I know it’s difficult not to associate agency with consciousness...
— Joshs

‘Whereas Barad dilutes the theoretical distinction between mind and matter as well as the distinction between animate and inanimate, the contention here is that it is ethically and politically vital to hold on to a notion of subjectivity understood in terms of the capacity for experience’ - from a critique of Barad’s agential realism.

↪Tom Storm Barad’s ‘agential realism’. Streetlight mentioned it also. As a form of materialism, it is obliged to deny the ontological distinction between animate and inanimate, per the above — Wayfarer

What I’m calling practice theory isn’t restricted to Barad’s work. It includes the projects of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, phenomenology , hermeneutics, poststructuralists like Foucault and Deleuze, as well as enactivists like Evan Thompson. The issue for Thompson isn’t whether the animate and the inanimate are ontologically distinct, but how to understand subjectivity in terms of autonomous processes of self-organization in living systems. Instead of viewing subjectivity as an inner , ineffable content, he views it as the derivative product of distributed neural networks. Subjectivity is a selfless
virtual self , an agent that emerges from a pattern or aggregate of personal processes.

I'm not clear how the subjective experience of eating chocolate, say, is a product of, shall we say, patterns of interaction within a network, shaped by how beings engage with their environment. I'm trying to understand what this frame contributes to a 'deflation' of the hard problem. Can you tease this out a little more for a layperson? — Tom Storm

I think the hard problem comes down to the seeming chasm between what we think of as feeling and the way that empiricism treats objects other than minds. We are taught that non-mental entities have no inner feeling content, only neutral properties and attributes that dictate how they interact with other entities. And we contrast this dead neutrality with what seems to us to be an inner spark or soul or spirit that imbues a mind with feeling and sentience. In doing this we are treating both non-mental objects and subjective feeling as possessing intrinsic properties that exist apart from their interaction with the world. Put differently , we think essence, existence and being apart from interaction and relation: physical
objects have a dead, neutral being and subjective consciousness has a feeling being.

The practice-based approach I’m advocating argues that what seem like two irreconcilable contents, dead neutrality and living feeling, are not intrinsic contents or properties at all. There is such thing as intrinsicality, ‘inner’ feeling, static existence , being or essence. What we mistakenly believe to be such is instead a difference made by interaction. The world is composed of bits of differences. These differences are created through their interaction with other differences. But we must not think of these interacting differences in deterministic empirical terms as efficient causes. We’re not talking here about physical particles with assigned properties which produce predictable effects. Each difference is something new in the world, a new value. A system of differences is a system of values, each affecting and changing the others. These valuative differences are the origin of what we call ‘feeling’ and they are also the origin of the seemingly ‘dead’, affectively ‘neutral’ physical features of the world.

But in order to recognize this, we have to stop thinking of subjective feeling as a static inner content, and we have to stop treating non-mental objects as having pre-assigned internal properties producing dead, neutral ‘causes’ and ‘effects’. You may wonder how any normative stability is possible given all this continual transformation , but such stabilities are the rule. We always find ourselves ensconced within some community or other, and thus are able from the start to understand others even though we participate in these discursive practices with our own perspective. This is how we are able to agree on such things as scientific laws.

.All other corners of the world untouched by our participation also are agentially perspectival with respect to themselves via their interaffecting within configurative patterns of interaction.
— Joshs

isn't that panpsychism? — Wayfarer

What is it in my description that evokes the notion of psyche for you? Is it the word ‘agent’? I know it’s difficult not to associate agency with consciousness. Consciousness itself implies self-consciousness, an immediate self-affection , a pure internality. But what I’m talking about is neither self-affecting intrinsicality nor efficiently causal relationality nor representationalism. It is a notion which marries the fecundity of consciousness with the relativism of interaction without succumbing to either empiricism or idealism.

Hoffman builds his case using evolutionary game theory, demonstrating that perceptions that accurately represent reality are not favored by natural selection. He further critiques the conventional view of physicalism—the idea that the physical world is the foundation of all reality—arguing that space, time, and objects themselves are human constructs rather than fundamental aspects of the universe. Instead, he suggests that consciousness itself might be fundamental, proposing a theory in which reality consists of a network of conscious agents interacting — Wayfarer

Well, he’s got it partly right in talking about a network of interacting agents. But he needs to jettison the Cartesian anthropcentrism. Agency isn’t a mind or consciousness, it is perspectival patterns of interacting practices. The part of that world that humans interact is ‘true’ just as it appears to us to be, a discursive structure of performances that changes as our situated ways of interacting with it changes. Our understandings of the world aren’t ideas in the head, they are activities of engagement.All other corners of the world untouched by our participation also are agentially perspectival with respect to themselves via their interaffecting within configurative patterns of interaction. Hoffman and Chalmers still think of consciousness as an Ideal substance.

Though at that point we would be kind of in the realm of both Hegel and Marx -- the historical a priori looks a lot like those big theories of history to me. And that's getting close to a similar totalizing project, at least on its face — Moliere

That’s what pragmatist-hermeneutical and poststructural models of practice are for. For Hegel and Marx the dialectic totalizes historical becoming. In these latter models cultural becoming is contextually situated and non-totalizable. It is normativity all the way down.

This is a tall order, but if you had to name a single work by Derrida that shows him at his best, what would it be? If I haven't read it, I'll try to. — J

Hmm, you might try his lecture course on Heidegger from the mid ‘60’s:
‘Heidegger: The Question of Being and History’

He keeps the play on language to a minimum here, opting instead for a straightforward exposition ( or as straightforward as he gets). His interviews are another way to avoid the rhetorical tricks. I recommend ‘Points’ and ‘Positions’, as well as the last part of Limited, Inc.

What would be more interesting is to understand why such implications arise within a formal system in the first place. Once we understand that, we can assess whether it’s reasonable to assume those implications might also hold for language or nature.

Did Wittgenstein even attempt to figure out why — Skalidris

Yes he did. He would never argue that the implications of mathematics are “irrelevant to the real world”. Rather, the implications of formal systems can only be made sense of if we recognize that they are only intelligible within the language game , or ‘form of life’, that they belong to, and that they are of no help in explaining the transition between language games.

↪Janus . . . And then there's Derrida. Like Janus, I've done my due diligence with him and have concluded that he's an extremely good rhetorician who discovered a "cool gig" and stuck with it. So, an exception to every — J

I have to disagree here. I’ve read and published on Derrida, and see his most substantive contribution to philosophy as recognizing where Heidegger stopped short of explicating the most radical implications of his own thinking. I think Heidegger is the most advance thinker of our era, and Derrida took his ideas a bit further, albeit only a little bit.

As evidence of this I reference the difference between Kant's categories and the most general scientific theories -- I don't see any need for a group of categories to make sense of science. I don't think the structure of the mind or the minds relationship to being is the site of knowledge, but of comfort — Moliere

What if in place of Kant’s Transcendental categories we substituted normative social practices? Doesn’t that stay true to Kant’s insight concerning the inseparable role of subjectivity in the construction of meaning while avoiding a solipsistic idealism? Don’t we need to think in terms of normative social practices in order to make sense of science?

how one approaches paradoxes depends on how one views logic in the first place. If we follow the peripatetic axiom that "nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses," my question is "where are the paradoxes in the senses or out in the world?" I have never experienced anything both be and not be without qualification, only stipulated sign systems that declare that "if something is true it is false," and stuff of that sort. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What is true is true in relation to a normed pattern. Perception, as pattern recognition, is conceptually based. This means that expectations guide recognition of perceprual objects. It also means that in assimilating the world to our expectations we at the same time modify those expectations to accomodate to the novel aspects of what we perceive. Put differently, in a certain sense what we perceive both is and is not what we anticipated. This not the same as saying that it is both true and false, since the sense of meaning of a conceptual pattern is being qualitatively adjusted in perceiving something. Thus the thing we continually recognize continues to be true differently. With regard to formal logic, if we think of a logic as producing a rule, then in following a rule we operate the same as we do in perceiving. The criteria of rule-following no more guarantees a criterion for correctly following it than our previous experience with a perceived object tells us how to recognize it correctly now.

Anything goes" is a recipe for conservatism, since if anything goes then the way things are is as viable as the way they might be, and there is no sound reason for change. — Banno

“Anything goes” is also the common strawman argument against a logical pluralism that is taken disparagingly to imply a ‘relativism’ or or ‘nihilism’, a view that those accused of relativism never actually hold, according to Rorty.

I noticed that you have a strong interest in the work of Ayn Rand.
— Joshs

what — SophistiCat

This is from his public webpage:

For many years I wrote very few essays, but instead made thousands of pages of notes on things I noticed about ideas, other human beings, and art. I studied Ayn Rand's essays, and they meant a lot to me.

First of all, consider this: can you think of any philosophers generally thought of as Analytic who mentioned Hegel positively, or at all, in their work?
— Joshs

John McDowell and Robert Brandom. — Janus

It’s true that the Pittsburgh school is well versed in Hegel, but I would argue that in embracing Hegel, hermeneutics, and other Continental strands of thought based on a grounding in Hegel, they represent a departure from ‘classic’ Analytic thought. Rorty wasn’t the only one among that group who thought that what they were doing was no longer Analytic philosophy. Putnam said:

“Thus we have a paradox: at the very moment when analytic philosophy is recognized as the "dominant movement" in world philosophy, it has come to the end of its own project-the dead end, not the completion.”

I think that the direction take by the Pittsburgh school was reflective of increasing crosstalk between Analytic and Continental types which has led to a blurring of the boundaries between them , to the point where perhaps these labels are no longer very useful. I want to share this from Quora, because I found it to be so thorough , and also because I’m know. around here for extensive quotes and I didn’t want to let anyone down.

My take on the matter is that it starts from Hegel; Analytic Philosophers, due to very biased (and wrong, I think) readings of german idealism by Russell and Moore, jump from Kant to Frege, leaving them unable to share a common language with Continental Philosophers, which carried on the tradition from Kant through the nineteenth century.

I guess then that in Analytic Philosophy, the bridging has been done by those Philosophers who stumbled upon Hegel; I'm referring to the Pittsburgh School of Philosophy, who enlists Wilfrid Sellars (who said that his major work "empiricism and Philosophy of Mind" were in fact hegelian meditations), Richard Rorty (who bridges Epistemology to Hermeneutics in "Philosophy and the mirror of Nature" and in various essays collected in "Consequences of Pragmatism" and "Essays on Heidegger and Others"; he also engaged very deeply with post-modernism, in the guise of Lyotard and Derrida, coming to strikingly close conclusions), John McDowell (Pittsburgh Epistemologist whose "Mind And World" was defined by himself as propedeutic to the reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of The Spirit, and whose work drew fruitful Epistemological and Metaphisical comparisons of Sellars and Gadamer), and finally Robert Brandom, whose theory of Inferentialism defined in his masterpiece "Making It Explicit" is essentially a Semantic Reading of Hegel (Brandom is actually working on a book on Hegel's Phenomenology).


We have then other Analytic Philosophers whose work does not explicitly refers to Continental Philosophers, but can be thought as Analytic Philosophers arrived at "Continental" conclusions. In Epistemology they are of course Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend (especially the latter, he has nothing in common with the teleology of contemporary analytic Philosophers such as Quine or Searle), Bas Van Fraassen (whose epistemology draws from the latter wittgenstein to form a "constructive empiricism" he also calls "hermeneutic") and the Communitarian epistemologist such as David Bloor and Martin Kusch (Kusch actually wrote his PhD dissertation under Jaakko Hintikka on the theme of Language in Husserl, Heidegger and Gadamer, and also devoted a book to Michel Foucault's Epistemolgy. His interests shifted towards a more standard analytic Philosophy in later years, but in his book "Knowledge by Agreement" he writes that his position is so strongly influenced by the likes of Gadamer and Habermas that he sees no opportunity to engage critically with their thoughts in the book). Hilary Putnam then has been a Reader of certain Continental Philosophers, such as Buber, Levinas and Habermas, and its later internal realism share some views with Rorty on the subjects of truth and knowledge. Michael Dummett has produced one of the most important researches in Analytic Philosophy by drawing its birth through a comparison of Frege's Philosophy and Husserl's phenomenology. Some Philosophers of Mind are actually rediscovering the works of phenomenologists such as Maurice Merleau-ponty on the subjects of perception (even though their understanding of these works is at least doubtful). Other lesser known Analytic philosophers have engaged with continental thoughts (Diego Marconi wrote his PhD dissertation under Sellars on Hegel's Logic, Stanley Cavell has written extensively on Heidegger, Jacques Bouveresse has compared philosophy of language of Hermeneutics with the latter Wittgenstein and with Speech Act theory)

In continental Philosophy the matter is a little more complex. Many continentals do not engage with the mainstream analytic thought, because it is viewed (quite arguably) as discovering platitudes already well known, or to have misguided aims (the desperate search for grounding beliefs and knowledge, described by Heidegger as the real problem of philosophy, this search, not the ground itself).
Many important continental Philosophers have nonetheless shown that they do indeed read analytic works: Jurgen Habermas has written extensively on Speech Acts, Putnam, Davidson, and has been one of the first to recognize the significance of Robert Brandom's works. Karl-Otto Apel has crafted a neo-kantian philosophy (sometimes called also neo-hermeneutics) by a thorough and careful reading and comparing the later Wittgenstein and Heidegger. Ernst Tugendhat book "Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die sprachanalytische Philosophie" can be considered one of the best works by a continental philosopher on the themes of Analytic Philosophy. Some Continental "Masters" have shown an acquaintance with analytic themes and authors; Gadamer remarked how the Hermeneutic he detailed in Wahrheit und Methode (1960) contains a great deal of concepts also found in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations.

↪Joshs OK, thanks. It's an interesting take on Rorty's part but I'm not sure it's held by too many others. It makes for some strange groupings -- Husserl is meant to have more in common with Quine, on this view, than e.g. Heidegger or Sartre, which seems wrong — J

I agree with you about Husserl and phenomenology. I think Rorty misread them. I see Husserl’s and Sartre’s work as very much indebted to Hegelianism. But Rorty isn’t the only one who treats Hegel as a crucial philosophical and cultural dividing line. First of all, consider this: can you think of any philosophers generally thought of as Analytic who mentioned Hegel positively, or at all, in their work? The same is not true with regard to Kant, Hume and Leibnitz. In the political world, Hegel has been targeted by conservatives such as Andrew Breitbart, who blamed Hegel for Marx, Relativism, Critical theory, poststructuralism, postmodernism and deconstructionism. And he would be right in that such movements would not have been possible without Hegel.

Perhaps it would have better to say something like "In the early 20th century a split in methods and interests occurred within philosophy, and Husserl was a bellwether." I was trying to pinpoint the "two-camps" division, before which Hegel et al. were simply philosophy, common property of all philosophers. Only in retrospect were they seen as prefiguring Continental phil. Or that's my version of the history, anyway. — J

My take aligns somewhat with that of Rorty, who argues that analytic philosophy doesn’t go any further than Kantian modes of metaphysics, which is why he refers to the community of post-analytic philosophers he identifies with (James, Dewey, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Sellars, Davidson, Putnam, etc) as ‘we Hegelians’.

…both analytic philosophy and phenomenology were throwbacks to a pre-Hegelian, more or less Kantian, way of thinking - attempts to preserve what I am calling "metaphysics" by making it the study of the "conditions of possibility" of a medium (consciousness, language).

I think that analytic philosophy culminates in Quine, the later Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Davidson-which is to say that it transcends and cancels itself. These thinkers successfully, and rightly, blur the positivist distinctions between the semantic and the pragmatic, the analytic and the synthetic, the linguistic and the empirical, theory and observation. Davidson's attack on the scheme/content distinction, in particular, summarizes and synthesizes Wittgenstein's mockery of his own Tractatus, Quine's criticisms of Carnap, and Sellars's attack on the empiricist “Myth of the Given." Davidson's holism and coherentism shows how language looks once we get rid of the central presupposition of Philosophy: that true sentences divide into an upper and a lower division-the sentences which correspond to something and those which are "true" only by courtesy or convention.

Case in point, perhaps, is Husserl, arguably the father of Continental thought. — J

That might come as news to Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Dilthey, Nietzsche and Bergson. On the other hand, it would be accurate to call Husserl the father of Phenomenology.

I think that when we consider personhood and rationality in general we are going to have to deal with borderline cases, and at least some of these will fall into the ethical community. We'll need more that my definition of a person to settle some of these issues. — Kurt Keefner

I noticed that you have a strong interest in the work of Ayn Rand. Do you think that her ideas on selfhood are compatible with those of Merleau-Ponty?

I agree with that. Thinking about things in new and fruitful ways can certainly be a positive creative aspect of philosophy. Philosophy as art more than as science. I think the caution needs to be there to avoid imagining those ways as being absolute truths rather as being useful provisional entertainings. — Janus

You’re missing Rorty’s point. He believes that the goal of science isnt to arrive at the way things truly are, but to enhance social solidarity. For Rorty it is not just philosophy that resembles art but science as well.

Do you support people believing in such fantasies. Note that I don't condemn people holding fantastic beliefs that might be psychologically necessary for them. But I would imagine that such fantasies become impossible for those who are more highly educated and reasonable.

Diversions are okay provided they don't dominate one's life to the point of occluding reality. Everyone perhaps needs some time off for the mind to 'go on holiday'. Would you count the mind being permanently on holiday as being a desirable state of affairs — Janus

Christ, you sound like a joyless unimaginative old man. Reasonableness is entirely overrated. Here’s a little secret. Whatever works in person’s life to open up and keep open possibilities of creative transcendence is real. Today’s tried and true verities become tomorrow’s superstitions.

I don't usually like to quote passages from other writers but here is an interesting take on philosophy from E M Cioran's A Short History of Decay — Janus

This quote amounts to no more than confusing a personal preference for a profound insight. He falls into a common misapprehension of those with a talent for a specific form of expression. Poets believe there is no truer access to the natural of things than through poetry, while musicians preserve this privilege for music, novelists for novels, artists for art, r for science , philosophers for philosophy.

I think the best philosophies are those which are most in accordance with the facts of human life. I don't think living in illusion is likely to lead to flourishing in any real way. It is often the stuff of diversion and fantasy. — Janus

One person’s illusion is another’s emancipation. Could be that a bit more diversion and fantasy might actually enhance your life. Perhaps it will even reveal that the ‘facts of human life’ you feel you need to anchor yourself to are more a recipe for conformism than for flourishing.

Most 'facts' of human life are not obvious enough to fall prey to philosophy, in the way you want. Surely, philosophy's main role (at least now, post-religion) is to investigate the 'facts of life' as found by science, say — AmadeusD

Are you saying that philosophy is obvious and science is not? And that philosophy’s role is subservient to the facts that science discovers?

SEP has no article on "Analytic Philosophy". The IEP has an historical essay, tracing the developments in anglophone philosophy until the sixties, when analytic philosophy became ubiquitous. "On account of its eclecticism, contemporary analytic philosophy defies summary or general description."

Where does this lead? Nowhere. Like this thread — Banno

I have always thought of Analytic philosophy as a way of interpreting an era of Continental philosophy via a range of stylistic moves. It is not as though Analytics ignored Continental philosophers as a whole. Rather, they concentrated on the era spanned by Leibnitz, Hume and Kant, producing work that elaborated on metaphysical themes consistent with this group, and either ignored or were actively hostile to Hegel and post-Hegelian Continental philosophy. This is why Rorty referred to post-analytic writers like Quine, Sellars, Davidson, Putnam and himself as the new Hegelians.

So, would you consider the proper way of doing philosophy mostly conceived as with the analytic school, as philosophy proper or are we still struggling with how philosophy should be done? — Shawn

Years ago a sharp cultural divide distinguished approaches to philosophy in the English speaking world from those in Europe , dubbed the Analytic-Continental split. Philosophy isnt nearly so polarized these days. There are lots of thinkers who cross over between the two styles of philosophizing.

The almost universal agreement about the most significant moral issues I outlined above doesn't change from time to time or culture to culture, as least when it comes to members of what one considers one's own community. — Janus

Don’t confuse universal use of labels like rape, murder, theft and genocide with universal agreement on whose actions
deserve these labels. Without such universality the labels are only as useful as the stability of the social configurations within which they are employed.

how can you be sure that what makes that situation right or wrong draws from the same rules, criteria and justifications as the previous time, or compared with 20 years ago?
— Joshs

Why does it matter? Why can't I change my understanding? — T Clark

It sounds like we’re in agreement.

Determining right from wrong in a particular situation is easy. What is not so simple is recognizing the subtle way our criteria of ethical correctness shift over time.
— Joshs

I don't know what this means. The only time I need to know right from wrong is in some "particular situation." — T Clark

Yes, and each time, in each particular situation, how can you be sure that what makes that situation right or wrong draws from the same rules, criteria and justifications that you depended on the previous time, or 20 years ago?

Seems to me that people are forever banging on about 'the good', as if it were out there to be discovered, or simply a matter of common sense, but actually, it seems slippery, a contingent thing, a piece of construction work.
— Tom Storm

I doubt that you - Our aw shucks, I’m not a philosopher, Aussie Everyman – has trouble knowing the difference between right and wrong very often. — T Clark

Determining right from wrong in a particular situation is easy. What is not so simple is recognizing the subtle way our criteria of ethical correctness shift over time.

↪Joshs Thanks for that, Josh. Most helpful — Banno

Let’s see if it helps Tom.

Have a read of Moore's Principia Ethica. Then Philippa Foot. Then Martha Nussbaum.
— Banno

Fair enough. Probably won't have time. I did read Nussbaum's Capability Approach. It all seems very middle class (human rights/human dignity). Does she not essentially argue that human flourishing should be the universal goal of all ethical systems? Which doesn't mean it is wrong. But not being a philosopher, I can't tell if this stuff is useful or not. I need others with some deeper reading/interest to talk about it. — Tom Storm

I’ll save you the trouble of reading the other two. It’s the usual reliance on some universalistic grounding of ethical normativity mixed with a sprinkling of cultural situatedness.
Let’s just say I find their universalism to be riddled with parochialism.

Even if something is not directly relevant to one’s survival, if it affects the organism in a meaningful manner, there will in some way be a relation to a survival mechanism. — Vivek

What kind of survival are we talking about? A rock survives as itself only to the extent that it remains more or less self identical over time. But a living organism will perish if it remains exactly the same. What the organism attempts to preserve is a normative pattern of functioning in the face of continually changing conditions. And as for humans, our normative patterns of functioning, our goals and purposes, are continually changing over the course of cultural history. Within any given era and community, for each individual there will be particular goals and purposes, and the criterion of good and bad is aligned according to such goals. But as the cultural communities evolve, what constitutes good and bad changes along with purposes. If there is anything consistent which ‘survives’ all these transformations of the human perhaps it is the simple fact of pattern itself. Only something that changes itself in a patterned way can know good and bad. The moment a rock is formed it is already on its way to no long being a rock, because it doesn’t perpetuate itself in a consistently patterned way.

Unfortunately, Austin doesn’t talk much about why someone would claim indirect realism, nor why it is important to tear it apart (and “realism”) — Antony Nickles

Other than myself, you may be the only person I’ve encountered on this site over the past 6 years who is not a realist. It gets lonely here when you’re not contributing.

I am suggesting that the notion of 'formless matter' is meaningful…

clouds of interstellar gas could be considered formless matter in a metaphysical sense, as they are raw material that, under the right conditions (e.g., gravitational forces, fusion processes), can form stars, planets, or other celestial bodies. For that perspective, 'form' (morphe) refers not just to shape but to the organizing principle that gives a substance its identity…

…from a scientific perspective, interstellar gas and dust are not really formless, as they are subject to physical laws and composed of atoms which have regular structures. They are subject to processes of condensation, fusion, and gravitational collapse, enabling the formation of structures like stars or planets. In this sense, the term "formless" would not strictly apply, since even gas clouds have properties (mass, temperature, charge) and follow patterns like the formation of stars in nebulae. However, they could be seen as chaotic or unstructured compared to highly organized systems such as life-bearing planets and human artefacts. — Wayfarer

It is possible to make distinctions between different kinds of formative agencies without needing to derive formative agency from formless matter, or separating the two into different conceptual realms (mind vs world , or mind-body vs world). Instead of placing the inorganic under the category of efficient cause and the organic under the category of complex dynamical systems, and then trying to make the latter’s forming agency ‘ emerge’ from the former, formative agency can be accorded to the inorganic as well as the organic. We simply have to move way from the concept of ‘unstructured’, ‘chaotic’ efficient cause with regard to the physical.

I should add that what you’re identifying as formative
capability in humans is not a passive picture of the world created by an observer, but a performative activity, a set of practices involving mind, body and environment in a dance of interaffection. Form is not our stance toward the world but a pattern of material interactions with it, in the midst of it.

If the mind is imposing a form on "clouds of interstellar matter," that lack it, why does it impose one form over any other?
— Count Timothy von Icarus

Because 'cloud' is a familar cognitive trope. But do clouds possess form at all? I think in the strict sense that it is questionable. They fall under this description:

Clay, rocks, etc. are just bundles of external causes.
— Count Timothy von Icarus — Wayfarer

And the concept of external cause is not itself a form (Wittgenstein would say form of life)? What is it we are doing when we split an observer off from an observed, and then go on to declare the observed as lacking any form in itself?

In any case, the fact that forms are artefacts of the cognitive system, does not undermine their objective (or would that be transjective) reality. It doesn't say that they're solely the product of the mind, but that they arise in the relationship between observer and observed — Wayfarer

If forms arise in the relationship between observer and observed, isn’t this also true of what supposedly lies outside of the experience of the observer? This gets to the issue of the basis of the reality-appearance distinction questioned by writers like Wittgenstein (seeing something as something) and Nietzsche.

↪Joshs

The non-living world subsists in itself as configurative phenomena.

What does this mean? Are there non-configurative phenomena as a constant?

Matter ‘comes to matter’ within intra-actively changing agential configurations.

"Agent" as the term is used in chemistry, e.g anything affecting change, or "agent" as the term is often used in the social sciences, as an entity that makes intentional decisions/choices? — Count Timothy von Icarus

There are no non-configurative phenomena. All events take place within some larger pattern of relations. Agency here does not refer to an entity, but to the organizational capacities of reciprocally affecting relational processes.

Which brings to mind the Pinter analysis - that form is precisely what is brought to bear by cognition so as to navigate the environment — Wayfarer

It’s not just humans who bring form to bear on an environment. This is precisely what all living systems do. And we don’t have to stop there. The non-living world subsists in itself as configurative phenomena. Matter ‘comes to matter’ within intra-actively changing agential configurations.

In The Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger critiques the idea that form and content can be treated separately, as though form were something imposed on a thing, or content were ‘beyond’ form and style.

I agree that we only derive from a philosophy what already accords with our worldview to a large degree. But that philosophy can still have a legitimately profound effect on our thinking , and it’s a testament to the richness and fecundity of great philosophy that it can have this effect, in different ways with different people, like the blind men and the elephant. In a way, most of us who are influenced by a set of philosophical ideas are in a similar position to “guys in their twenties who discover and misinterpret Nietzsche to bolster the radicalisation of their own arrogance.”

Are you saying Heidegger’s main question is ‘ why is there something rather than nothing’?
— Joshs

I do not know if it is 'the question'... it is his opener in his 'einführung in die Metaphysik" I believe... — Tobias

Indeed it is. What many don’t realize, though, is that he isn’t simply repeating Leibnitz’s question, he is deconstructing it. What he is really asking is , ‘why do we exclusively associate the copula ‘is’ with the notion of something, of presence, and not also the Nothing’?

How does it come about that beings take precedence everywhere and lay claim to every "is," while that which is not a being - namely, the Nothing thus understood as Being itself- remains forgotten? How does it come about that with Being It is really nothing and that the Nothing does not properly prevail? (Introduction to What is Metaphysics?)

You do realize you are introducing your readers to your thought, via Heidggers' main question? In good German I would say: "was sich liebt das neckt sich" ... :wink: — Tobias

Are you saying Heidegger’s main question is ‘ why is there something rather than nothing’?