, " how can he demand of us that we read him with pertinence, preciSion, rigor? How can he demand that his own text be interpreted correctly? How can he accuse anyone else of having misunderstood, simplified, deformed it, etc.? In other words, how can he discuss, and discuss the reading of what he writes? The answer is simple enough: this definition of the deconstructionist is false (that's right: false, not true) and feeble; it supposes a bad (that's right: bad, not good) and feeble reading of numerous texts, first of all mine, which therefore must finally be read or reread.

Then perhaps it will be understood that the value of truth (and all those values associated with it) is never contested or destroyed in my writings, but only reinscribed in more powerful, larger, more stratified contexts. And that within interpretive contexts (that is, within relations of force that are always differential-for example, socio-political-institutional-but even beyond these determinations) that are relatively stable, sometimes apparently almost unshakeable, it should be possible to invoke rules of competence, criteria of discussion and of consensus, good faith, lucidity, rigor, criticism, and pedagogy.”

Derrida, Limited, inc.

I thought Witt was a huge fan of James. And that Feyerabend’s work was in opposition to Popper’s pragmatism.

quotes:

"In itself life is insipid, because it is a simple "being there." So, for man, existing becomes a poetic task, like the playwright's or the novelist's: that of inventing a plot for his existence, giving it a character which will make it both suggestive and appealing. ... .. — James Riley

And so the static notions inherited from classical physics rear their ugly head. Gasset was a student of Heidegger, but apparently didn’t read him very well. I would prefer to say that life in itself, as ‘being there’ , is incessant change and transformation. We need to invent plots in order to impose some
order on and find patterns in what would otherwise be an overwhelming chaos.

That comes out of phenomenology, which precedes postmodernism. Merleau Ponty died in 1961, whereas post-modernism came out in the late 60's early 70's — Manuel

We’re not talking chronology , but similarity of ideas. There are loads of papers connecting MP to postmodernists like Deleuze and Nancy. In fact, in terms of content, I would argue that Heidegger’s phenomenology ( and Gene Gendlin’s also) comes AFTER postmodernism. In fact , in 1997 Gendlin held a conference at the University of Chicago titled ‘After Postmodernism’. Trust me, what he had in mind had nothing to do with what the critics of pomo on this thread are advocating for.

My point is that p0m0 says nothing new that has not been said clearer, more insightfully and more applicably since the late 16th/early 17th century. — 180 Proof

To prove your point convincingly you would have to be able to summarize the arguments of Derrida or Foucault.

what's missing from analytic philosophy is that they "do philosophy" as if nothing has happened in 20th century history, as Derrida said, — Manuel

. Rorty made this argument also, meaning that most analytic philosophy was simply regurgitating Kant and hadnt absorbed Hegel’s lessons yet.

But I don't see what's new about the thought, besides the jargon. — Manuel

What’s new is that it rejects representationalism and the neo-Kantian notion of a world out there we can only approach through interpretation. Philosophical postmodernism might become clearer in you in the guise of enactive, embodied cognitivism. Zahavi would also be a good place to start.
https://www.academia.edu/34265366/Brain_Mind_World_Predictive_coding_neo_Kantianism_and_transcendental_idealism

non-Jamesian/Rortian pragmatisms + left-libertarian critiques of – alternatives to – the neoliberal, military keynesian status quo is still the only "viable" oppositional stance given that 1960s-80s p0m0 was DOA — 180 Proof

Who are these non/Jamesian pragmatists? Certainly not Dewey or Mead. Do you mean Peirce?
And where do you stand on critical theorists like Adorno and Habermas, Badiu , Lacan, Zizek or pomo theologians like Caputo , Critchley, Charles Taylor?