I bet you’re a lawyer

I'd count it as one of the lesser works of existential thought, far behind Sartre or Kierkegaard. — Banno

Sartre’s master work, Being and Nothingness, would not even exist without Heidegger’s writing. It’s a second rate misinterpretation. of Being and Time.

Here’s Derrida’s view of Sartre:

Sartre was a representative of a philosophy like Husserlian phenomenology, adapted to France, a philosophy that was already beginning to make some noise but that at the same time, and even with respect to what he was introducing or translating from phenomenology, from Heidegger even, that there were some enlargements, distortions, simplifications, which from that point of view seemed to me to amortize what was essentially interesting about the work of Husserl and Heidegger.

I mean that both in what he was keeping and in what he was critiquing, in my opinion, he was not a rigorous enough reader.

He and others with him kept from us for a long time the real importance and the sharpness of Husserl's and Heidegger's work while importing them and pretending to critique them, as both translator, if you like, of Husserl and Heidegger and critic of Husserl and Heidegger. I think that even in order to understand, to critique Husserl and Heidegger, it was necessary to understand them better than Sartre did in those days. I mean that he misunderstood Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche (to put them together as is usually done) even more than he misunderstood Husserl and Heidegger, whom he nevertheless quoted.

What must a society such as ours be if a man, who, in his own way, rejected or misunderstood so many theoretical and literary events of his timelet's say, to go quickly, psychoanalysis, Marxism, structuralism, Joyce, Artaud, Bataille, Blanchot-who accumulated and disseminated incredible misreadings of Heidegger, sometimes of Husserl, could come to dominate the cultural scene to the point of becoming a great popular figure?

And you won’t have some acquaintance with their philosophies without the slightest idea of how to interpret the way they lived their lives.

Your point?

In so far as Heidegger "thinks of (meaning) in terms of the way that meanings are uniquely my own" he fails to recognise that meaning is embedded in life.

And that is exemplified in their respective biographies. I answered your question; but perhaps not in the way you wanted. — Banno

My point was, and don’t take this personally, and correct me if I’m wrong , but I get the distinct sense that you’ve never read Being and Time.

THe way they lived their lives shows much about their respective philosophies. — Banno

I agree that a philosopher’s ideas and personal choices inother aspects of their lives are intimately connected. For that reason you won’t have the slightest idea how to interpret the way they lived their lives without some acquaintance with their philosophies. Which brings us back to the OP

It might be better not to use thei term so freely. See the topic of the same name. It's not a word used by Wittgenstein, nor by his translators - and for good reason. — Banno

That’s a good start. Give me a better word to describe his understanding of the public.

Heidegger spent the Great War reporting on the weather. Wittgenstein spent it volunteering for the most dangerous tasks to be found on the front line.

Heidegger talked about engaging with life. Wittgenstein engaged with life. — Banno

I’m not sure you’re ‘engaging’ with the OP. I should have added: no gratuitous comments on Heidegger’s politics as a substitute for having read the work.

Will you please study Spinoza ... (& Thomas Metzinger & Ray Brassier). :confused: — 180 Proof

I think Thomas Metzinger should study Shaun Gallagher, Matthew Ratcliffe and Dan Zahavi for a more enlightened approach to cognition

Thank you Heidegger

how do we know you understand them? And I am not saying you don't, just that we have no way of knowing this. Heidegger is notoriously difficult to follow. Derrida is understood so differently by so many closes readers who can say what he really means? — Tom Storm

We will never know what a philosopher ‘really means’, but I don’t think that should be considered the aim of reading them. What we should aim for is to learn a new way of looking at the world which we find pragmatically useful in our lives in it’s different facets ( interpersonal understanding and ethics, spiritual concerns , education and political thought, aesthetic experience and creativity).

It is unlikely that we will prevented from sharing the insights we gain, because even though as you pointed out there are multiple interpretive camps for every major thinker , it is quite likely we will identify with one of those camps and be able to share and learn alongside them.

Good philosophy is clear and accessible, even to the novice: Mary's Room, Defense of Abortion, Trolley Car, Allegory of the Cave, Riddle of Induction, What is it like to be a Bat, Ship of Theseus, Transporter Problem, and so on.[/quote]

Much of what you are listing as ‘good’ philosophy seems to belong to the conventional style of thinking of analytic philosophy, which brackets the era from
Hume to Hegel and renders those ideas palatable to a wider audience. I call it ‘applied’ continental
thought. Analytic is to continental philosophy as engineering is to theoretical physics. It doesn’t attempt to dig beneath the deepest presuppositions of an era of thinking i. sweepingly comprehensive fashion , as the continentals do.
That’s why it seems clear and accessible to you. Its language was designed for that purpose. For me Heidegger, Derrida and Husserl are clear and accessible, but then again my goal is to turn the conventional on its head, not work away at its edges.

Certainty early Heidegger and Nietzsche are accessible to the novice in the sen that they write completed , coherent thoughts, don’t use arcane language without first defining it for the layman, and circle around repeated themes of general interest. But their aim is to teach you a very different way of thinking about your world, so you end up having g to reread every apparently ‘simple’ sentence multiple times.

Derrida was once asked why , given all the other contemporary philosophers Derrida wrote about , he never devoted any time to
discussing Lacan’s ideas. I like his response:

“Lacan's style: its sometimes remarkable, and also sometimes anachronistic (I do not say untimely) effects (in relation to a certain advance and to a certain "program" of the times) seemed to me to be governed by the delay of a scene, conferring upon it, as I do not doubt, a certain necessity. (I am designating whatever constrained him to deal with institutionalized psychoanalysis in a certain way: this is Lacan's argument.) In relation to the theoretical difficulties that interested me, I read this style, above all, as an art of evasion. The vivacity of ellipsis too often seemed to me to serve as an avoidance or an envelopment of diverse problems.

Even if these reservations are far from exhausting Lacan's work, of which I remain persuaded, they were already important enough for me not to seek references (in the form of a guarantee) in a discourse so different, in its mode of elocution, its site, its aims, its presuppositions, from the texts that I was proposing. Such references would only result in the accumulation of fog in a field already not lacking it. They also risked compromising the possibility of a rigorous juxtaposition that perhaps remained to be constructed.”

Noam Chomsky - a highly complex theorist - made this exact same point about some French thinkers. Not a naïve realist or simple man by any means. — Tom Storm

His view actually comes pretty close to naive realism. He certainly is not much of a constructivist, believing as he does in innate semantic primitives. Jerry Fodor’s comment about 1st generation cognitive science applies well to Chomsky’s approach.

“the only respect in which cognitivism is a major advance over eighteenth- and nineteenth-century representationism is in its use of the computer as a model of mind.”

His comment about French thinkers was probably aimed at Foucault.

generally take the view that if an idea is understood well it can be expressed simply and clearly. — Tom Storm

You agree that someone with no background in physics is not in a position to tackle QM or Einstein’s general
relativity. Why should it be any different for philosophy? I’ve never found anything Derrida wrote to be onscurantist or convoluted. On the other hand , given the limitations of Foucault’s worldview, I’m not surprised he blamed Derrida writing style for his failure to understand the fundamental concepts. Sealer writes in a nice clear style and I find his work to be utterly banal in comparisons to Derrida, Heidegger , Nietzsche and many other continentals.

Some philosophers are obscurantist. They tend to be the mediocre thinkers who don’t have much new to say.
Don’t confuse them with writers offering difficult new ideas. If you think any set of philosophical ideas should be immediately readable by you in particular in a way that appears ‘simple and clear’ then I suggest what you really are looking for is a set of ideas that fit within a worldview that is already eminently familiar to you. So if you’re only interested in ideas that conform to what you already know ( your metaphysical framework) , then continental philosophy isn’t for you.

But i think it goes further than that for you. I think your worldview itself may possibly be a naive realist one,( our scientific theories attempt to correspond to an independently existing external world ) and if that is the case then the notion of a philosophical perspective requiring a whole new way of thinking and a transformation of your language is alien to you.

That analysis goes much further back than Quine. — Banno

If you’re referring to Kant , the Quinean formulation amounts to a critique of Kant’s
idealism.

The mistake in the OP is to think in terms of objective/subjective rather than is/ought. — Banno

Putnam, following Quine said that is and ought cannot be disentangled since fact and value interpenetrate.

peoples may differ on what exactly they believe is right and wrong but they all agree that there's such a thing as right and wrong. — TheMadFool

In the same vein, people agree that there is such a thing as the familiar and the alien, the understandable and the strange. The problem is that morality , and its judgments of what is right and what is wrong , generally comes down to these dichotomies, so that morality is just another word for the drive to enforce
conformity.

I don't know if most people really need a philosophical justification to do good things anyway. — Dharmi

That would explain why they think the notion of ‘doing good things’ is objectively definable in the first place.

Can it not be explained in a simple sentence? — Tom Storm

I always get that from corporate types( not that you’re necessarily a corporate type). If an idea is worth anything it should be explicable in a simple
sentence. That works well in the world of
commerce because by definition a commercial product only has a market if it’s value is understood by a sizable number of people. But philosophy traffics in ideas
that are not already well understood by the mainstream , so buzzwords, soundbites and tweets will only be coherent to whose already well versed in a particular philosophical approach. Plus, different philosophical orientations define metaphysics in their own ways. Since I’m using Derrida’s definition , I’d need to introduce you to his vocabulary and way of thinking before his notion of metaphysics will make sense.

I could, however, respond to focused questions from you.

formalist gesture in thinking
— Joshs

I don't understand what you mean here? — Tom Storm

Metaphysics in the way authors like Derrida mean it has to do with organizing particulars via a category some sort of a priori , that is , irreducible status.
Let me give examples of metaphysical
systems. There’s Descartes’ rationalism, in which an a priori pre-established harmony prevails between world and reasoning subject , and Kant’s a prior categories of the understanding , and Hegel’s
formal dialectic of history. And then there’s the metaphysics of naive realism that Wittgenstein unravels , the picture model of meaning in which facts can be separated from interpretations of facts.

if someone chooses to place a different interpretation on the same facts, the facts haven't changed. — Gary Enfield

Here’s an example from Nelson Goodman describing the relationship between our accounts of experience and the experience in itself:

“To be objective, the interpretationist points out, one would have to have some set of mind-independent objects to be designated by language or known by science. But can we find any such objects?

A point in space seems to be perfectly objective. But how are we to define the points of our everyday world? Points can be taken either as primitive elements, as intersecting lines, as certain triples of intersecting planes, or as certain classes of nesting volumes. These definitions are equally adequate, and yet they are incompatible: what a point is will vary with each form of description. For example, only in the first "version," to use Goodman's term, will a point be a primitive element. The objectivist, however, demands, "What are points really?" Goodman's response to this demand is worth quoting at length:

If the composition of points out of lines or of lines out of points is conventional rather than factual, points and lines themselves are no less so. ... If we say that our sample space is a combination of points, or of lines, or of regions, or a combination of combinations of points, or lines, or regions, or a combination of all these together, or is a single lump, then since none is identical with any of the rest, we are giving one among countless alternative conflicting descriptions of what the space is. And so we may regard the disagreements as not about the facts but as due to differences in the conventions-adopted in organizing or describing the space. What, then, is the neutral fact or thing described in these different terms? Neither the space (a) as an undivided whole nor (b) as a combination of everything involved in the several accounts; for (a) and (b) are but two among the various ways of organizing it. But what is it that is so organized? When we strip off as layers of convention all differences among ways of describing it, what is left? The onion is peeled down to its empty core.”

metaphysics in its most general sense is just the formalist gesture in thinking. Derrida recognized that there is no escaping this gesture , even for atheists and those who reject classical metaphysics. That’s why he dubbed his position ‘quasi-transcendental’, because it acknowledges the inseparable relation between the formal and empirical moment in every experience.

I ultimately agree with Popper about metaphysics. — norm

I would have thought you’d prefer Kuhn to Popper. There just aren’t enough Kuhnians on this forum. Popper is too much of a realist for me. Let me ask you this: who would you side with in the following debate?

“While Rorty claims that his view is "almost, but not quite, the same as Putnam's" internalist conception of philosophy" , Putnam is uncomfortable with this association. Putnam claims to be preserving the realist spirit but he takes Rorty to be "rejecting the intuitions that underlie every kind of realism (and not just metaphysical realism)" . Putnam views Rorty's pragmatism as a self-refuting relativism driven by a deep irrationalism that casts doubt on the very possibility of thought. Yet in the paper Putnam cites to support his charge Rorty insists that he shares Putnam's desire for a middle ground between metaphysical realism and relativism and that his pragmatism fills the bill. Putnam does not concur.”

The problem or comedy is that philosophical realizations (breakthroughs, revolutions) don't necessarily provide wonder-working technical power.
— norm

The philosophical realisation that underlies our world began with Descartes’ algebraic geometry combined with Newton’s and Galileo’s science. That philosophical revolution certainly provided wonder-working technical power. You’re looking at it. — Wayfarer

Norm is referring to a different philosophical breakthrough than that of enlightenment era science( the later Wittgenstein , and I would add to that a boat of other post Hegelian philosophies that have yet to be translated into wonder-working technical power). I anticipate that these more recent philosophical realizations will produce a new generation of technologies. They are already being translated into artificial intelligence platforms.

When an experiment produces results, those results become a fact that has to be explained. Other than discovering error or fraud in the reporting of measurements etc., those facts become a permanent and unchanging record — Gary Enfield

How we interpret facts is ever changing as new philosophical ideas emerge - but the facts themselves don't change — Gary Enfield

the old facts don't go away, and must still be accommodated by any new theory. — Gary Enfield

Thanks to analytic philosophers like Quine , Sellers and Putnam, it is now commonly accepted within at least some quarters of philosophy of science that facts cannot be separated from values, that is, interpretive schemes that define what a fact is. So there no such thing as a fact in itself independent of a particular interpretation. Change the interpretation and you change the fact.

If you can show some general progress that philosophy has made you'd be in a very small minority. Even among its advocates, it's generally accepted that philosophy doesn't actually 'progress' in that way. — Isaac

As I started to say in the previous post, but want to expand upon now, I don’t think there is any stable way of defining the difference between a concept called ‘science’ and one called ‘philosophy’ , not in terms of methods, goals , the possibility of ,or rate of , progress.
I do want to say that I believe that we can talk of a progress in ideas over the course of cultural history, as long as we understand this not in the 19th century sense of a linear accumulation, but rather in pragmatic terms of periods of Kuhnian normal science and transformative revolutions. In fact, I view this progress as accelerative.
And unlike those who argue that human nature does not change , I believe that inter-personal
insight , the ability to adapt to and empathize with the alien other , and to predict others actions and ways of thinking , is at the core of this cultural progress.

Now , one particular view of science is that it offers a privileged access to truth through its methods in comparison to other cultural modalities , including philosophy. The thinking goes that the rigorous social process of hypothesis , definition , test , validation and replication (not to mention quantification) that developed during the Enlightenment led to a rapid acceleration of knowledge that would not have been possible without the use of its methods.

I started out a firm believer in this narrative , and in my grad school days in experiment psychology , as I was working out my own psychological perspective , I firmly believed that any the pricks innovation in the field
could , as. must, be demonstrable though construction of the right experimental design.

I had no interest in what I understood to be the role of philosophy , and I even wrote a piece in a student publication arguing that philosophy was essentially obsolete, given that all the old philosophical questions concerning memory, emotion, perception and cognition could now be submitted to empirical test.

It took a few years of restless, futile attempts to force my psychological model into the confines of the reigning cognitive science paradigm for me to begin reading original sources of philosophy, and I did so with great skepticism and suspicion. It told a few years for me to be won over to the view that the ‘introspective methods’ of continental philosophy allow them to make as much progress as the sciences, because it is this same introspection that causes scientific revolutions. You might say, sure , of course there are conceptual ‘introspectively originating’ leaps in science , but what gives it its advantage is that it submits such leaps to the communal processes of method I mentioned above.

My response is that those methods serve to define in a certain way , for a certain audience , a scientific paradigm. They bring its definitions into sharp focus and clarity , so that the community can agree on what it is testing. but this testing process mainly describes the period of normal science when there is more or less a consensus concerning the hypotheses involved.

During shifts from one paradigm to another , much of that painstaking detailed work of validation may be jettisoned. For instance , how useful are the decades of intricate research studies within the S-R paradigm today when almost no one is making use of that framework any more?

So it is quite possible to have a number of psychological research communities operating in the same era on the basis of mutually incompatible paradigms. One of them will likely to ultimately be determined as more useful than the others , resulting in the discarding of all of the detailed research results belonging to the rival approaches. This parallels the progression of philosophical positions over cultural history( from Greek to Medieval to Enlightenment to Idealist to postmodern philosophy, we have a direct parallel to the progress of science. ).

I think the main difference between your thinking about scientific ideas ( or ideas in general) and mine is that I view any particular fact as belonging to a holistic gestalt ( what you would call a theory ). All the terms of a theory are interlocked in such a way that each term is mutually defined by its relation to all the other terms and no term can be removed from the whole.

When a paradigm is replaced by another , every concept within the old paradigm, no mater how insignificant or subordinate , is transformed along with the whole. And what is the relation between this gestalt and the world which it is attempting to predict? The shift in paradigm is
also a shift in world , because the paradigm isn’t a template designed to match itself to the world , it is a remaking of the world. Science ,( as well as all
other cultural modalities ) is in a sense the world coming to know itself through its becoming, and our inquiries are a part of that becoming.

The most difficult implication of this gestalt view for most empirically oriented types is that one can translate from one field of culture to another and recognize them as variations on a shared theme. For instance, it would mean that Einstein’s relativity is just a variation of Kant’s
idealism, translated into an operationalized language of physics. This implies the even more outrageous supposition that there are a range of post-Kantian philosophies that imply a post -Einsteinian view of physics that needs to be ‘ filled in’ by the next generation of physicists. ( for a preview of what this may look like , check out Lee Smolin or Ilya Prigogine).

I don’t expect you to buy this , but it should at least look a bit familiar ,because you’re seeing more and more argumentation of this sort coming from the Left concerning the ideological underpinnings of science.

Anyone can do what Kant did. I could write something similar tomorrow. His insights were gained entirely by introspection using his mind, and we all have one of those. Even the authors he may or may not have read (Wittgenstein had famously read very little philosophy) he has simply chosen to agree or disagree with using nothing but introspection.

Even the most trivial scientific theory, by contrast, is based on a set of empirical findings which a non-scientists would be usually prevented from replicating or testing, simply for pragmatic reasons - the sample size is too large or the equipment too technical. There is a body of such empirical knowledge which, if you haven't read it, you will be unable, no matter how hard you try, to replicate it. — Isaac

‘Introspection’ in philosophy and in science will not lead to a revolution in thinking unless it takes as its starting point the most advanced forms of thinking of its era, so not everyone can do what Kant did. The most innovative philosophers were extremely knowledgeable about the mathematics and science of their day, which is why so many contributed new forms of mathematics or participated in the loftiest debates about the field (Descartes, Leibniz, Husserl, Wittgenstein ). So when they introspect, they are connecting the cutting edge of ideas of their era with something new., and it becomes irrelevant which specific empirical facts
they may be missing , be user those facts are just variations within the larger frame that they are turning on its head The ‘intro’ of introspect implies something sealed up inside a subject , but it should instead be seen as the subject’s encountering something new in the world. If what they create is validated by a community then that person will have a lucrative career ahead of them , it will not likely have ventured very far from conventional thinking. But didnt Einstein venture significantly from the conventional thinking in physics? Maybe in physics but not in philosophy. There was already a ready intellectual home for his ideas thanks to the prior work of philosophers, artists, psychologists and biologists( remember now , I’m sticking with my outrageous notion of different modalities
of culture as variations on shared intellectual
themes ).

The most cutting edge thinking in philosophy as well as psychology sits out in the wilderness with no community able to understand it well enough to validate it( James, Dewey , Meade, Kelly).

I used to think that nothing could match the precision of quantitative measurement within the sciences, so it was a shock to me when I was forced to reverse that view and consider the most powerful continental
philosophies to embody a more intricate and profound precision than that of empirical styles of theorization .
This is because precision cannot simply be a function of measured variables with an empirical system. It has to include everything f that allows us to define the terms of the system , what its fundamental propositions mean and how they are grounded. For the purposes of designing tools, machines, medical treatments, a less comprehensively defined precision is appropriate , since , like a commercial commodity , by definition technology or scientific products must be accessible to a wider range of people( In fact, can there be something like science’ without a conventional community defining what counts as empirical and what doesn’t? If a scientist co struts their model outside of what is defined as properly empirical by the. irma of that community they willbe derided as a crank, a mystic or worse yet , a philosopher). This to me describes the philosophy-empirical-technological-commercial spectrum of ideation as ranging from the most comprehensively defined to the most generic and operationalized( Nietzche to Freud to Friston).

My belief is that those who prefer to work within empirical communities rather than philosophical communities do so because their style of ideation is better suited for a more generic operationalized language than the
comprehensive language of continental
philosophy( the same
reason one prefers to work in applied sciences like engineering rather than in theoretical sciences). This is true even though they may tell themselves that only science advances , because only science validates itself effectively in relation to the real world.

It is true that embracing a very rich style
of ideation of like that of continental philosophers encourages mediocre thinkers to confuse vagueness and vacuity with profundity. Most of the academic output is of this sort. At the other end of the spectrum, less talented empirically oriented researchers an clog up
the research pipeline with hyper-detailed studies on trivial
themes. So we have the dangers of vacuous in coherence at one end and mind-numbing conformity at the other.

It's just personal bias to suggest that there's a direction of thought that they should be moving toward but aren't (or are doing so too slowly). It's not as if all the philosophers in the philosophy of science have all agreed on anything, there's no "Yep, we nailed that one - let's tell the scientists" on any issue at all. — Isaac

It certainly is a personal bias. . But that’s all we have to rely on in the end , even with all our empirical proofs.
You’ll never find any issue in which all the psychologist agree either, but that shouldn’t stop them from saying ‘ "Yep, we nailed that one - let's tell the scientists". And they do that all the time. ( extended mind and enactivism vs pp). Again, I shouldn’t have put this as a rivalry between empiricism and philosophy. I think i the leading edge of psychology is close to the same page as the leading edge of philosophy ( phenomenology).

That's a very dramatic way of phrasing the dilemma but it seems appropriate and I like your wording. I also think sometimes people give up by finding the answer - one that satisfies but is really just a holding statement of sorts. "I'm an X..." — Tom Storm

Yes, but if that is meant to refer to norm’s comments here concerning the relation of language in a Wittgensteinian sense to issues like mind versus body I think it would be missing the point of his argument.

Really we can zoom in on any word and find a hollowness. They make approximate sense working together in a specific practical context. Float away from that and it's poetry, sometimes good sometimes bad. — norm

Still. for Dharmi there is a range of contexts that he is likely putting together with his concepts without realizing the synthetic act he is pulling off, and this range of contexts has a certain stability , at least enough of one to appear to him to indicate grounded truths. He is likely hearing you saying that we have to dissolve that stability( thus the accusation of nihilism), when in fact to follow Wittgenstein here would be to respect that relative contextual stability and show how we can see our concepts as intertwined in much more intimate ways as interpersonally founded events than as the abstractive templates that dualist thinking sees them as. So what you are doing isnt substituting chaos for his ordered truths , as it appears to him, but enriching and interrelating his
notions. The problem , though , is that the most superordinate understandings that we carry with us are very resistant to transformation.

He also dissolves the self and yet still speaks in terms of perceptions, clinging to the image of a single something that perceives, that is separate from the world. — norm

William James thought Hume came close to recognizing the difficulty of maintaining an ideal separation of self and world , but settled for a traditional metaphysical explanation.

I doubt It's much influenced by Kant though. The majority of scientists I know just tend to get on with what they do and any underlying assumptions and broader frameworks are questioned (when they're questioned at all) by their own intellect - coffee room discussions. They don't feel the need to borrow the intellect of an eighteenth century German. Just weird like that I suppose. — Isaac

That’s true, but for me the significant point is that the scientists are usually playing catch-up with the philosophers. I’m glad they don't feel the need to borrow the intellect of an eighteenth century German, but knowing a bit about my perspective , I don’t think you’d be surprised if I suggested that they could do worse that to borrow the intellect of certain 20th century philosophers, since they seem to be playing catch-up again.

Looking at your conversation with Olivier, I should add that there are no fixed boundaries between what constitutes science vs philosophy. There are more and less theoretical or applied sciences , and the same goes for philosophy( analytic vs continental) . I’m less interested in whether a particular set of ideas is labeled philosophy or science that how profound and useful
those ideas are. I should add that all other areas of
culture including poetry, literature , music and art , contribute to the shaping of theoretical ideas. That’s why I’m fascinated by the way a particular scientific theory belongs to a large cultural
movement.

All I need do is point to myself to confirm this, in my view. — NOS4A2

Pointing to oneself and recognizing this as a unity body requires an intersubjectively shaped concept of one’s body. Before looking in a mirror, a child’s model of their body is piecemeal. The reflection for the fist time shows the body as a unitary phenomenon, but it also requires that the child recognize that others see them in this way, from the outside in. Schizophrenics often lose the ability to know where their body leaves off and the world begins, and many brain injuries can change our sense of whether and how our limbs belong to us. Now can this be? It is because concepts concerning the unity of the body involve complex correlations of perceptions and actions in the world. The unity of the body is an achievement , not a given.

In my own view the self begins and ends at the exterior surface, which can be discerned from simple observation and direct contact. It cannot extend any further outward or inward, and any notion of the self that violates this principle is illusory. — NOS4A2

Sounds simple but may not be so. Have you heard of the research on extended cognition? Drawing a boundary based on the physical body is somewhat arbitrary, since cognition is not a calculating computer in a bag of bones.
Cognition, like other organismic functions is interactive exchanges of activity with an environment. We eat , we breath, we excrete. Should the functioning body not include the oxygen we take in, and the aspects of our surrroudinga that keep our nerve and muscle cells from atrophying? Our perceptual-motor systems that power our actions in the world as well as allowing us to
perceive it in the first place cannot even be properly defined from a functional point of view without taking into account the complete interactive body-environment cycles. These are not machines that are designed first and then plopped into a world. Drawing a contour around an anatomical body and calling it self is artificially separating what was never separate to begin with.

It makes sense to ask if it is warm. If you say "it is", where is you? — Heiko

There is a difference in meaning between ‘it is warm’ , which doesnt necessary require a subjective experience ( I could be looking at a thermostat) and proclaiming that it is I who feel warm. And what about my pain?Does it make sense to ask if it is ‘I’ who am in pain? Is my pain the same thing as ‘there is pain’?
My own arguments in favor of the idea that all experience has a ‘for-menses’ quality about it is a bit different from what I’ve been describing. These accounts depend on the idea of a certain felt sense of ‘ ‘ me ness’.
My own account is based on the argument that all of our sensory, perceptual , cognitive and affective experiences are defined i relation to our prior goal oriented understanding. We recognize the new in relation to pre-existing schemes of sense. So the ‘self is always changing but there is an ongoing integrity and unity to it. What I experience is always a variation on a prior theme for me.

So you relate the existence of the warmth to "modalities"? — Heiko

We all do, according to studies. And what about the use of the world ‘I’ here? We can talk about the feeling of warmth in the abstract , in third personal terms, i. which case ‘I’ is irrelevant. But when I have a personal feeling of warmth, does it makes sense to ask the question, ‘is it ‘I’ who is feeling warm’?

- but where is the proof? Maybe the warmth just IS warm. — Heiko

You are not only aware of the warmth. You are also aware of the mode of subjective access to the experience. Did you experience it directly or recollect it, or did you just fantasize about warmth? One is not only aware of an experience but can report what personal modality the experience arose from.

Where do you find yourself at all? All there is is the things that are there... — Heiko

That’s an interesting question. There’s a consensus forming among a community of phenomenologically influenced writers in philosophy of mind that self-consciousness is intrinsic to all awareness. I am not only are aware of smelling the rose, I am aware that it is I use smell the rose. Ther is what, after Nagel, they call the feeling of what it is like to experience anything, a quality of for-meness’ that attaches to all my encounters with the world. Social constructionists take the opposite view , arguing that the self is just a socially created construct.

My aim with the Hume quote was to show that the assumed pure
interiority of consciousness falls apart when analysed closely, because when we search for ourselves what we find is always reshaped by exposure to an outside. If you want to call that outside ‘physical’ then you’re maintaining a kind of dualism between interior and exterior. I prefer ‘phenomena’ or appearances’ to physical objects( as Nietzsche wrote, there is nothing behind those appearances) , because it indicates the indissociable reciprocal depends of interior and exterior, making mind embodied and embedded in a world , which itself is co-constructed by its relationships with embodied mind. In this view of mind-body-environment no clear-cut interior or exterior can be discerned.

Even from the first-person point of view we come into direct contact with the outer world. I think the burden of proof lies with those who claim otherwise. — NOS4A2

My favorite quote from Hume:

“ For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception…. If any one, upon serious and unprejudic'd reflection thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continu'd, which he calls himself; tho' I am certain there is no such principle in me.”

Whatever a dog represents as a ball or food, isn't learned, it's represented, learning doesn't arise.

In either case representations aren't learned. They grow in the mind. — Manuel

I’m not sure I understand the distinction you’re making between the act of representing a feature of the world , and learning. Isn’t all representation a creative act? Or are you arguing for innate hard-wired categories as an explanation of instinctive behavior?

When scientists apply an interpretation to their findings, they are applying a philosophical judgement, and until their case is proven, there will always be alternate explanations from across the range of possibility. Yet 'Facts' remain unchanged, for ever, and therefore every philosophical interpretation must accommodate every relevant fact if it is to be held as potentially valid. — Gary Enfield

Could you elaborate a bit more on your philosophy of science stance with regard to your assertion that facts remain unchanged forever?

Are you saying that scientific progress is cumulative, with every new set of facts added onto the previous body of scientific knowledge?

Idealism should be the default starting position.
— RogueAI

Irrelevant. Physicalism is the default starting position. — Isaac

There are many forms of physicalism.
For instance , what allows Barrett to reject naive realism is her indebtedness to Kantian idealism. That’s why she can talk about a veil of appearances separating us from a world we have no direct access to and must use interpretive faculties to understand. She would agree we can never access the thing in itself. That notion of the physical only emerged with Kant. So I would say the default position in most of the sciences is a physicalism
derived from , or at least consistent with, Kant’s idealism.