Is there evidence that they reliably make money over longer periods of time?

Show him a Picasso first. He'll have better luck with that. Or one of Trump's tweets.

what we do make of the brain? This constituted object is also constituting. — Eee

Good question. Of course, couldn't one ask the same question of Kant's categories? Husserl was well aware of the chicken and egg difficulties inherent in his thesis.

The sequence would seem to be circular. The lowest stratum of constitution of a world is that of basic spatial objects, and from this level we then constitute what Husserl calls my animate organism(my body, which is both object to me and perceiving subjectivity, as I can demonstrate when my one hand touches the other and each is at one moment the perceiving subject and in the next moment the perceived object). At a higher stratum of constitution I emerge as intentional cognizer and member of a cultural-scientific community, Husserl recognizes that the intentional stratum is dependent on the material body, which is necessary but not sufficient for it.

IF this is the case, how can Husserl claim the primordial structure of temporal synthesis (retention primal impression protention) as more fundamental than that of the body if phenomenology is articulated in language for a languaged community , which is a higher order intentional stratum? How can the lower order(the physical brain and body) be grounded via the higher constituted order? I think Husserl;s answer would be that although it is necessary to articulate phenomenology's primordial structures via the higher stratum, nevertheless what it points to is not a founded but a founding level.

Put differently, we cannot ground retention-impression-protention in brain physiology because the latter is a relative and contingent empirical formulation but the former is not. Temporal synthesis is not a psychological system but a philosophical a priori. Scientists can change their models of brain function as much as they like but this should have no effect on the phenomenological a priori of temporal synthesis underlying any and all constitution of spatial objects as well as interpersonally constituted products like particular empirical scientific models , throughout their changes.

That was my omission. Husserl makes a distinction between a lower stratum of constitution, in which I form 'real' objects out of syntheses purely of my own actual perceptions, retentions and protentions(that's the stratum I described in the OP), and a higher stratum in which my language interactions with others in an interpersonal world contribute to my actual perceptions of sensate experience. It is out of this interpersonal nexus that empirical objects , the basis of science, are constituted. Even though I (and others in my world) don't actually experience every aspect of such inter-personally constituted objects , we fuse into our own perception what we only indirectly aperceive from others. Through such interpersonal correlation, we assume these objects to be the same for everyone. Logical and mathematical idealities are made possible through this interpersonal objectivizing that gives us the 'identical' object for all.

Wouldn't it be nice if philosophy were this easy. Then we could put it in fortune cookies. Seriously though, do the qualia represent physical data of the world independent of the perceiver? Are there more or less correct ways to organize these qualia in the mind to mirror the external world? Neither of these are true of Husserlian primal impressions. They function very differently than qualia, which are proxies for Kantian intuitions.

Phenomenologically oriented writers like Husserl and Heidegger insist that none of the advances in modern physics(and for Heidegger that included theoeretical contributions up till 1976) depart in any significant way from presuppositions traceable back to Kant.
Husserl wrote: Physics, whether represented by a Newton or a Planck or an Einstein, or whomever
else in the future, was always and remains exact science. It remains such even if, as some think, an absolutely final form of total theory-construction is never to be expected or striven for.:"

What he meant by exact science is a science based on pure geometry of space. The innovative mathematics of space-time in recent physics is still dependent on geometric idealities. Husserl wrote copously about how geometry's origin in pragmatic activities in the world, and how it morphed into a 'ready-made' set of axioms by the time of Galileo.

I read the figures in physics that you mention as residing within a philosophical space somewhere between Kant and Hegel. Nome have ventured into phenomenological philosophical territory as of yet(which I view as being as revolutionary in its own way as Kant was).
In this sense, enactivist psychology, having begun to assimilate ideas from Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, is anticipating where physics will go next.

What I am questiong is the coherence of the "itself'. I can accept if you want to add that the intrinsicality or in-itselfness of an object is unique to my experience of it. But if you are arguing that whatever it is that is intrinsic to an object is universal, independent of all subjectivities who encounter it such that when they do, the object contributes the identical content for each of them, the I would have to ask where this universality comes from and what is the usefulness of talking about aspects of things that are imminent in a way that is independent of a subject.

What it is in the objecgt taht is beyond my concept of it is beyond my concpet in a wasy that is uniue to my concept rather than being common to all subjectivities in the particular content of its beyondness/

Kant's subjectivization of the empirical world didn't go far enough. It left intact the notion of objectively causal world in universal space time, rather than reducing notions like objective causality and universal geometric space to the relative products of embodied correlations in experience.

the form cannot be exhaustive of it. There might always be more to the object. It is more than the concept of form in question.

Objects need more than an idea to make them so. — TheWillowOfDarkness

There is a difference between arguing that there is more to an object than the form I give it, and arguing that it subsists in itself. One could say, for instance, that my sense of an object anticipates beyond itself , and meets up with that object In that way, I can determine an object to be a relation between what I already expeieince and what is new in that object with respect to my experiecne. Another way of putting it would be to say that all objects of my experience exist for me only in relation to a field. All objects for me are figures on a background which is intrinsic to their meaning for me. Thus no object is completely independent of my subjecdtivity in its meaning, and no object is merely co-opted into my subjectivity.

In order to understand consciousness, it is necessary to recognize the inextricable interdependence of subjective and objective aspects of all experiencing of a world. All understanding takes place and organizes itself relative to a background field. There is no meaning without this relational structure of figure-ground and this is the meaning of consciousness. Intelligence has no sense without meaning and meaning has no senses outside of conscious processes of relationality. We can talk about dispositions, capacities ad potentialities that are latent in a person, but intelligence is only discerned via meaningful , intentional behavior. Intelligence has to manifest itself via the constructions of conscious intentions. Otherwise it remains a latent potentiality.

there is something independent of any phenomenal form which constitutes the being of objects. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Could you elaborate on this a bit? Does this imply that objects subsist in themselves, that they have existence independent of a subject experieincing them? Could you give examples of such objects?

Any explanation of intelligence that doesnt understand conscioussness is not an explanation, only a superficial description.

Almost everything humans talk about now can relate to what Kant has already said. — Mww

Do you mean this in the same way that everything humans talk about now can relate to what Hegel, Nietzsche, Plato and Descartes said, that current knowledge sits on the foundation of previous thought? Or are you claiming that philosophy hasn't progressed much beyond Kant?

Its idealist in a particlar way, but not anthropomorphic if we have reduced the anthropos to a process of temporalization in which the human disappears along with animals and 'natural' constituted world as a whole. Husserl made this move with what he called epoche, abstracting away all empirically relative facts to arrive at minimal conditions for any experiencing whatsoever. Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger and Derrida followed him in this direction to various extents, recognizing a prmordial gestalt temporal relationalty as fundamental in talk about any experieincing of a world, prior to constitutied empirical beings.

There is something significant in the phrase 'what it is like', but this significance isn't picked up on by thinkers like Nagel and Searle. Nagel means to highlight the supposed self-enclosed subjectivity accompanying a creature's perception of the objective world, and so he uses 'like' to point to this unbridgeable privacy of subjectivity as that we can only use metaphors to get at in someone or something else's private experience. But the deeper significance of 'like', lost on realists and idealists alike, doesnt involve comparing one being's subjectivity to another's , as if they are two objects, but rather the very structure of subjective experience as metaphorical in and to itself. To experience anything at all is to see that experience in terms of the particular way in which it is both alike and different from our previous experience. The 'intrinsic' meaning of a perception is nothing outside of or other than this always new and unique way in which it is alike and differs from what came before in it in our immediate experience.
So a bat wouldn't know what it is like to be a bat except in terms of what it is like to experience each new moment, and it only know what each moment is like by moving from that moment to the next. This phenomenological structure defines consciousness as intrinsically built of 'likeness', of the experience of the now as a comparison and a transtiion, a familiarity and a novelty. The now of consciousness is mediate rather than immediate. This radical mediacy at the heart of the supposed pure self-aware subjectivity of consciousness destroys the realist's dream of the purely empirical at the same time that it deprives the subject of its independence from the objects it perceives. Subject and object become only subjective and objective poles of an indissociable interaction in which there is no longer a subject that it is someting like to BE, nor an objective world independent of that subject which it engages with fro out of its solipsism.

some animals, humans in particular, do develop a theory of mind where we can look at the context of someone's identical actions and infer their intentions. — Marchesk

You might want to mention that TT(theoy theory) is just one of three main contenders for explaining the relation between empathy and mirror neurons. The other two are simulation theory and interaction theory, or enactivism. Its this third one that borrows heavily from Husserlian and Merleau-Pontian phenomenology, by rejecting the idea that we consult an internal theory of mind to interpret others actions and instead directly perceive the meaning of their intent in the action itself. How we manage this requires delving into the gestalts that give us access to an intersubjective world, explain realist materialist science and at the saem time deprive materialism of its claim to self-grounding.

Are you familiar with the work that Fresco mentioned above? In case you are not, let me quote a few passages summarizing 'Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being'. Lakoff is a psycholinguist who has developed a cognitive-psychology based explanation of the origin of mathematics that in many respects in comparable to the position I have been arguing.

"In the course of our research, we ran up against a mythology that stood in the way of developing an adequate cognitive science of mathematics. It is a kind of “romance” of mathematics, a mythology that goes something like this:

.•Mathematics is abstract and disembodied—yet it is real.
•Mathematics has an objective existence, providing structure to this universe and any possible universe, independent of and transcending the existence of human beings or any beings at all.
•Human mathematics is just a part of abstract, transcendent mathematics.•Hence, mathematical proof allows us to discover transcendent truths of the universe
.•Mathematics is part of the physical universe and provides rational structure to it. There are Fibonacci series in flowers, logarithmic spirals in snails, fractals in mountain ranges, parabolas in home runs, and pin the spherical shape of stars and planets and bubbles.
•Mathematics even characterizes logic, and hence structures reason it-self—any form of reason by any possible being.
•To learn mathematics is therefore to learn the language of nature, a mode of thought that would have to be shared by any highly intelligent beings anywhere in the universe.
•Because mathematics is disembodied and reason is a form of mathematical logic, reason itself is disembodied. Hence, machines can, in principle, think.It is a beautiful romance—the stuff of movies like 2001, Contact, and Sphere.It initially attracted us to mathematics.

But the more we have applied what we know about cognitive science to understand the cognitive structure of mathematics, the more it has become clear that this romance cannot be true. Human mathematics, the only kind of mathematics that human beings know, cannot be a subspecies of an abstract, transcendent mathematics. Instead, it appears that mathematics as we know it arises from the nature of our brains and our embodied experience. As a consequence, every part of the romance appears to be false, for reasons that we will be discussing. Perhaps most surprising of all, we have discovered that a great many of the most fundamental mathematical ideas are inherently metaphorical in nature:

•The number line, where numbers are conceptualized metaphorically as points on a line.
•Boole’s algebra of classes, where the formation of classes of objects is conceptualized metaphorically in terms of algebraic operations and elements: plus, times, zero, one, and so on
.•Symbolic logic, where reasoning is conceptualized metaphorically as mathematical calculation using symbols.
•Trigonometric functions, where angles are conceptualized metaphorically as numbers.
•The complex plane, where multiplication is conceptualized metaphorically in terms of rotation."

"Metaphor is not a mere embellishment; it is the basic means by which abstract thought is made possible. One of the principal results in cognitive science is that abstract concepts are typically understood, via metaphor, in terms of more concrete concepts."

Do you agree with any of this?

I agree completely about Lakoff and Nunez.. i was going to mention them.

That is quite an anti-Platonist view. Mathematics deals with counting of not anything in particular. In the abstract, Platonic world of number theory, which is obviously not the real, physical world, there is no need for something to count. Mathematics explores that non-real world. — alcontali

Are you a platonist? Are you comfortable with Kant's notion of math as originating from the a priori categorical formal attributes of a transcendental subject? If so, then quantity may seem to you as something we could think apart from meaningful semantic quality, as arising from a different world, that of the a priori purely empty subjective formalism. For phenomenology, on the other hand, quantity is itself a peculiar species of the meaningfully semantic qualitative. It abstracts away all other properties of objects in order to lay bare its own meaningful organizational properties inherent in what calculation is trying to do, what it aims at in itself, apart from what it is applying itself to.

These specific procedures obviously originate from pragmatic interaction with the world. However, the goal of mathematics is to abstract away the real world. Otherwise, without abstracting the real world away, it is not mathematics, but something else — alcontali

Mathematics would be unthinkable without the notion of the object, which originated with the Greeks and by the time of Galileo became the basis of science with the complete transforming of the phenomenally experienced world into an abstracted realm of 'real' objective bodies, what you call the "real physical world". For Husserl, fundamental experienced reality contains no objects. these are idealizations, formal devices of thinking to organize our world. For him , the entirety of 'real physical reality' is a second order abstraction based on a formal condition of possibility, a thinking which, in the hands of Kantian and platonically oriented philosophers and logicians, is not able to make explicit its presuppositions in order to ground them in a more primordial origin of mathematics. Objectivity presupposes the notion of identity. The idea of an object is that of self-persistence. An objective thing is only an object in that it is considered as identical to itself. Thus, the origin of the 'real physical world' rests on a set of formal presuppositions that include self-identity, which is not a property of the world independent of our theorizing activities. (Even as theorized, pure self-identity masks subtle , continual changes in the sense of what we try to hold as self-identical). Calculation and number would be impossible without this idealization. The thinking of number, as 'same thing, different time' is already implicit in the formal basis of objectivity as identity. In this way, modern empiricism and mathematics presuppose each other and arose together as forms of understanding.

To begin from the 'real physical world' as irreducible leaves us with a schism between quantity and quality, between empirically contingent causal 'objects' and the subjectively and universally formal meaninglessness of math(as well as with subject-object dualism and the hard problem of consciousness). This leads to the view that one can devise out of ones imagination any formal mathematical idea at will without it having to have the slightest practical connection to, or influence from, the 'real' world. After generating such pure ideas out of thin air, we then go on to see if and where such meaningless, purely abstract formalisms apply to this real world, and then shout with astonishment when they miraculously describe aspects of this world. That's platonism in a nutshell.
What I suggest is instead the case is that, a at all periods in human history, the development of mathematics, in its pre-formal as well as recent purely formal incarnations, is as utterly dependent on the intersubjective cultural environment as any science . It is for this reason that each historical innovation in mathematics (Greek geometry, classical logic, analytic geometry and calculus, etc. arise out of the intellectual milieu of their time n the same fashion as does every scientific theory. Classical, medieval, Renaissance, enlightenment and modernist chapter of of the development of mathematical concepts parallel developments in the sciences as well as the arts and all other arenas of culture because all of these interpenetrate and influence each other. It is not the case that the history of mathematics is merely a cumulative enterprise, with new developments merely adding to and building onto previous ones, which would be the case if mat were purely, platonically formal.. There is a continual, subtle reinterpretation of the meaning of all aspects of mathematics just as happens in physics or any other science . But because it is in the nature of the language of mathematics that its formalisms are very general, it is assumed that our practical understanding of them never changes, that their sense stands outside of time, that they in fact have no sense because , of course, calculation is supposed to be empty of all sense. but this is mistaking generality of sense with absence of meaning.

Formalisms , whether of a mathematical or any other nature, stand for a semantic content. They mean something in order to to do something. Self-identiy is not an irreducible basis of the world, it is a semantic gimic. 'Same thing- different time' is a pragamtically meaningful notion. If it is the case that one can ignore every feature of the world that one is applying a mathematical formalism to, then it is equally true of other sorts of categorical generalities. We can think color in general abstracted from all other aspects of the world. All that is necessary is to have the neurological capacity to imagine color. In same fashion, we can think counting part from any features of an object that is to be counted, as long as we have the neural capacity to do this(there are some neural pathologies that prevent the ability to think calcualtively).

But the fact that we can separate our formalisms from specific objects that we want to apply them to does not mean that these forms are not in themselves meaningful, or that they are not always motivated by some purpose which belongs to their meaning in a subtle way. For instance, normally, it only occurs to us to calculate when a need arises for some practical aim. That need does not only motivate the onset of the counting as a background drive that then vanishes the minute we begin to count, it continues to frame the counting. It is a subtle part of what it means, right now, in the midst of the performance of calculating, to continue the activity . If I am interpreted , what brings the task back to mind is the recollection of why I wanted to count in the first place.

the applicability of math would be badly impaired if it sought to be directly meaningful or useful. Math is necessarily, in and of itself, meaningless and useless, in order to maximally relegate these characteristics to its real-world application. — alcontali

To give you a little background, I adhere to radical pragmatism (Rorty) and Husserlian phenomenology(starting with his Origin of Arithmetic). From the perspective of these approaches, any experienced reality is inherently meaningful in that it has significance for, matters to us.
Math does not become meaningful only when it is applied to real world phenomena. The origin of number and calculation is a series of synthetic intentional acts of understanding that emerged at various points in human history. If one goes back far enough, one can find cultures with no notion of object permanence, formal counting or number. These were conceptual inventions motivated by practical concerns, much like concepts such as left-right, high-low, fast-slow. In order for number and calculation to have any coherence, one must first construct the idea of a world of discrete objects out of the flux around us. Further ,we must develop the notion of empty plurality, etc. These are semantic notions in themselves, prior to their application to phenomena we wish to perform calculations on. We wouldn't know what a calculation is in the first place unless we retained the semantic meaning that led to its creation by our forebears. It is not that math is useless in and of itself, It is that that there is no such thing as math in and of itself.To think of calculation is to automatically imply a substrate. That is what counting means. To count is always a counting OF something. If the semantic emptiness, that is, the absolute abstractive generality of the something, is one component of what calculation means, equally implied is how a mathematical operator acts on, transforms its object. Multiplication, addition ,subtraction, simple counting, these are all specific procedures ,and as such they represent specific semantic meanings, developed through pragmatic interaction with the world at some point in human history.

In sum, for radical pragmatism and phenomenology, any empirical fact has a formal, normative component. By the same token, formal mathematical concepts, originating in the most basic notions of number and counting, have a empirical component that defines their meaningful sense, and renders them at the same time a discovery and an invention.

In mathematics, abstract nonsense, general abstract nonsense, generalized abstract nonsense, and general nonsense are terms used by mathematicians to describe abstract methods related to category theory and homological algebra. More generally, “abstract nonsense” may refer to a proof that relies on category-theoretic methods, or even to the study of category theory itself. — alcontali

That's an awful lot of differentiated terminology for a practice without meaning. It's true that mathematics abstracts away meaningful content but it does does so in order to arrive at meaningfully useful tools. One chooses to make use of a particular calculative method becasue of its pragmatic usefulness in relation to one's purposes. For instance, number abstracts away all particularies of the set of objects it counts, but it does so in order to allow us to form the notion of the act of counting itself, which is anything but meaningless in its origin or purpose.

even transcendental subjects must emerge from an indifferent nature — fdrake

There are no transcendental subjects. What there is is a transcendental in-between, between the subjective and the objective. This is the space, the only space of experience and nature.This is not a transcendental in the Kantian sense of a beyond nature, but of nature as itself beyond itself in transforming itself valuatively moment to moment.
There is no indifferent nature. Apart from the necessity of a human to interpretively construct a valuative understanding of nature, The world in itself is contingent not in an empirical sense of a causal chain of history. That is a false contingency in that it already presupposes a world of objects in interaction. That is a metaphysical presupposition, Without realizing it, by carving nature at its joints via beginning from objective causality, you only end up ever talking about the a priori structure of experience. That is to say, nature ends up always being this indifferent history of casual relations between objects. Such an appraoch never escapes its grounding. Modern scientific empricism, far from being a free openness toward a contingent world, shuts itself off from the world's true conteingency.

The nature that is anterior to the a priori structure of the joints of objective causality is one that is always valuative in that it consists of patterns of relations in which its entities are not only defined only by their referential relation to other entities within the pattern, but that environment of relations is always in process of transforming itself valuatively(value here means a qualitative way of being) This cannot be reduced to a causal chain without wiping out this essential qualitatively valuative, perpsectival facet of nature. Nature is anticipatory, it always has its purposes, and these purposes are always in process of being reconfigured,Thus, values, change. This is what the arrow of time signifies. Its not simply a question of the difficulty of ascertaining initial conditions, because that still remains within an objective thinking of causality.
Every philosophical approach implies its own account of both human understanding and nature, since the two cannot be disentangled fro one another. Hegelian-marxist accounts have led to a rethinking of nature as self-organizing system organized according to a vector of increasing complexity .

Even physics will join this trajectory if physicists like Lee Smolen have their way. According to him, temporality must be brought back into physics and take on a central role. That way, cosmological and biological evolutionary processes can be seen as connected. This forms a nice dialacticalization of nature, in line with a dialectical thinking concerning cultural change. It is no accident that biologists like Lewontin and Rose who endorse self-organizing systems ideas in biology are also sympathetic to Marxism.
But just as a dialectical thinking implies a certain way of thinking about natural as well as cultural history, one has to understand how a radical geneological-historicist approach rethinks further the nature of nature as well as culture. You suggest that Nietzsche had in mind only a radically contingent thinking of culture while leaving nature to empiricism. That doesnt jibe. The two realms imply each other. If you believe that its possible to approach human history in a radically genealogical way, while leaving intact the modern objective realist approach to nature, then I dont think youre fully appraeciating the argument that is being made by post structuralists concerning the social construction of culture.

The bottom line here is that the things of nature only appear once in time.. Even if empirical representation were a mirror of nature rather than a perspectical interpretation, we could never recover what was for the reason that what was only existed for the fleeing moment of its instantiation. To argue that that doesnt matter for science since one can abstract common features still doesnt get the point that modeling particulars within a common category fails at the point where the category itself becomes valuatively transformed. Understanding natural history geneologically rather than empirically means that its developments cannot be reduced to law-bound causal explanation, only description. Likewise , the is no dialectical progression to human culture, only geneological unfolding, with no telos, no progression, no objectively causal basis.

You're making the same methodological slip as before, the concept of the thing is not the thing, only now you're talking about it as if human history contains natural history, rather than as if human experiential temporality acted before the evolution of humans. — fdrake

I never said that human experiential temporality acted before the evolution of humans. I said that temporality acted before the evolution of humans. If one can imagine an object, like a dinosaur, existing before humans, this presupposes a structure of temporality(as opposed to time in the classical sense) in that object implies change, change implies differential relationality and reference, which gives us the irreducible retentional, presencing and protentional elements making possible objectification.
That is to say , if we take the point of view of the object, the above features are implied in what it is in itself, apart from any talk of experiencing psychological subjects. Its not simply that human history contains natural history, its that contingent history contains natural history. Human memory and cognition can be taken out of the equation and one is still left with the necessity to found objectivity on relational structures of transformation (temporalization) that precede and are implied by them.
You liked my Nietzsche quote because you read it as making a distinction between human and natural history. I would agree that Nietzsche was not simply a social constructivist, reducing nature to language and culture. Like Deleuze after him, he considered the biological realm on its own terms as already
a kind of social construction. If the natural realm is already a contingently self-transforming process not amenable to a logic of cause-effect, then we dont need to reduce nature to human constructions in order to conclude that its history is discontinuous and contingent. All that is left to us is perspectival interpretation not due solely to language, but to the nature of nature itself as contingent self-transformation.
"As Nietzsche repeatedly argued, including in his most positivistic period, there is no independent nature in itself that could free it or us from our in­terpretations, interests, and evaluations of value. Our "nature" is to artfully pick and choose, value and devalue, and rank and transformatively order and reorder, even as "nature" is in itself neither good nor evil for Nietzsche. Nevertheless, this valuing does not occur out of free will or in the transpa­rency of consciousness that Nietzsche deconstructed as fictional entities. Interpretation is neither arbitrary nor infinite; it is shadowed by an ape, and physiologically and social-historically circumscribed and conditioned."(Eric S Nelson)

not only can we establish stuff about a nature indifferent to us, we have to be able to do ontology in a way which allows us to make sense of this fact. The a-priori structure of experience passes from non-being into being, and this is an observation which can be understood within the a-priori structure of experience, rather than some grand violence against experiential temporality, we already know this shit. We understand it, it has been demonstrated already. It is not a conceptual issue, it's a fact. Take off the Heidigoggles and go visit Jurassic Park. — fdrake

Sorry for the late response. I noticed in a recent post you made reference to Badiou. If his approach to history is one you are comfortable with, then perhaps we are discussing a distinction between a structural marxist dialectical teleological understanding of history and what has been referred to as a radical geneological or historicist one. Clearly, a dialectical history would be incoherent without the ability to, as you say, make sense of a history indifferent to us. We have to be believe in empirical facts as based in the a priori structure of experience. You claim this is not a conceptual issue, but it is obviously a metaphysical issue , or there wouldn't be a dispute about it. Radical historicism does away with appeals to principles that lend necessity and unity to history. The result is a powerful emphasis on: nominalism, contingency, and contestability. Radical historicists reject the teleological narratives of developmental historicism, including those that are widely associated with Marxism and critical theory.
Radical historicists thus portray history as discontinuous and contingent. History is a series of contingent, even accidental appropriations, modifications, and transformations from the old to the new. As Nietzsche wrote, "there is no more important proposition for historians than: that the origin of the emergence of a thing and its ultimate usefulness, its practical application and incorporation into a system of ends, are toto coelo separate; that anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually interpreted anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose by a power superior to it; that everything that occurs in the organic world consists of overpowering, dominating, and in their turn, overpowering and dominating consist of re-interpretation, adjustment, in the process of which their former meaning and purpose must necessarily be obscured or completely obliterated." (Geneology of Morality).
"This emphasis on contingency may appear to suggest that change is inexplicable. Yet, radical historicists often describe and explain change; they just do so without appealing to overarching principles. Change occurs contingently as, for example, people reinterpret, modify, or transform an inherited tradition in response to novel circumstances or other dilemmas." (Mark Bevir, What is Geneology)

Nature existed without humans. We know this. Furthermore, far from being senseless, the indifference of nature to our concerns which it reveals is something utterly banal. Update your ontology with its effects. — fdrake

I want to make sure I understand you. What is the relation between what you are arguing and, say, Thomas Kuhn or Paul Feyerabend's thinking about the connection between nature and our paradigmatic constructions of it? Or other social constructionist, sociological and cultural studies-based approaches to science ( Joseph Rouse, Foucault, Rorty, Latour, )? I get the sense its more that Heiddger's Dasein you're objecting to here. It seems to me you are opposing your realist stance to a large community of anti-realist philosophies of science( who apparently are not grasping what is 'utterly banal' to you). Would I be correct in surmising that?

it isn't how the universe existed before humans which poses a problem here, it's that it existed at all. It existed non-relationally to humans for longer than there are humans, and it still exists non-relationally to humans. — fdrake

Keep in mind that Heidegger's Dasein is not a human being, He was adamant that it is not an anthropomorphisim. Husserl made the same argument about transcendental intentionality, and Derrida was just as clear that differance is not an anthropomorphism.
These are not structures that require human psyches or souls, rather they precede all thinking of humans as subjects or biological objects even as they make possible such conceptions. They are a starting point for the positing of any kind of existing entity. Their a priori status with respect to humans and all other objects and subjects might tempt one to think of them in terms of a pan-pychism, but this would confuse more that it clarifies, given the link between pan-pychism and subjectivism.

. The desire to know for the sake of knowing — Fooloso4

is inherently a pragmatic quest in that knowing is transformative interaction. The desire to know is the desire to adaptively reshape.

And the idea that the thingliness of things can only be given an adequate account in terms of the existential hermeneutics of a late arriving structure in the universe doesn't make you want to throw up from nauseating reductionism? — fdrake

We can always pretend that we have access to , or can make coherent, an account that bypasses "late arriving structures". The problem with that notion of time consciousness is that the past as we experience it is always already changed by our present. The earliest and most remote past is already an reinterpretation of 'what was' for present purposes. We dont want to and don't need to know how things 'really were' before we existed. That is a nonsensical notion. When we theorize about the past, whether cosmological, biological or cultural, what we want to know is what we can do with this understanding right now in relation to our current goals. Because our past is always ahead of us, our changing accounts of the oldest and most ancient is an expression of the cutting edge of our thinking(the latest arriving structures of thought). The universe isnt an independent outside for us to represent and mirror, it is a development whose transformation we advance by asking questions of it. When we attempt to 'go back' and revael things that were before , we are transforming the world anew.

There is no nature outside of an interpreted world — Joshs

Dinosaurs called, they want their time back. — fdrake

"To describe the "world" phenomenologically means to show and determine the being of beings objectively present in the world conceptually and categorially. Beings within the world are things, natural things and "valuable" things. Their thingliness becomes a problem. And
since the thingliness of the latter is based upon natural thingliness, the being of natural things, nature as such, is the primary theme. The character of being of natural things, of substances, which is the basis of everything, is substantiality. What constitutes its ontological meaning? But are we asking ontologically about the "world"? The problematic characterized is undoubtedly ontological. But even if it succeeds in the purest explication of the being of nature, in comparison with the fundamental statements made by the mathematical natural sciences about this being, this ontology never gets at the phenomenon of the "world. " Nature is itself a being which is encountered within the world and is discoverable on various paths and stages. Neither the ontic description of innerworldly beings nor the ontological interpretation of the being of these beings gets as such at the phenomenon of "world. " In both kinds of access to "objective being, " "world" is already "presupposed" in various ways .

Terminologically "worldly" means a kind of being of Da-sein, never a kind of being of something objectively present "in" the world. We shall call the latter something belonging* to the world, or innerworldly. One look at traditional ontology shows us that one skips over the phenomenon of worldliness when one fails to see the constitution of Dasein of being-in-the-world. Instead, one tries to interpret the world in terns of the being of the being which is objectively present within the world but has not, however, even been initially discovered-in terms of nature. Ontologically and categorially understood, nature is a boundary case of the being of possible innerworldly beings. Da-sein can discover beings as nature only in a definite mode of its being-in-the-world. As the categorial content of structures of being of a definite being encountered in the world, "nature" can never render worldliness intelligible. But even the phenomenon "nature," for instance in the sense of the Romantic concept of nature, is ontologically comprehensible only in terms of the concept of world; that is, in terms of an analytic of Da-sein."

Heidegger, Being and Time

when they're all harmonising we end up with a successful understanding of nature. — fdrake

Every understanding of nature is successful within its own terms and given the limits of its aims. Naive realism's unexamined presuppositions limit a priori the scope of its ciiteria of 'success'.

the subject is of the world and the world is of nature. The transparent veil erected by this wrongheaded thinking isn't really there; our senses are prisms more than prisons. — fdrake

The subject is of the world and the world is of the subject. The subject enacts the world that it is 'of' . Our senses are interpretations. There is no nature outside of an interpreted world

What do you think was behind Husserl’s contention that ‘Galileo was at once a discovering and concealing genius?’ What exactly was ‘concealed’ by Galileo’s new science? — Wayfarer

I think what Husserl meant was that Gallleo took for granted, as a 'ready-made truth', the ideality of geometric concepts. Thus , he established an approach resulting from the invention of "a
particular technique, the geometrical and Galilean technique which is called physics. " What was concealed from Galileo was the practical activities of the life-world making possible the abstractions of modern science.


"In his view of the world from the perspective of geometry, the perspective of what appears to
the senses and is mathematizable, Galileo abstracts from the subjects as persons leading a personal life; he abstracts from all that is in any way spiritual, from all cultural properties which are attached to things in human praxis. The result of this abstraction is the things purely as bodies; but these are taken as concrete real objects, the totality of which makes up a world which becomes the subject matter of research. One can truly say that the idea of nature as a really self-enclosed world of bodies
first emerges with Galileo. A consequence of this, along with mathematization, which was too quickly taken for granted, is [the idea of] a self-enclosed natural causality in which every occurrence is determined unequivocally and in advance. Clearly the way is thus prepared for dualism, which appears immediately afterward in Descartes.
In general we must realize that the conception of the new idea of "nature" as an encapsuled, really and theoretically self-enclosed world of bodies soon brings about a complete transformation of the idea of the world in general. The world splits, so to speak, into two worlds: nature and the psychic world, although the latter, because of the way in which it is related to nature, does not achieve the status of an independent world. The ancients had individual investigations and theories about bodies,
but not a closed world of bodies as subject matter of a universal science of nature. They also had investigations of the human and the animal soul, but they could not have a psychology in the
modern sense, a psychology which, because it had universal nature and a science of nature before it [as a model], could strive for a corresponding universality, i.e., within a similarly self-enclosed
field of its own."

I find Husserl's work to often be so difficult that I don't feel justified in complaining about long-windedness. I do find Derrida to be typically extremely long-winded, and at times perhaps Heidegger, although I think he's just trying to work his way through difficult ideas that he can't find a more direct way of expressing..

Is it possible to not be long-winded, though? — Terrapin Station

I think a good test of whether a discoure is long-winded is whether a more succinct, but accurate. version of it can be produced. Do you understand Husserl well enough to do this?

Contintental philosophers are often accused of long-windedness, and just as often, those who level this charge proceed to completely misread their work. I, for one, wish Husserl was more long-winded, particularly with regard to giving practical examples.

what constitutes 'the crisis in European sciences' that Husserl is writing about? — Wayfarer

Husserl was frustrated that his attempts at introducing his brand of phenomenology had up till that point (he was already 75 when he wrote the Crisis) had not been successful. Meanwhile , he was aware of a general dissatisifaciotn among European intellectuals with the direction that scientific thinking was taking, such dissatisfaction manifesting itself in the popularity of existentialism,and Heidegger's project.

The consensus was that science (postitivism, neo-Kantianism) was alienated from the practical concerns of culture.

An extremely long-winded way to say that geometry is based on the practical techniques of tasks such as surveying? — Terrapin Station

Husserl isn't saying that geometry is just based on these activities. he's saying that such pragmatic embodied activities constitute its original meaning, and what is typically taught in textbooks is geometry as ready-made concepts.

"What sort of strange obstinacy is this, seeking to take the question of the origin of geometry back to
some undiscoverable Thales of geometry, someone not even known to legend? Geometry is available to us in its propositions, its theories. Of course we must and we can answer for this logical edifice to the last detail in terms of self-evidence. Here, to be sure, we arrive at first axioms, and from them we proceed to the original self-evidence which the fundamental concepts make possible. What is this, if not the "theory of knowledge," in this case specifically the theory of geometrical knowledge? No one
would think of tracing the epistemological problem back to such a supposed Thales. This is quite superfluous. The presently available concepts and propositions themselves contain their own
meaning, first as non-self-evident opinion, but nevertheless as true propositions with a meant but still hidden truth which we can obviously bring to light by rendering the propositions themselves self-evident."

Husserl explains the problem with this non-historical formal rendering of the meaning of geometry:

The progress of deduction follows formal-logical self-evidence; but without the actually developed capacity for reactivating the original activities contained within its fundamental concepts, i.e., without the "what" and the "how" of its prescientific materials, geometry would be a tradition empty of meaning; and if we ourselves did not have this capacity, we could never even know whether geometry had or ever did have a genuine meaning, one that could really be "cashed in." Unfortunately, however, this is our situation, and that of the whole modern age."

And what was the original meaning?

"In the life of practical needs certain particularizations of shape stood out and that a technical praxis always aimed at the production of particular preferred shapes and the improvement of them according to certain directions of gradualness. First to be singled out from the thing-shapes are surfaces—
more or less "smooth," more or less perfect surfaces; edges, more or less rough or fairly "even"; in other words, more or less pure lines, angles, more or less perfect points; then, again, among the
lines, for example, straight lines are especially preferred, and among the surfaces the even surfaces; for example, for practical purposes boards limited by even surfaces, straight lines, and
points are preferred, whereas totally or partially curved surfaces are undesirable for many kinds of practical interests. Thus the production of even surfaces and their perfection (polishing) always plays its role in praxis. So also in cases where just distribution is intended. Here the rough estimate of magnitudes is transformed into the measurement of magnitudes by counting the equal parts."

the question arises, as per the above, what is the nature of the existence of such things as natural numbers, logical principles, geometric forms, and the like? I like to say that these are real but not necessarily existent. (Of course, in practice it is quite correct to say that 'the law of the excluded middle exists', but the point I'm trying to make is that this is something which is real only for a mind capable of grasping it; it's not existent in the same sense as phenomenal objects.) — Wayfarer

I prefer Husserl's way , grounding the ideaized shapes of geometry in historical constructive intentional acts of the life-world, out of which emerged reified abstractions which maintain themselves through existential acts. Nowhere here is there room for a non-exististential plane

"Galileo was himself an heir in respect to pure geometry. The inherited geometry, the inherited manner of "intuitive" conceptualizing, proving, constructing, was no longer original geometry: in this sort of "intuitiveness" it was already empty of meaning. Even ancient geometry was, in its way, removed from the sources of truly immediate intuition and originally intuitive thinking, sources from which the so-called geometrical intuition, i.e., that which operates with idealities, has at first derived its meaning. The geometry of idealities was preceded by the practical art of surveying, which knew nothing of idealities. Yet such a pregeometrical achievement was a meaning-fundament for geometry, a fundament for the great invention of idealization; the latter encompassed the invention of the ideal world of geometry, or rather the methodology of the objectifying determination of idealities through the constructions which create "mathematical existence/'"(Crisis of European Science)

one of the dogmas of the secular view of evolution, is that it has nothing like an overall direction or purpose, and so the fact of the existence of intelligent self-aware beings has no particular significance in the overall scheme. — Wayfarer

I would like to think that it is not necessary to create a barrier between the supposed human and the animal in order to affirm the worth of humanity. Wouldn't it be better to affirm the value of all living things? More specifically, in an era in which so many supposed distinctions between human mental functioning and that of higher animals have been shown to be in error (tool-use, emotion, altruism, language, self-awareness, culture), perhaps the lesson we should take from this is the danger of exceptionalist thinking.

As far as the issue of purpose in evolution, is it necessary, or even desirable, for that directionality to be pre-determined or totalized in a Hegelian sense? Can there not be self-organizational purpose whose direction constantly shifts in ways that maintain self-consistency but do not conform to final cause? Can we not be Nietzschean value-positers, simply there to enjoy the ride? Or Heideggerian disclosers of our ownmost uncanny, mysterious possibilities of being, whithout needing to get closer to some pre-figured end?

Yes, it is an immanent process, but as Thompson would argue, at the same time that enactivism eschews metaphysical foundations, it challenges the objectivist presuppositions underlying physical causation. It does not simply reduce intentionality to mechanism