it seems to me that persons are born with attributes, talents, dispositions and characteristics which are very hard to account for in purely physicalist terms, and that in some sense they do seem to embody the memories of previous lives. The idea of an individual life being a part of a much larger sequence doesn't strike me as outlandish — Wayfarer

Would this be true also of animals? Do you also have trouble with the use of physicalism to explain psychological phenomena like consciousness?

Thus I've come to realize practicing Buddhism in western culture is almost too difficult. Our culture is anti Buddhist in every conceivable way — Anthony

Yes, but your interpretation of Buddhism is eminently Western . It has to be. We think from and after our own cultural history, which includes all the sedimented ideas of Western Greek-Judaeo-Christian metaphysics that form the background of our inquiries. Western Buddhism is not an ignoring or turning back from Western philosophy but a carrying forward of it. We can see examples of this in Buddhist-like thinking of the self of Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Merleau-Ponty, and in amalgams of east and west in the writings of phenomenologically trained philosophers like Evan Thompson, Carl Rogers and Francisco Varela.
But not only is Western philosophy now able to thinking in Buddhist-like ways,from its own history, it has exceeded some of those teachings. For instance, your formulation of social relations in terms of rote conditioning has already been jettisoned by some Western philosophers.

When I was trying to form my own ideas about life, psychology, etc, in high school, the dominant traditions out there were psychoanalysis and behaviorism. I hated the way that they made humans the slaves of internal drives or environmental reinforcement. I felt instinctively they must be wrong but it took me a while to come up with an alternative. I read that William James was physically ill for years as a result of his struggle to extricate his thinking from the dominating straightjacket of Hegelianism.

I found my wasy out of the straightjackeet of drives and reniforcers with the help of Heideger(he's the one who coined the term 'thrownness'), Eugene Gendlin and George Kelly. Kelly, Gendlin and Heidegger abandoned completely the notion of 'drive' as a way of explaining human motivation. We are not slabs of meat pushed and pulled by social and internal strings.

Eugene Gendlin’s re-envisioning of the body as radical interaffecting, thinking along with
Heidegger’s Being-with, locates the genesis of meaning-making as always beyond the reach of
normative social processes.

“We can speak freshly because our bodily situation is always different and much more
intricate than the cultural generalities. A situation is a bodily happening, not just generalities.
Language doesn't consist just of standard sayings. Language is part of the human body's
implying of behaviour possibilities. Our own situation always consists of more intricate
implyings. Our situation implies much more than the cultural kinds. The usual view is mistaken,
that the individual can do no more than choose among the cultural scenarios, or add mere
nuances. The ‘nuances’ are not mere details. Since what is culturally appropriate has only a
general meaning, it is the so-called ‘nuances’ that tell us what we really want to know. They
indicate what the standard saying really means here, this time, from this person.
Speech coming directly from implicit understanding is trans-cultural. Every individual
incorporates but far transcends culture, as becomes evident from direct reference. Thinking is
both individual and social. The current theory of a one-way determination by society is too
simple. The relation is much more complex. Individuals do require channels of information,
public discourses, instruments and machines, economic support, and associations for action. The
individual must also find ways to relate to the public attitudes so as to be neither captured nor
isolated. In all these ways the individual is highly controlled. Nevertheless, individual thinking
constantly exceeds society.”

I'm going to copy my response to Noah Te Stroete and see if that clarifies things:

Let me give an example. If i'm involved in a discussion with someone who, like me, is thoroughly versed in , say, Sartre, the our disagreement over Sartre will require each of us to reexamine our own readings of him and his definitions. It can be exasperating and frustrating, but also potentially very instructive. Ive had many such discussions, and I end up learning something new in my own reading of philosophers. That's regardless of whether I come to an agreement in the discussion. On the other hand, I've been involved in debates where I have to spend so much time in superficial background clarification that it never becomes challenging for me.

There have been many famous ongoing debates in philosophical history, such as those between Gadamer and Habermas, Habermas, Rorty and Dennett, Stephen Jay Gould and Dawkins, etc.
Such debates never resolve themselves, and yet are highly instructive for both the participants and the audience.

And then there are non-debate debates where the parties involved were so far apart in their use of terms that the debate was never really able to get started (Derrida vs Gadamer and Derrida vs Searle).

I'm not discounting creativity, but creativity in solving the material-functional things that get stuff done is what counts. Next time you turn on your light, adjust the temperature, open the computer, walk on any material in your house, go to the bathroom, wash your hands, etc. etc. you'll know what I mean. — schopenhauer1

The people I'd first want to thank for my home thermostat, computer, refrigerator and lights are the ones who installed them. They are the 'realest of the real' minutia mongergers. Next would be the ones who delivered the materials, and after them would be the corporate ceo's who created a business model , marketing, and distribution successful enough to stay in business and make these products available to people like me. I suppose next I'd thank the minutia mongerers who designed these products, which is the narrow group you seem to constantly refer to and glorify. but of course they are just one intermediate link(in terms of detail mongering) in a long chain of participants in bringing products to my life. After the designers-engineers, I'd thank the scientists who invented the physical, chemical-electrical-information theories that the designers merely applied. Then I'd give a big thanks to the abstract philosophers-logicians-mathenaticisns who preceded the scientists and provide the overarching framework within which the industrial and information sciences could develop a vocabulary. Apart from the progressively higher levels of abstraction and generalization we see in the sorts of models and plans used by the various groups involved in bringing products to me, as we move from transportation route to business model to design blueprint to scientific theory to philosophical position, there is another progression we see.

While each corporation and designer deals with a limited range of products, the scientist creates the possibility for many categories of products in a wide variety of industries to be developed. And the philosopher not only makes possible new modalities of material inventions, but new political, ethical , economic, educational and social arrangements as well. So as we move up the ladder of theorization and generalization, from business to design to science to philosophy-logic-math, the variety of human technologies, well beyond the merely material ones, that each participant makes possible expands.
Note another imporant fact about this progression toward generalization. Starting with the lowest rung of the ladder of abstraction, thinking machines are in the process of replacing the workforce. The blue collar manufacturing workers were the first to go, accounting and secretarial work is vanishing, soon transportation workers will be eliminated. It is only a matter of time before the design-engineer-programming minutia mongerers are replaced by machines. You wont have to worry about all those bored 'getting stuff done' drones any more. They will be obsolete. The pace of change is accelerating, and time will be too precious a commodity to waste on paying humans to do repetiiive 'minutia mogering' work when they will be better utilized in creative , intuitive tasks that machines will not be able to duplicate for a long time.

The whole notion of the relationship between what humans get paid to do and what 'works' is likely to undergo significant change over the next century as those aspects of our world we call merely functional move further away from human concerns as we increasingly cede control to our machines to take care of the sort of repetitive minutia of what 'works' . What will be left to humans will be the social and creative arts, politics, entertainment, education and the like. You know, the generalization racket.

All that matters is that stuff is getting done that works and is functional, is usable, and takes the material world and does something with it — schopenhauer1

.

What it means for something to get done, to work, is relative to one's goals. If you're bored and miserable at your job , you are failing to get stuff done that counts for you, even if you are churning out product.. Your affective comportment is telling you this. There is no other measure of success at anything than our affectivity. It is what defines our values, our goals and their successful accomplishment. What ever you can accomplish through a mostly tedious , repetitive and boring career you can accomplish much more by replacing that meaningless job with one that feels satisfying, regardless of whether it is making what we call 'real' objects. Since the machines will eventually take over your job anyway, why not get a jump on the future? Why waste your life as a slave to a narrow materialistic view?

It may be that you havent found satisfaction in any other sort of thinking than what passes for you as pragmatic materialist drudgery, so you universalize what works for you into a general human principle. But holding that functional-materialist view may make one miss the eventual threat to one's livelihood from trends that are beginning to pick up speed.

I am not claiming that "nothing" and "something" are visual phenomena. i'm just trying to clarify whether you are arguing that 'visual phenomena' is too broad a category to count here for the darkness-light example.

I mean significant, noteworthy, non-trivial properties (for example: being blue, being a living organism, being large or small, being square-shaped, etc., etc.). — Troodon Roar

. Or being a visual phenomenon.

i'm not sure I understand why in the context of light vs dark. If one is the absence of the other, don't darkness and light fall within the category of visual phenomena?

Are you referring to darkness vs light? Do you mean trivial relation?

It is not just that something and nothing are both 'things', it's that the unique meaning of 'something' and 'nothing' imply each other , like darkness and light. You can see that darkness and light are related not just because they are both things but because the unique meaning of both of them implies the other.

This all led me to wonder where desires come from, if our whole existence depends on what we desire then where do our desires come from in the first place? Then I realized that we could see all our desires as evolutionary tools that were selected through competition for survival, that everything is as if we have the desires we do because they helped our ancestors/species survive in some way. — leo

There is more than one way to look at desire besides thinking of it as separated from cognition and experience. It is only when we begin from a desire-thinking split that we are faced with a self-invented problem of having to explain how we are pushed(drive, motive) or pulled(environmental re-enforcement) into action. We inherited this quandry from the notion of static equilibrium used in the physical sciences, But a living system is not a static thing, it is a self-enclosed system of exchanges and interaction with an environment. It exists by changing itself, and thus is a dynamically equilibrating system.

A range of philosophical and psychological accounts abandon the arbitrary split in favor of a view of experience that begins with our always already finding ourselves in motion (not physical movement but experiential). so from moment to moment we find ourselves in changing circumstances as sense making organisms. 'Desire' is simply the particular way in which the world makes sense to us in our interactions with it. We find ourselves engaged and doing before we 'desire' to engage. This means that human experiencing is inherently anticipatory, purposive and goal-oriented.The world as it appears to us via our perspectival, goal-oriented engagement with it IS what desire is.
This always already being in active engagement with the world is something we share with all living systems. It is not a specific evolved mechanism but rather goes back to the fundamental basis of living systems as self-organized interactions. The question for us human is not how to explain desire but how to adaptively transform our perspectives such as to move smoothly through a constantly changing world.

What is the trivial property you have in mind, simply the word 'thing'?
My argument is that any concept that we think is also a contrast, an edge. A line implies that which it emerges out of, the background. Something is only something because it has an edge, a contrast, a boundary. It also emerges out of something else. The word 'nothing' would be incoherent if it didn't also imply a contrast, edge, boundary. Nothing can only be nothing because it emerges from something prior to it. It is a negation of a prior something. 'Nothing' intrinsically depends for its very meaning on 'something'. Its like darkness and light. Each means what it does only by comparison to its other.

Lets unpack the adjectives that you use to flesh out your concept of minutia mongering. You've described it in terms of complexity, intensiveness, orientation toward fine details, something we are slaves to and may want to rid ourselves of, something we do as a means to an end, and the opposite of generality, which you seem to associate with nothingness and escape from experience.

The way that you've articulated the concept of minutia mongering, it seems that the more 'stuff' we are conscious of dealing with in our moment to moment experiencing of our world, the more it will fit the defintion of minutia mongering. Detail, complexity, intensity imply a quantitative element, all that magnitude of stuff we are burdened with fixing, figuring out, calculating, counting, manipulating, transforming.The greater the magnitude the more burdensome.

Your adjectives for minutia mongering are affective terms, describing what it feels like to be involved in a kind of experiencing that we don't particularly enjoy, that is tedious, somewhat boring and unfulfilling. What exactly is it about such experiences that make them less than satisfying to us?
Is it the sheer amount of 'stuff' that is the essence of minutia mongering, or is it the inadequate way in which that 'stuff' is organized, interrelated within itself and with respect to our goals? Think about what are called 'flow' experiences. When we are immersed in such experiences, time seems to fly by, we feel the opposite of bored, we don't consider what we are doing a means to another end, but its own end. But is a flow experience characterized by a paucity of 'stuff', the escape from detail? On the contrary, in such states of being we maintain a hyper-awareness of all that goes on around us.

What differentiates it from an experience of minutia mongering is that each moment 'flows' into the next. What makes this possible is that when we are engaged in a truly creative endeavor, we are able to assimilate new experience in a supremely , joyfully integral way with respect to previous experience.. The difference between a complex, intense, detailed experience that feels burdensome, tedious, boring and, enslaving, and one that is creatively satisfying and pleasurable is not the amount of 'stuff' we are aware of being immersed in, but the particular way we are immersed in it, how meaningfully we organize it. This meaningfulness is a function of our ability to make sense of its moments as purposefully and thematically related and relevant to each other and to our overarching goals and self-understanding. Spreadsheets and programming tasks can typically involve a mixture of the purposefully patterned and the arbitrary in equal measures. Important factors include who you are doing such tasks for, and how personally invested in the outcome you are(is this your own business, personal hobby, or are you a wage slave to a boss whose goals you are not personally invested in?). Writing a musical score or a novel or philosophical treatise will also involve a bit of both, but if they represent works of unusual originality the moments of profound satisfaction will greatly outweigh those of ambivalent, semi-bored 'minutia mongering'.

Generalization is an important element in flow experiences . You associated the term with sleep, nothingness and escape from experience, but , on the contrary, generalization, theorization and abstraction are synonymous with true detail oriented, complex thought. Generalization is about ordering lower order differences within higher order unifying syntheses. It lets you have your cake and eat it too, Generalization allows us to experience MORE detail than we can when an experience we are immersed in unfolds in a fragmentary, disjointed, arbitrary manner. 'Minutia' implies arbitrary. We only pay attention to each moment of experience when they are imbued with an arbitrariness. Watching the clock move agonizingly slowly while waiting for the school day to end illustrates how our sense of the speed of time is connected with the relative interruptedness and disjunctiveness of moment to moment experience. Don't mistake this restless bored attention to the clock as a hyper-awareness. One's memory for the later recall of the details of what transpired during such tedious events is not typically very impressive when compared to one's memory for what took place during a hyper-aware flow experience. Generalization gives you MORE, richer, denser , more integral experience than minutia mongering.

If, as you argued, the marginally effective ways of construing ongoing experience characteristic of minutia mongering are means of self-preservation, the the more effective and adaptive flow-type modes of creativity are even more conducive to self-preservation.

My issue is with a calm focused mood. I think, with philosophy this can too easily be a depressed mood. It's life affirming to be riled up and not entirely thought out.

Thinking is not the opposite of 'being riled up'. My best moments of 'being riled up' in a positive, profoundly joyful and excited way have come through philosophical insights, those eureka , light bulb moments.
What is life affirming is what produces the experience of pure creativity, the joy of discovery. If "being 'thought out' is depressing it is because this 'thinking out' not only lacks discovery , but causes one to fall away from one's sense of wonder and self-renewal. I would call this this the polar opposite of the spirit and intent of philosophy (or else I'd call it analytic philosophy, which always depresses me).

I would bet you that when Kant or Descartes or Aristotle came upon their essential insights, it represented an ecstatic highlight of their life, just as when Einstein stumbled upon e=mc2. Unfortunately , many who write philosophy, have little new insight to offer, so for them it may very become a depressing 'thinking out' of someone else's insights. If one finds doing philosophy depressing, I'd suggest that they are doing is not really philosophizing, it's accounting.

How exactly do people claim to obtain fulfillment from creating ones own value? I understand it as a principle but what is an example of self made value and fulfillment? It always seems vague. — Edward

Its not a s though some create their own value and others don't. We have no choice but to create values to the same extent that we create interpretations , perspectives, theories of our world. We are sense-making interpretative beings. It's less of a choice than that we always already find ourselves relating to our world via an explanatory scheme of one sort or another. Our choice isn't whether to have a worldview or not, its how adaptively we are able to continually adjust our perspectives to a constantly changing world.
Have you read Thomas Kuhn? He asserted that science changes by revolutions in scientific worldviews(paradigms).. Nietzsche would argue that a paradigm is also a value system. So when we move from one worldview to another we are changing our values.Cognitive therapy works by guided people toward adaptively modifying their outlooks . This is an example of attaining fulfillment through transforming our value systems. The goal is to move more and more effectively, which means creatively, through new experience.

The way that meanings emerge for us out of previous meanings goes beyond simply talking about temporal or spatial or empty categorial proximity. There is thematic overlap that is entirely missed by keeping to the restrictions of formal logic, which has to pretend that what conditions meaning can somehow be ignored when defining terms. But lets say we stick to the restrictions of logical formulation. We would still have to come up with some sort of mechanism to explain lack of relationality. We couldn't derive that from anything in the empirical world, because empirical objectivity implies causality. We couldn't find it in the mechanisms of consciousness because that has its own causality. So what kind of mechanism can we make use of that ignores both the empirical world and the world of conscious structures? Unless you want to use models from physics suggesting how something emerged from nothing. That's the closest I can think of to an empirical account of non-relationality.

Perhaps your search for pure non-relational entities is a search for pure non-meaning itself.

How does one possible world, as in Nelson's 'Ways of Worldmaking' emerge, what are its conditions of possibility, in the imagination, other than a previous context o imagining? Put differently, is consciousness not a stream, and is there not some minimal continuity from one moment of the stream to the next, such that new worlds of possibility belong to the same stream as previous ones? And not just temporally, but also thematically? IS it ever possible for a thought to occur to us that has absolutely no contextual connection with a previous?

Have you tried meetups groups? Here in Chicago, there are a wide range of philosophical authors and topics covered (James, Dewey, Marx, Freud, Hegel, Kant, Badiou, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Derrida, to name a few). Our Heidegger meetup meets every week for 3 hours. We've spend 5 months going through Being and Time 30 pages at a session.

This may be a historical question. It seems to me one would have to do an anthropological investigation into forms of thinking prior to the founding of Western metaphysics with the Greeks. The invention of logic and objectivity on which scientific empiricism and mathematics is based implies relational causation as inherent to objects. This makes the idea of pure, radical non-relationality incoherent. Buddhist and Hindu religious positions likely also make such a notion untenable. One would have to locate an ancient thinking with a very different idea of causality.

Nothing and Something both have 'thing' in common. We can't think the concept of Not or negation without also thinking 'thing' or 'substance' or 'presence' because absence requires a contrast. Pure nothing can't be thought.

What if our "background that constitutes the sense of all intentionalities" drives us to theoretically dismantling our mood? — Edward

Theoretically dismantling one mood doesn't leave us without any mood. There is always affectivity as a background comportment or attitude toward the world. An attitude of neutral, calm focus is still being in a mood. The world always matters to us, is significant for us, strikes us, is relevant for us, , affects us in some way.

perspectives are value systems.


I suppose my point is, if your perspective is one of existential absurdity then how does one reconcile this with an authentic moral system. — Edward

A perspectival account of values like Nietzsche's wouldn't be 'absurd' or nihilistic to him. On the contrary, he would consider an 'authentic moral system' absurd. He would consider his ontology of the becoming of value systems to be a liberating, authentic approach to ethics.

"Our primitive drives - self-preservation, procreation, security - are our most basic values. "

Nietzsche wrote:"Physiologists should think twice before positioning the drive for self preservation as the cardinal drive of an organic being."

The drive for self-preservation doesn't explain love and creativity very well, unless you add this corrective: What organisms preserve is nothing static, like a rock. Living beings are activities, systems of exchanges with an environment. The 'self' that they preserve is a continually transforming process that must adapt itself to every new element that it assimilates into itself, but it must adapt itself without losing its overall integrity..The continued survival of an organism is the preservation of a certain organized integrity of change. So one could say that the drive for self-preservation is more fundamentally the drive for self-consistency though change. It is creativity itself, if creativity is understood as the anticipatory incorporation of new experiencing a way that preserves the integrity of the self system as a whole. The more aggressively we self-transformatively assimilate new experience, the more effectively we preserve ourselves. Thus , adopting and changing perspectives and value systems is in line with our fundamental drive of creative self-overcoming.

"As I indicated in the OP, broader issues of the place values hold in our philosophies and our lives are not the intended subject of this thread. I'm hoping to talk about them later.

Seems to me what you indicated in the OP was you didn't want to discuss the place that OBJECTIVITY
holds in our lives.

'Talk of objectivity obscures the extent to which human value directs our thoughts, feelings, and decisions."

I totally agree with you that human value directs our lives. Nietzsche agrees with you too.
that's why he placed valuation as the pinnacle of what it means to be human.
And Nietzsche's top value was the becoming of values.

Even more depressing is that people are still throwing around the idea of truth as being absolute.

Your starting point in thinking about the relation of feeling to rationality is an outdated one.

All rationality is inherently affective in that rationality only makes sense relative to a particular perpectival scheme, and perspectives are value systems.

While more traditional approaches in philosophy and psychology treated affective phenomena as at best peripheral to, and typically disruptive of, rational processes, embodied cognitive theories take pains to present emotion and thought as an indissociable interaction. According to current accounts, cognitive and affective processes are closely interdependent, with affect, emotion and sensation functioning in multiple ways and at multiple levels to situate or attune the context of our conceptual dealings with the world . According to the newer thinking, affective tonality is never absent from cognition. "Moods are no longer a subjective window-dressing on privileged theoretical perspectives but a background that constitutes the sense of all intentionalities, whether theoretical or practical.

You missed something here. You left out philosophical approaches that attack the whole enterprise of ferreting out a particular value system and privileging it over others. The project of moral philosophy is the justifying of a metaphysics. Nietzsche comes to mind as a prominent critic of such attempts to ground ethics via metaphysics. In his 'Beyond Good and Evil' and other works, he argues that the basis of values (and by the way, it was Nietzsche who originated the modern expression of having 'values', that you're now making use of) is the Will to Power, which is a principle stating that human rationality and truth is relative and perspectival, and framed within our value systems. He also argued that our value systems are in a state of continual self-transformation; they change along with our individual and cultural perspectives. Thus, the essence of being human is becoming(not progress, but the endless movement from value system to value system). To the extent that Nietzsche, along with much of postmodern philosophy, offers an ethical argument, it is that of encouraging teh fluidity of becoming and warning against individuals and cultures becoming temporarily stuck on any particular ethical precepts or system of rules, such as your list above. If you added self-transformation, becoming and thinking beyond good and evil to the list that would help..

"

As for science, it looks like it's at the top of the list of mankind's creative and logical achievements. It helps us understand, therefore manipulate, our world to our advantage. Scientists and mathematicians have to be rational AND creative, sometimes, I believe, at the very frontiers of these abilities.

So, according to me, yes, there is a greater meaning/purpose in immersing oneself in math and science. — TheMadFool

I agree with Paul Feyerabned's views of science:

"Starting from the argument that a historical universal scientific method does not exist, Feyerabend argues that science does not deserve its privileged status in western society. Since scientific points of view do not arise from using a universal method which guarantees high quality conclusions, he thought that there is no justification for valuing scientific claims over claims by other ideologies like religions. Feyerabend also argued that scientific accomplishments such as the moon landings are no compelling reason to give science a special status. In his opinion, it is not fair to use scientific assumptions about which problems are worth solving in order to judge the merit of other ideologies. Additionally, success by scientists has traditionally involved non-scientific elements, such as inspiration from mythical or religious sources. He rejected the view that science is especially "rational" on the grounds that there is no single common "rational" ingredient that unites all the sciences but excludes other modes of thought He claims that far from solving the pressing problems of our age, scientific theorizing glorifies ephemeral generalities at the cost of confronting the real particulars that make life meaningful."

It does often go on for months, but the idea is that the more terms are defined and fleshed out, the more room there is for some general overlap in perspective between the participants. This is the process of teaching each other one's own language.

Let me give an example. If i'm involved in a discussion with someone who, like me, is thoroughly versed in , say, Sartre, the our disagreement over Sartre will require each of us to reexamine our own readings of him and his definitions. It can be exasperating and frustrating, but also potentially very instructive. Ive had many such discussions, and I end up learning something new in my own reading of philosophers. That's regardless of whether I come to an agreement in the discussion. On the other hand, I've been involved in debates where I have to spend so much time in superficial background clarification that it never becomes challenging for me.

There have been many famous ongoing debates in philosophical history, such as those between Gadamer and Habermas, Habermas, Rorty and Dennett, Stephen Jay Gould and Dawkins, etc.
Such debates never resolve themselves, and yet are highly instructive for both the participants and the audience.

And then there are non-debate debates where the parties involved were so far apart in their use of terms that the debate was never really able to get started (Derrida vs Gadamer and Derrida vs Searle ).

"In order to criticize Western science, you actually have to know and understand Western science".

Abandoning the correspondence theory of truth is not about ignoring the Enlightenment or Western science. In fact, Thomas Kuhn.s approach, which is an abandonment of the correspondence theory, has been taken up by plenty of empirical researchers in the cognitive sciences. If this is fashionable nonsense, then I guess the visual perception research of Alva Noe at Berkeley is fashionable nonsense.

"So you're not sympathetic to the knowing discussion of imprecisely defined things? Is there a reason why?"

I have a background in philosophy and its much more interesting for me to be engaged in a discussion where there is enough mutual knowledge of historical figures or relevant ideas to start the conversation with a certain coherence. Others with much less background may find just the attempt to raise overarching questions about life to be satisfying. After college, many aren't able to find ways to become involved in such discussions as the mundane obligations of life begin to close in.

You see both types of discussion on this site, those with vaguely defined terms which attract beginning philosophers,and those that begin with and maintain a high degree of focus and relative precision.

I'm going to add to my definition of post-foundationalism and you tell me what you think of it ..

We need an entirely new conception of truth, since the traditional notion of correspondence to the world in itself is no longer feasible. I think that Heidegger gives us the best answer: if reality is that which appears and if it is as it appears, then truth should be thought of as this event of appearing itself. The idea of comparing appearances with the reality behind them is off the table, since the only way we have of making such a comparison is by checking one experience against another. In other words, all we can do is compare appearances with appearances without ever getting outside of these. There is no way to get behind them to something deeper or realer, so we shouldn’t even say that there is an outside or that these are “mere” appearances. What we need is a rigorous philosophical analysis of appearances and appearing, and this is just what phenomenology becomes in Heidegger’s hands.

"We don't need to 'think' anti-foundationalism. We just learn to live without some top-level metaphysical justification of our doings. Or we learn that we are already doing so."

So apart from a definiton of foundationalism as a "top-level metaphysical justification", here's another one. You stop a random person in the street and point to a rock. You ask them what it is. They say it is a rock, and as a rock, it is an object with persisting attributes and properties such as a grey color and a particular weight and size, and is composed of particular material compoents. You ask them if the object still exists when they walk away from it, and they answer yes. You then stop another person in the street and point to the same rock. You ask them what it is. This person says what it is depends on the reason that the person is paying attention to it. It could be an object of aesthetic enjoyment, or merely abstract figure, or only something indistinct in the background next to something else the person has their eye on. You ask them if it is an object with persistent properties like weight and size, and they say those are not properties of a fixed or persisting thing, but only a way that one has of talking for particular purposes. You ask if the rock is still there when one walks away from it, and they say the question is incoherent. Most would say the first person is using common sense in describing the rock, That may be so, but I'd also say their description is a foundational one. What is common sense to someone in the 21st century would not be to someone 20,000 years ago. A set of theoretically guided ideas underlie the commonsensical answer of a self-identical object with persisting properties. The second person gives a non-foundational response, making the experience of the rock relative to the concerns and context of that person. They may have learned their answer from a philosopher, but then again, it may be common sense to them.

So whether or not we live with direct exposure to philosophical teachings, our common sensical thinking about our world may be foundational or post-foundational, and this will depend primarily on what cultural era we grow up in.

"Very little persuasion happens on these forums as far as I can tell. Personalities tend to settle and harden. I wouldn't even say that one of us has to be right on what I regard as spiritual matters. As I see it, we are publicly performing the game of personality."

My goal is not persuasion. I believe that worldviews, which are what philosophical positions are, have a certain stability to them.
What I aim to do is to get as precise an understanding of the other's worldviews as possible , from their perspective, so that I can effectively summarize back to them their ideas. I'm not out to win anything but demonstrating to myself that I was able to subsume another's worldview to their satisfaction.

i'm curious why when it comes to Heidegger you are "consciously against appealing to such a controversial figure as an authority", when you've just said you are close to Lee Braver's thinking and he seems to appeal to Heidegger as an authority.

[ Could you do me a favor and offer some comment concerning my philosophy of science questions? I would like to understand better what you mean when you say you are anti-foundational. Explain to me what makes your anti-foundationalism different than "accusations of feeble readings can be answered with further accusations of feeble readings."
Great, so what's your alternative? Is it closer to Popper, Kuhn or neither?

" I am consciously against appealing to such a controversial figure as an authority --which you seem to do implicitly." Suit yourself. If Heidegger's political affiliations were enough in and to themselves to discredit his philosophy, don't you think that Derrida, Levinas and philosopher Eugene Gendlin, three Jews who suffered from anti-Semitism (Levinas only survived the war because he was in a prisoner of war camp rather than a concentration camp, and Gendlin only barely made it out of Germany in 1938), would have ignored him, rather than considering his work teh greatest of any 20th century philsopher? (I'm also Jewish, for what that's worth)
Either you find his work authoritative or you don't . Obviously I do, and I'd rather rely on my friend Gendlin's take on Heideger's politics than yours.

"You would still never be able to know the exact moment when an electrical signal turned into a thought, or how that happened."

More importantly , you could not be sure that the feeling of what it is like to be experiencing something is being fully captured by the data being recorded. What does it mean to translate someone else's feeling of blueness into a set of numeric data and then share that feeliing of blueness? The essence of the mind-body problem is that relational context is cut off from objective 'third person' models of consciousness and what is left is generic abstraction.

No, it just means the claim that absolute truth is impossible is itself a contestable claim rather than unchallengeable.

I don't think the generality of a term necessarily correlates with vagueness and imprecision unless that general term also happens to be vaguely and imprecisely defined. The basis of philosophy is the attempt to unify and relate disparate meanings within an overarching synthetic general concept. Scientific theories attempt something similar using empirical methods and mathematical measurement to define the theoretical.. Continental philosophy develops general terms by relating and differentiating them within the concepts of an entire historical heritage. Heidegger spent a whole career trying to define 'Being'. Some would suggest he didn't succeed entirely, but the point is he attempted to relate his term to as many other concepts as he could think of in order to flesh it out and give it precision.

The challenge of a site like the philosophy forum is that often someone uses a term like wisdom and means it in a particular way, assuming that other will understand it in the same way they do. But each of us carries around our own idiosyncratic mental dictionaries in which each term we use is mutually defined by its relation to all other terms in our lexicon. In order to make cleaner to others how we are using a word, we have to show how we understand a host of other words that relate to its context. That is, we have to teach others how we are using our own lexicon when we present general philosophical concepts, and many of us haven't given it that much thought.
That's not to say that starting with vague and loosely defined concepts doesn't happen a lot around here. That either will lead to a sharpening and defining of the issue or else people will tend to give up in exasperation and move onto a more fully thought out topic.

"We differentiate between spiritual claims and worldly, objective claims."

Heidegger called the basis of modern science onto-theology because he recognized that worldly objective claims are founded on metaphysical pre-suppositions that link it to the history of Christianity.
IN a fundamental sense, the claims of objectivity are inherently spiritual claims.

"And your talk of disabuse lapses back into the objectivity that some of your pomo taken earnestly would deny. If there are no facts but only interpretations, there's no reality for me to see incorrectly. It's this kind of performative contradiction that I strive to avoid by cutting back on some of the rhetorical habits of thinkers I otherwise value.'

Perhaps the person most closely associated with radical relativism, and the idea that there is "no reality for me to see incorrectly". is Jacques Derrida. But no one saddled with that accusation would argue that there is no way , in any sense, to distinguish better and worse , more or less correct. The quote from Derrida below is I think representative of how so-called radical relativists would argue against your claim.


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

Then perhaps it will be understood that the value of truth (and all those values associated
with it) is never contested or destroyed in my writings, but only reinscribed in
more powerful, larger, more stratified contexts. And that within interpretive contexts
(that is, within relations of force that are always differential-for example,
socio-political-institutional-but even beyond these determinations) that are relatively
stable, sometimes apparently almost unshakeable, it should be possible to
invoke rules of competence, criteria of discussion and of consensus, good faith,
lucidity, rigor, criticism, and pedagogy. I should thus be able to claim and to
demonstrate, without the slightest "pragmatic contradiction," that Searle, for
example, as I have already demonstrated, was not on the "right track" toward
understanding what I wanted to say, etc. May I henceforth however be granted
this: he could have been on the wrong track or may still be on it; I am making
considerable pedagogical efforts here to correct his errors and that certainly
proves that all the positive values to which I have just referred are contextual,
essentially limited, unstable, and endangered. And therefore that the essential
and irreducible possibility of misunderstanding or of "infelicity" must be taken
into account in the description of those values said to be positive.

— Joshs

What I would want to try to disabuse you of is the notion that you have found any refuge from the risk of noise and nonsense by enveloping yourself in the supposed solidity of the pragmatic. You have called your thinking anti-foundational ,but i think there may be a misunderstanding of what that term means, or at least one can confuse a Kantian calling themselves anti-foundationalist with Rorty making the same claim. It may be that your anti-foundationalism is my foundationalism. Maybe we should unpack this term a little more carefully.