Ethical striving toward empathy, love and compassion are derivative modes of sense-making.
— Joshs

Sorry, this is opaque to me. Could you expand? And, no offense, but in your own words if possible? I'm less interested in what other philosophers have said about this than I am in what you think. — J

The question of how to be compassionate toward others and to be alive to each being's suffering, assumes a need to resist the unjust desire or intention not to be alive to the suffering of others, that is, the unethical impetus to inter-affect with others by excluding their experience. But the suffering other can only be acknowledged if they can first be made sense of as a suffering other. What matters to us, what we care about, whose suffering we empathize with, is dependent in the first place on what is intelligible to us from our situated vantage of participation within multiple practices. We can only intend to recognize and welcome the Other who saves us from sense-making chaos; we intend to reject the Other who offers the oppression of incommensurability.

Freedom from incoherence strengthens ties of relevant social relationality , freedom from the order of intelligibility fragments the integrity of social bonds. What is repressive to us is what we cannot establish harmonious relation with. To choose to embrace the other is to discover and construct that aspect of the other which is knowable and relatable, which offers us the hope of avoidance of the abyss of senselessness and incoherence. We cannot get beyond this link between the lovable and the recognizable without losing the basis of any ethics, which is the ability to distinguish between, even if without yet defining, what is preferred and what is not.

But where do such alternative forms of interchange actually work?
Certainly not at university, nor any level or form of formal education, not in most businesses.

I suppose a freelancer in some fancy abstract
mostly artistic type of work-livelihood could practice those alternative forms of interchange. But for everyone else, I can't see how they could be anything other than socioeconomic suicide. — baker

Groups of people form the kinds of social, economic and political structures that they understand. There are only a tiny handful of poststructuralists in academia or the workforce, so until which time that they emerge in larger numbers, these institutions will continue to operate the way they have. That doesn’t mean that individuals can’t apply poststructuralist ideas in their interactions with others within these institutions.

I’m not trying to suggest that a single monolithic episteme underlies all forms of cultural creativity in a given era for a given community, but I am saying that these systems are interlocked, such that it makes sense to talk about Romantic painting, literature, music philosophy and science and mean more than just that these domains all belong to the same chronological period.
— Joshs

Yes, with a heavy emphasis on your warning about simplistic "single monolithic episteme" talk. The interlocking is complicated, and the parallels are stronger or weaker from era to era. Also, the role of science here is, to my mind, by far the most problematic. "Romantic" science? I'd need to hear more about what that might be. We all remember the Sokal hoax . . . — J

I’m thinking here of Foucault’s historical analysis of scientific epistemes. He grouped the period from around 1400 till today into three epistemes, the Renaissance, the Classical period (roughly 1600 to 1780) and the Modern episteme (1780 to today), and showed how theories of language , life and economics within each episteme shared many common features. Relevant to your question concerning Romantic science, he argued that the science of biology could not exist until the modern period because the classical episteme’s notion of natural history lacked a concept of holistic organization and history as self-reflexive change. These notions are central to Romanticism as a whole. He cites Romantic philosophers such as Kant , Schelling and Hegel as contributing to this new organicist
thinking in linguistics, economics ( Marx) and biology (Darwin).

I think this is indeed the conclusion we'd be forced to draw, and I think it's the wrong one. So I'd want to go back to look more closely at the fact/system/intelligibility relationship. How much of this is cultural? Do all matters of fact really depend on such radically contingent systems? Is there no value in the distinction between the natural sciences and human sciences?

I think that Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Habermas have a lot to teach us here. — J

Dilthey made a sharp distinction between the methods of the natural and human sciences, believing that hermeneutic method only applies to the latter. Gadamer, by contrast, and like Kuhn, applied hermeneutics to both the hard sciences and the human sciences. Gadamer, like Kuhn and Rorty thought that one could talk about a progress in the sciences, but this is not to be interpreted as a securing of matters of fact independent of schemes of intelligibility. Rather, the sciences, as part of the continuing conversation of man, can benefit humanity in increasingly useful ways in spite of the discontinuous nature of successive schemes of empirical factuality.

. The implication is that "the desire to be moral" can exist without some particular "conceptual content" -- that the desire can be present from era to era, but with a differing notion of the ethical good. Are you sure that's possible? What is this common denominator of desire? I'm not saying that there is no such common denominator, of course; I'm arguing, in the opposite direction, that in addition to such a common desire there is also ethical conceptual content that is translatable from era to era and individual to individual — J

I would say that the common denominator of desire is the normative aims of anticipatory sense-making. Ethical striving toward empathy, love and compassion are derivative modes of sense-making. The ethical conceptual content you refer to , such as the Golden Rule, is what happens when sense-making breaks down and leads to blame and a concomitant collection of ‘oughts’ , which all come down to variations on the theme of ‘Thou shalt not act in ways that exceed my sense-making capabilities’.

The other falls short of our ethical standards due to a failing of ‘integrity’, a ‘character flaw’ , dishonesty, evil intent , selfishness, etc. In doing so, we erase the difference between their world and ours, and turn our failure to fathom into their moral failure.
— Joshs

To me, this describes the process of "othering," in which opponents or adversaries are assumed to be in disagreement with us due to certain traits they possess, rather than because there is genuine, potentially resolvable disagreement. Oddly, I see this as erasing the similarities between their world and ours, not the difference. But I think we may be getting at the same idea — J

The essence of the concept of Othering is not simply seeing
someone else's views, behaviors or traits as alien with respect to oneself and one’s own community, but judging these as unethical in their failure to conform to some universal. Levinas’s philosophical approach putting ethics before ontology captures the move made by a variety of approaches in contemporary philosophy. “According to Levinas, the face-to-face relation primarily registers in an ethical order: the other, in her alterity, is such that she makes an ethical demand on me, to which I am obligated to respond… Levinas describes a direct embodied encounter
with the other.…the failure to enact that transcendence [recognizing the alterity of the other], as when we simply objectify or reify the other person, is also a possibility of relational contingency.”(Shaun Gallagher)

No, at some universities, the rhetoric and actions of some students and faculty have become repressive. Can you locate anything intrinsic to postmodernist philosophies taken as a whole (whatever that would be) that would necessitate such repressive behavior?

Is this not a "no true Scotsman" or "'real communism/capitalism' has never been tried," situation? No doubt someone could argue something similar about "real Christian nationalism," being grounded in love and "what is best for everyone," or "real Marxism" freeing the university system. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What do Christian nationalism and Marxism have in common? Both of them are grounded in forms of emancipatory humanism, which means that both posit a path of righteousness, on the basis of which it is possible to oppose and identify injustice and ethical depravity. The vast majority of the ‘woke’ community shares in this moralistic thinking, and justifies their repressive , language-policing tactics on its behalf. By contrast, the post-humanist work of writers such as Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida rejects the idea of a righteous path of emancipation and the moralizing that goes along with it. They work not from grand narratives of emancipation, but within particular discursive systems to reveal openings for re-invention and alternative forms of interchange.

At some universities postmodernism has become as scary as The Spanish Inquisition. — jkop

No, at some universities, the rhetoric and actions of some students and faculty have become repressive. Can you locate anything intrinsic to postmodernist philosophies taken as a whole (whatever that would be) that would necessitate such repressive behavior?

I do want to affirm something you don't come right out and say, but that I think is implied in your questions. Creativity is socially constrained; it has a history and a context; and to ask "Would X have understood A?" is not the same as asking "Could X have created A?" In one of my fields, music, we often kick around stuff like "What would Bach make of Stravinsky?" Well, given enough time and examples to acclimate himself to Modernism, Bach might well have loved Igor. But there is absolutely zero chance he could have written Rite of Spring in 1725. So I read you here as pointing out, rightly, that we mustn't engage in some sort of "leveling of history" and imagine that Socrates, Aquinas, and Kant all spoke essentially the same creative language. They did not. — J

Yes, and I would go beyond that and argue that intelligibility is socially constrained. This point is fundamental for any theory of ethics, and for addressing the question the OP asks. You see, I believe that the musical sensibilities of era are inextricably linked to the way that the sciences are approached in that era , and the framework of understanding that undergirds the sciences is closely tied to that of philosophy , and the epistemic presuppositions grounding philosophy are related to that of poetry and literature. I’m not trying to suggest that a single monolithic episteme underlies all forms of cultural creativity in a given era for a given community, but I am saying that these systems are interlocked, such that it makes sense to talk about Romantic painting, literature, music philosophy and science and mean more than just that these domains all belong to the same chronological period.

More importantly, when we move from one era to the next
a certain discontinuity and incommensurability is involved. Not so much for those looking back to previous eras of thought and reinterpreting them from the present vantage, but for those who remain wedded to the old ways in the face of paradigm shifts and are not able to fathom what is in the process of replacing their system of thought. An entire metaphysics of ethics is dependent on flattening and ignoring these discontinuities in intelligibility. As a result, ethical values (the ought)) are spilt off from matters of fact (the ‘is’), as one assumes that it is a simple matter of introducing the new ways of thinking to any reasonably intelligent person and understanding is all but guaranteed. Why shouldn’t Socrates be able to understand Kant, the thinking goes, given a sufficiently thorough period of study? Why shouldn’t the Qanon -touting Trump voter sitting next to you be able to absorb the raw facts when conferences directly with them? According to this dualism of ethical value and matters of fact, the ethical disagreement between a neoliberal and a progressive socialist is based on considerations entirely different from those having to do with matters of fact. This flattening of discontinuities in intelligibility between eras, and between individuals, provides justification for the idea that there is such a thing a a universally shared notion of the ethical good that comprises not just the desire to be moral, but a shared conceptual content that is as transparent as matters of fact.

But if matters of fact depend for their understanding on systems of intelligibility which are contingently culture-bound, why should notions of the ethical good be any different? We live in a society carved up into myriad communities united by their own systems of intelligibility. The fact that we are all able to share the roads together and communicate in public spaces on the basis of general and superficially shared understandings masks the extent to which our worlds only partially link up. When we fail to see this we force the ethical into the position of subjective will. The other falls short of our ethical standards due to a failing of ‘integrity’, a ‘character flaw’ , dishonesty, evil intent , selfishness, etc. In doing so, we erase the difference between their world and ours, and turn our failure to fathom into their moral failure.

I was thinking of the parent trying to deal rationally with a child who has discovered the possibility of an infinite regress of "why". In the end, the authoritative. dogmatic, answer is the only possible one.

The language game makes intelligibility possible by taking for granted a founding system of interconnected meanings that it would make no sense to doubt as long as one continued to move within that language game. This built-in normativity of our languaged practices is not a failure to properly ground meaning, but the condition for keeping meaning alive.
— Joshs
I agree with that, of course. That's the explanation that makes the authoritative answer not merely dogmatic. — Ludwig V

Of course, the flip side of operating within a language game is that its authoritative rules and pronouncements are at the same time normative and non-binding concerning future practices within it. As Joseph Rouse explains:

Wittgenstein's well-known remark that requests for justification of a practice must eventually encounter a stopping point at which one can only say, “This is what we do" is often read as appealing to a social regularity, but his remark can instead be heard with the inflection with which a parent tells a child, "We don't hit other children, do we?"

Such statements or rhetorical questions do not describe regularities in children's actual behavior. On the contrary, parents make such comments precisely because children do hit one another. Parents do so, however, in response to or anticipation of such "deviant" behavior in order to hold it accountable to correction. Children's behavior in turn is only partially accommodating to such correction: sometimes obeying, sometimes challenging or circumventing corrective responses, some-times disobeying and facing further consequences, and so forth. Remember that we cannot appeal to social regularities or collectively presupposed norms within a practice: there are no such things, I have argued, but more important, if there were they would not thereby legitimately bind us. Any regularities in what practitioners have previously done does not thereby have any authority to bind subsequent performances to the same regularities. The familiar Wittgensteinian paradoxes about rule following similarly block any institution of norms merely by invocation of a rule, since no rule can specify its correct application to future instances (Wittgenstein 1953). Practices should instead be understood as comprising performances that are mutually interactive in partially shared circumstances.

As for the continuity question, I see nothing in Kant's ethics -- apart from the Christian aspects -- that Socrates would not have both understood and been eager to debate — J

It sounds like you believe that the part of Kant’s ethics that exclude the Christian aspects comprises the core of his ethical thinking. If that’s the case, then am I right to assume you believe that Socrates would have understood the core of Kantian ethics? Am I right to further presume that, given that Socrates was capable of-comprehending Kant’s ethics, he could conceivably have though up something similar himself, in spite of the fact that he lived two thousand years before Kant?

Postmodern fear of knowledge. — jkop

Realist fear of postmodernism.

The "Nihilsum" represents a state that defies conventional logic by existing in a realm between what we establish as being and non-being. It cannot be fully categorized as something or nothing; it is also the absence of either — mlles

This does accord with poststructuralist accounts putting difference before identity , and Heidegger’s attempt to think being and nothingness together. Heidegger constantly struggled to come up with an adequate way of articulating a notion of transit, othering and difference that the grammatical structure of language mitigates against, an essencing which is neither simply present nor absent, neither something nor nothing, neither future, now nor past, being nor becoming, good nor evil.

Glad to see you on the forum. Self-proclaimed postmodernists are very rare on this site, unfortunately. Do you think your notion of Nihilsum provides a way to critique empirical realism?

This is the point where people say that understanding or meaning or interpretation "drop out", because Wittgenstein is insistent that anything you try to grasp as standing behind the words will be just another sign. There is something genuinely radical, or at least strange, going on here.
— Srap Tasmaner
That's right. It seems to me that this is why W ends up (in the PI) with the faintly despairing "But this is what I do!" or "When I have reached bedrock, my spade is turned — Ludwig V

But this having reached bedrock is precisely the way out of despair, or precisely, the way to free ourselves of the meaningless that confusing empirical with grammatical certainty leads to. The language game makes intelligibility possible by taking for granted a founding system of interconnected meanings that it would make no sense to doubt as long as one continued to move within that language game. This built-in normativity of our languaged practices is not a failure to properly ground meaning, but the condition for keeping meaning alive.

When people say, "it will be good for you to study philosophy," "it will be good for you to start exercising," or "it's good for you to learn to appreciate Homer, Hesiod, and Horace," they certainly don't mean "you will enjoy those things." People often tell people that "x will be good for them," precisely as motivation for them to do things they do not want to do, even when the primary proximate beneficiary of these acts is the person doing them (although it isn't only for the good of the person undertaking these challenges; the champions of the liberal arts tend to argue that all of society benefits from the student's efforts). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Its a question of immediate vs delayed gratification. Addictions are so hard to overcome because the reward is immediate and the negative consequences occur over a longer period of time. The challenge, then, is to ‘frontload’ those delayed painful consequences so that they are not only experienced alongside the immediate gratification but overpower them. One thing is certain. No one will
be motivated to do anything, whether for themselves or the ‘greater good’, if it doesn’t present it self to them within the context of an immediate, personal reward.

Sure. Is this an objection to the example? Do you think it's impossible? What about the A Brave New World example? I only mention these as limit examples. The more general point is that it seems quite possible to have many pleasurable experiences and a "pleasant life," while avoiding the development of faculties and aptitudes that we tend to think are important for human flourishing — Count Timothy von Icarus

I dont think so. Pleasure and what you are thinking of in ethical terms as ‘human flourishing’ are not independent entities. And given that all goals and purposes, including minor pleasures, are integrated holistically at a superordinate level, the depth of satisfaction of a pleasant life will be directly correlated with human flourishing. Of course, the other’s criterion of flourishing may not meet your standards, in which case you’re likely to split off their life of pleasures against what you consider robust flourishing, rather than adjusting your construal of their way of life such as to gain a more effective understanding of how they actually see things. That’s more difficult than carrying around a priori concepts of flourishing in your wallet.

Suppose we have given a power AGI instructions to maximize human pleasure. They go about raising children, tending to their every need, and keeping them awash in pleasurable sensations — Count Timothy von Icarus

Pleasure is not a reflex mechanism, or the release of chemicals. It is an enormously complex phenomenon inseparably linked to overarching goals and interpretive values. Being “awash in pleasurable sensations” amounts to
achievements in sense-making of a norm-driven organism.

I'm sure not what the post I was responding to has in mind. What that Richard Polt OP is criticizing, is the widespread tendency to simply assume that evolutionary biology provides a kind of default basis for normativity, along the lines of what is 'advantageous for survival' ('oldy-moldy darwinism'). It's more evolution as secular alternative to religion. — Wayfarer

Right. As Rouse puts it, scientific accounts of evolution have been treated as though they offered a sovereign grounding for human social and ethical processes. As you say, religious accounts ( as well as many philosophical ones) attempt to usurp this authority by placing it within the idealist subject rather than in empirical realism. What Rouse is trying to do is get beyond both the sovereignty of realism and the authority of idealism by positing a nature-culture intertwining that produces a context-dependent social normativity all the way down.

For the link I sent you:

Evolutionary biology has long emphasized how environments exert selection pressures that transform organismic lineages. Biologists now recognize organism-environment relations as a two-way process. Niche construction is the process through which organisms act on their environments and change the selection pressures on their own and other lineages. It includes behavioral niche construction— forms of behavior that generate selection pressures to produce descendants of that behavior in subsequent generations. Human languages are probably the pre-eminent example of behavioral niche construction.

↪Joshs Where would I look for examples of this kind of approach? And in respect of human culture, how would 'normative patterns of functioning' be related to or grounded in evolutionary biology per se? — Wayfarer

I recommend Joseph Rouse’s work on evolutionary naturalism. He ties together biological and cultural
normativity. Here’s a place to start:

https://www.academia.edu/86909328/_Practices_Normativity_and_the_Natural_History_of_Human_Biological_Niche_Construction_Joseph_Rouse_Wesleyan_University_Presented_at_Bergen_Workshop_on_Wittenstein_and_Practice_May_2022

In fact, the very idea of an “ought” is foreign to evolutionary theory — Richard Polt, Anything but Human

You would think a Heidegger scholar would be able to do better than that. If we stick with the oldy-moldy neo-Darwinism that ignores the side of the equation where the environment is reciprocally shaped by the normative goals of the organism rather than unilaterally imposing itself on the organism, then the biological ‘is’ has no connection. to the ethical ‘ought’. But when we see the aims of the organism not simply in terms of static survival of a body, a strand of dna or a species, but in terms of the preservation of a certain normative pattern of functioning, then the functional organization and behavioral direction of the organism is all about normative ‘oughts’.

↪Joshs

Is there a way to separate out truth from goodness as fulfillment of normative expectations and purposes?

Depends on what you mean by "separate." Medicine is a normative practice. However, consider a child with cancer. It's bad for them to have cancer. It's good to cure it. Suppose the doctors give the child a treatment that is thought to be a good treatment for this sort of cancer. It isn't. It actually causes the cancer to become more aggressive.

We wouldn't want to say that the treatment is a good one when the normative standard is to give the treatment and only becomes a bad one later. Indeed, it would come to be deemed a "bad treatment" in the normative framework because of the truth about its effects. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Micro norms can be nested within larger norms. We can change our minds about the benefits of a particular treatment without dislodging the superordinate norms (good vs bad methodology) on the basis of which modifying a specific treatment is intelligible.

But moreover, people can have beliefs or make statements about themselves. Where is between here? Between the person and themselves? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I dont happen to view the self as a hermetically sealed
solipsism , but as the derived effect of a system of elements that are neither strictly internal to the organism nor merely interjected from its environment. This system of elements organizes itself into a unitary, autonomous whole producing intentional directionality. But because this autonomy is only that of a certain operational closure rather than that of an internal milieu divided off from an outside, deliberation, intentionality and reflection are not the activities of an inside, but of an organism-world interaction.

. And so we might go an extra step in locating goodness in ens reale (things) and not ens rationis (creations of mind). Yet, IMO this is unnecessary for concluding that, if relatively inert things like water motivated complex behavior, the goodness sought by the complex behavior lies primarily in what gets sought, not the seeker. Much good seeking involves actual consumption, the introduction of the good thing into the body/whole of the entity seeking it, and this doesn't make sense if all goodness is already in the organism doing the seeking — Count Timothy von Icarus

Is there a way to separate out truth from goodness as fulfillment of normative expectations and purposes? Are such norms to be located inside the organism, in the things outside the organism, or in the ways of functioning that take place BETWEEN organism and its world? If it is the latter then one doesnt have to choose between an inside and an outside in order to arrive at the site of truth and goodness.

it seems to rely on a wholesale dismissal of the philosophical tradition(s), as in Russell's history of western philosophy. On the other hand, other philosophers have done the same thing. (Heidegger, Husserl, Hume, Descartes etc.) — Ludwig V

Heidegger was keenly attuned to the historical nature of philosophy, as reflected in his appreciation for etymology, but Wittgenstein tended to write at times in an ahistorical way , as though something like a ‘desire for certainty’ could be understood independently of the historical eras within which concepts like desire and certainty were used.

But the failure to distinguish between psychological ("subjective") certainty and clarity and objective certainty and clarity is very common in analytic philosophy. — Ludwig V

I would have thought that, up till Wittgenstein’s later work, what was common within analytic philosophy was a failure to recognize the interdependence of subjective and objective certainty and clarity.

At best you can falsify metaphysical claims — Count Timothy von Icarus

You can? How on earth does that work without presupposing the very thing which makes falsification intelligible?

the idea that doing ontology itself might be a limit on freedom in Derrida and Foucault, or Deleuze's attempt to save ontology by making it "creative," presuppose that metaphysics is more something "we create" and less something "discovered." If it is the latter, then not only can some opinions be more correct than others, but it will also be the case that wrong opinions lead to ignorance, and on very many views ignorance itself is a limit on freedom (e.g. the entire idea of "informed consent," or just the basic idea that one cannot successfully do what one doesn't know how to do.) — Count Timothy von Icarus

For these writers, it’s not just “we” who create ontological realities, as human beings or subjects. It is the world itself that continually creates itself, and we are just along for the ride. Right and wrong opinions refer to what is pragmatically workable on the basis of how the world is laid out within a given set of practices. As the world changes and along with it our practices, the criteria of right and wrong, knowledge and ignorance, also change.

I think the latter idea, parametrising individuation, is about as close as you get. But you still need a background of individuating processes for it. The origin point is an analytical posit rather than an ontological ground. — fdrake

Why dont you build a giant paddock, and collect all the furniture of the universe inside of it. Then you can determine degrees of reality among the objects

If Dems were really out to win, then this guy Bernie Sanders would have beaten Trump — Shawn

It’s an old but persistent delusion that far-right nationalism is not rooted in the emotional needs of far-right nationalists but arises, instead, from the injustices of neoliberalism. And so many on the left insist that all those Trump voters are really Bernie Sanders voters who just haven’t had their consciousness raised yet. In fact, a similar constellation of populist figures has emerged, sharing platforms, plans, and ideologies, in countries where neoliberalism made little impact, and where a strong system of social welfare remains in place. If a broadened welfare state—national health insurance, stronger unions, higher minimum wages, and the rest—would cure the plague in the U.S., one would expect that countries with resilient welfare states would be immune from it. They are not. (Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker)

I suspect that philosophy is unattainable for most people who lead lives where the barriers to philosophy are significant and sometimes insurmountable. — Tom Storm

At age 15 I developed ideas that I have been elaborating ever since. I hadnt read a word of philosophy at that time, and I wasnt to do so for another 15 years. I considered what I was doing to be psychology, and now call it philosophy, even though it is the same basic ideas. Did this transformation consist of some abrupt shift in method or vocabulary? No, it was a gradual change, which is why I have insisted here that the difference between philosophical and other modes of expression has to be understood in terms of a spectrum involving qualities auch as depth and comprehensiveness of articulation.

. . . or that contemporary philosophers in general are not interested in mankind’s search for meaning?
— Joshs

Perhaps that task has been relocated in psychology and psychiatry. Or where its been for eons, religion — jgill

It’s true that if one wants to put forth a theory of meaning, one can choose from a range of conventional vocabularies under the rubric of ‘psychology’, whereas that option was not available before the 19th century. But empirical psychology and psychiatry can never replace the rigor of philosophy’s mode of questioning. That is why many philosophers put forth both a philosophy and a psychology, showing how the psychology is a naive form of philosophizing. Examples include Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsche, Husserl, Eugene Gendlin and George Kelly.

Philosophy is a peculiar discipline: it's almost entirely conversation. It's not much like science, for the most part, because you don't do research — Srap Tasmaner

Great philosophy is very much concerned with research. The fact that it does not partake of anscientific method of research doesn’t invalidate philosophical methods as less rigorous , ungrounded or mere conversation. On
the contrary, it is precisely through the phenomenological research of writers like Husserl that we are able to understand why scientific method cannot ground itself , and why philosophy can avail itself of methods of research that are in a significant sense more precise than empirical methods of investigation.

we still sit around and talk, and a lot of it is rehashing the same old disagreements we've always had. When the kids visit, they're either bemused or bewildered that almost nothing has changed — Srap Tasmaner

Philosophy doesn’t simply rehash old disagreements, it reveals how the most supposedly ‘cutting edge’ sciences recycle and rehash old philosophical themes without being aware of it. After showing how the old themes are still driving scientific and cultural understandings in other fields, philosophy then offers alternative ways of thinking. Philosophy thereby demonstrates what science, with its historical nearsightedness, cannot, which is that the progress in thought never simply abandons its past , but reinterprets it such that a certain thread of continuity runs through the history of thought.

historically philosophers have inquired into reality in a way similar to but deeper than what we now call "science," and if they did talk about what someone else has already said, it was only in service to this inquiry into reality. Lots of us still do philosophy the older way, where the object is reality and not primarily the text of some dead guy. — Leontiskos

All of my favorite philosophers (who are overwhelmingly contemporary) engage in texts of ‘dead guys’ (and girls) as an essential complement to the presentation of their original ideas. I have never encountered any other motive for this besides trying to describe reality.

This is the tension that Thomas Nagel and others say we have to live with. Of course the view from nowhere is an unreachable idealization that no one ever achieves. But it's a spirit that can't be exorcized. Consider: "an attempt to find the opinion that seems best." From what viewpoint would we make this judgment? From our own, and from our culture's, certainly. But is that the final word? What happens when two opinions make competing claims to be best, and give their reasons? I think Socrates and most philosophers since are committed to the idea that there is an ideal convergence point, involving rational inquiry, where we can reach consensus based on what is the case, not simply on "how it looks to us." — J

This is the way philosophy thought before Wittgenstein, and before Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, and before Nietzsche (I could name many others not stuck in Nagel’s retro position). They believe the work of philosophy is not to reach consensus concerning what is the case in terms of a correct correspondence between thought and the world, since they argue that there is a reciprocal dependence between thought and world such that each continally changes the nature of the other. They are instead interested in determining ‘what is the case’ in terms of the structural dynamics of this reciprocal self-world movement. What are the irreducible features of worldmaking experience? They all cite such features as temporality, relevance, relationality and interpretation as primordial.

I've found current academic philosophers whom I think have philosophically profound things to say, and a genuine passion for saying it. But the demands of the profession are such that they have to withstand the scrutiny of their peers, which often makes them very difficult for the lay reader — Wayfarer

Nietzsche didn’t have to worry about that, since he wrote outside the confines of academia. Does that make him easy to read? Yes, if you dont want to understand him. If you do want to, he is just as difficult as any philosopher who is subject to the demands of the profession, although frankly I’m not sure what that means. All of the original thinkers I know chose the language they use because it was the best way to explain themselves, using themselves and an imagined readership as their primary audience rather than the tastemakers of the profession . Some dumb down their thinking in interviews for the lay reader , but these end up being more difficult to decipher, in my opinion, than their work which is not dumbed down.

I got drawn to philosophy for what would generally be considered the wrong reasons - something like ‘mankind’s search for meaning’. When I actually enrolled in undergraduate philosophy, I was taken aside by a kindly lecturer, David Stove, who said ‘I can sense what you’re looking for, son, but you won’t find it here — Wayfarer

Did he mean that there are great living philosophers but they are tucked away in departments other than philosophy, or that contemporary philosophers in general are not interested in mankind’s search for meaning? Or maybe he was just speaking for himself, which I wouldn’t doubt given what I know of his work.

The work that gets published tends to be extremely narrow in its focus— for example, here’s my interpretation of Martha Nussbaum’s response to Joseph Raz’s critique of John Rawls’s Theory of Justice. I literally published a paper like that.10 It’s pretty good, as far as these things go. But it’s not the kind of work that anyone goes into philosophy to do, I suspect. (Al-Gharbi)

I’m not sure what al-Gharbi is bitching about. That sounds like a potentially interesting paper, dealing as it does with concepts articulated by leading thinkers in that area of philosophy. Introducing original thinking through the critique of established writers is an important way to connect readers to your ideas. As long as there is some community out there somewhere whose thinking overlaps one’s own approach, and who are represented by a journal, there should be no problem getting one’s work published if it is of high enough quality. I’ve never had any problems doing so.

As a longtime midwestern leftist, I have never found most fellow midwesterners all that receptive to leftist ideas — BC

Wiith some exceptions.

Milwaukee’s Socialist History:
Milwaukee’s socialist history begins in the early 20th century with a wave of socialist party candidates being elected into Milwaukee area positions. The City of Milwaukee elected three Socialist Mayors from 1910-1960. Emil Seidel was elected from 1910-1912, Daniel Hoan from 1916-1940 and Frank Zeidler from 1948-1960. The term “Sewer Socialist”, while used negatively among socialists, became synonymous for a specific Milwaukee version of pragmatic socialism. The Milwaukee County local Socialist Party (SPMC) during this time represented a large percentage of the Socialist Party of Wisconsin’s (SPWI) membership. From roughly 1973 thru the mid to late 1980s, the Socialist Party USA headquarters shared an office with SPWI and SPMC was located in downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

I have been commenting on what the American urban system produces. Should people be morally outraged by such a system? Sure, just as reformers were rightfully outraged over the excesses of the Gilded Age, slavery, etc — Count Timothy von Icarus

In order to be outraged by the excesses of a system like slavery, one has to be positioned within an alternative system of intelligibility. Most adherents of slavery, including prominent philosophers, were convinced it was morally justified, and this wasnt simply self-serving. This doesn’t mean a critique couldn’t arise from within the system of thought that justified slavery, but it would consist of reform within this system rather than an overthrow of it. Those advocating for such reforms generally agreed with the overall premise concerning the intellectual inferiority of slaves. To overthrow the system one needed to replace it with a way of thinking according to which whatever differences separated slaves from their owners did not indicate any innate traits marking them as less than completely human.

The issue of structural injustice arises in the context of the effect the perpetuation of the system has on reinforcing its grounding assumptions. If the result of treating a group of people as inferior and not fit to be integrated into society is to prevent them from attaining the very privileges that would allow the dominant society to recognize them as equals ( access to education and assimilation into the fabric of the community) , this will perpetuate the stereotypes even if it’s unintentional.

With respect to old-line liberal values among the urban elite, a critique from within this system would advocate for reforms along the lines of an increase in the minimum wage and more hiring quotas. But a critique capable of overthrowing this system would have to question the very assumptions grounding it , such as Lyotard’s notion of the differend, which asserts that there are certain wrongs that cannot be rectified within the terms of language set by a system that assumes a level playing field, such as Rawls’s veil of ignorance. Marginalized groups often end up being excluded from the terms of that ‘level playing field’, and more reform just perpetuates this exclusionary state of affairs. But what if all the wealthy power brokers in places like New York bought into Lyotard’s value system rather than old-style liberalism?

And by that I don’t mean simply pay it lip service, because if you understand how a value system operates, to be ensconced within it is to rely on it to make your world intelligible from both a rational and a moral perspective. I don’t think such an overthrow would solve the wealth inequality or racial segregation issue although it would make some progress in that direction. It would more likely shift the bounds of the issue from one of racial identity and class differences to one of philosophical value system. Adherents of different value systems speak different languages and belong to different cultures. Highly educated BLM activists, while aiming their rhetoric at residents of poor black communities, were really speaking to other academics, and the practical consequences of their ideas could be located in the context of the academic and skilled workplace environments in which they could apply these ideas to improve interactions with their colleagues.

Meanwhile, little by little residents of poor back communities, being mostly socially conservative rather than the BLM progressives who advocate in their name, are moving into the Republican party.

The question is whether and how you can tie such facts to a liberal-progressive social value system.

Sure, that's exactly what al-Gharbi and others have done. I don't think it is just some "unavoidable problem of urbanization," that the oh-so-progressive residents of the Upper West Side balked at unused hotels in their neighborhoods being used as shelters for Manhattan's homeless during the pandemic. It was the recurrent theme of "yes, progressivism... but not in my backyard — Count Timothy von Icarus

I want to thank you for pointing me to Al-Ghabi’s work. His thinking intersects some of my recent research, particularly the tension between personal and social autonomy and structural injustice. I want to offer a critique of his approach based on the relation between what I see as two main strands in his thinking. the first is the structural injustice theme.

Shaun Gallagher characterizes it this way:

“Standard accounts of action and interaction abstract away from the specifics of everyday life; they ignore the circumstances that are framed by social and instituted practices that often lead to structural distortions and injustices.” “Structural features of the specific practices or institutions within which individuals interact can distort human relations in ways that subtract from total autonomy and reduce the overall interactive affordance space.” “When structural features of cognitive institutional practices are exclusionary, closing off possibilities, or when such practices are designed so that whoever uses them comes to be dominated by them, with the result that their thinking is narrowed and determined, then again autonomy, not just of the individual, but of social interaction is compromised.”

“To the extent that the instituted narrative, even if formed over time by many individuals, transcends those individuals and may persist beyond them, it may loop around to constrain or dominate the group members or the group as a whole...Collective (institutional, corporate) narratives often take on a life (an autonomy) of their own and may come to oppose or undermine the intentions of the individual members. Narrative practices in both extended institutional and collective structures and practices can be positive in allowing us to see certain possibilities, but at the same time, they can carry our cognitive processes and social interactions in specific directions and blind us to other possibilities."

Notice that for Gallagher structural injustice takes place in spite of the best intentions of individuals participating within institutional practices. Is Al-Ghabi not saying the same thing when he states that even when a person’s heart and mind are in the right place, they can still be contributing to injustice? I don’t think so, and this is where the second strand of his thinking comes into play. Al-Gharbi, unlike Gallagher, relies on the moralistic concept of hypocrisy to explain what he sees as a failure to practice what one preaches. He relies on the ‘Gotcha’ moment when he asks the liberal do-gooder who contributes to all the rights causes, votes for all the right people, use all the politically correct vocabulary why they don’t pay their housekeeper or Uber driver a higher tip , or why they take a NIMBY attitude toward the proposed mixed income development planned for their street. They want to look that person in the eye , see them squirm and hem and haw as they realize they’ve been found out as morally culpable for choosing self-interest over altruism and, even worse, using their liberalism as a cover for it. What Al-Gharbi seems to have done is observe that, in spite of urban America being dominated by liberals, income inequality and racial segregation are as bad as ever. In searching for an explanation, he lands on good old fashioned selfishness and hypocrisy, and he dresses this up in the trendy vernacular of structural practices This mix of moralism and practice theory is a central feature of wokism, which after all has its origin in a religious context of spiritual enlightenment. Let me now critique this Sartrean ‘bad faith’ notion from the vantage of practice-based accounts that I prefer. These accounts don’t begin from an autonomous subject who choose their moral values and then attaches themselves to a community based on shared interests. Rather, subjectivities are constituted in their moral values as well as epistemic rationality through their interactions within an already existing community.

The bottom line is that the liberal who is also a NIMBY, and who is a meager tipper, and commits all the atrocities Al-Gharbi iterates, does practice what they preach. There is no hypocrisy involved. If you ask them and are willing or listen carefully to their reply , they will justify, on the basis of the discursive practices which they partially share with their community, the logic and morality of their position. Instead of looking for a moral ‘Gotcha’ moment, what is needed is to offer the person whose actions one disagrees with an opportunity to understand an alternative set of practices, a new interpretive rationality.
But one has to appreciate what one is asking here. Changing a deeply enmeshed perspective is akin to changing religious doctrine. It is easy for Al-Gharbi, because he has decided in advance what the ‘correct’ moral stance is (elimination of racial segregation and income inequality) and why people fail to live up to his ‘correct’ standards (they are hypocrites who fail to practice what they preach because they choose self-interest over altruism).

Al-Ghabi’s ‘selfishness vs giving’ binary misses the fact that the self is not a fortress originally walled off from the world , the moral task being to break down the wall. The self is a social construct, a product of discursive and material
practices and interactions. Our limits of compassion and altruism are not a function of Al-Ghabi’s fortress self but our inability to make intelligible and relatable the practices of those who are too ‘Other’. Either they must find a way to bridge the gap between their ways and those of our group, or we must find a way re-configure our own system of practices to make those Others recognizable to us. You’ll notice that NIMBYism doesnt exist in a normal family. Their backyard, if they have one, is filled with their children’s toys and swingset. Is this because of a moral choice on the part of the parent to be giving rather than selfish toward their children? If it is in our self-interest to be giving toward our children, our spouse, our friends, this is certainly not hypocrisy. Practice theories show that it is not an act of moral will that determines our generosity, or lack thereof, toward those different than ourselves, as though it were as obvious as Al-Gharbi wants us to think it is what constitutes racism , social injustice, unfair inequality, and who is to blame for it.

By making moral choice the kingpin of his approach, he marginalizes the role of discursive practices in its shaping of ethical and rational action to a peripheral status. As a result, he takes the cause of the injustices he rails against out of the historical contexts of the worldviews which are needed to make sense of them. So rather than seeing differences in how Otherness is perceived between social conservatives like J.D. Vance (whose focus is on individual character and personal responsibility due to his allegiance to the Enlightnement thinking of the autonomous self) and liberals who understand that it ‘takes a village’ as decisive for their actions, Al-Ghabi personalizes the issue. There just happen happen to be a large number of selfish hypocrites concentrated in big cities who won’t share. their toys. Meanwhile, one can find many social conservatives in small towns who are generous and who do all kinds of wonderful
things for ‘Others’.

I should point out that within the urban blue camp there is a whole spectrum of political philosophies , which I tend to see in developmental terms, ranging from old-style MLK or Obama-type liberalism, to Marxism , Critical theory , critical race theory and intersectionality, to postmodernism. The wealthy liberal lawyers and businessmen of the Upper West Side are overwhelmingly of the MLKObama type, which means they are only supportive of a limited degree of wealth redistribution. I see Al-Ghabi’s approach as a bit to the left of old-school liberalism within this spectrum. It seems to me the main way in which his thinking distinguishes itself from the old left is that he is more comfortable with considerable wealth redistribution.

And yet, the way things are in places like New York City or Los Angeles— this is not how things are in many other parts of the country.

Pointing out that super-wealthy residents of New York are predominately of certain ethnic persuasions while their servants are of another, and that social mobility among immigrants is greater in South Dakota in the midst of an economic boom doesn’t explain very much. The question is whether and how you can tie such facts to a liberal-progressive social value system. Yes, big cities have problems. New flash: they are noisy, dirty, congested, it’s expensive and tough to find parking, there are big rats. None of this reveals anything about why many like myself are passionate about the attitudes and ways of thinking (the philosophically informed strains of liberalism and progressivism) we find concentrated in urban centers, and why, in spite of the economic hardships imposed on many sub-communities that are a part of the urban fabric, we believe that these ways of thinking produce an approach to social relations, to caring about and supporting each other , that is more satisfying than the alternative we see being put into practice in places with more conservative values.

What I’m saying is that the negatives you’ve been pointing out are not the direct result of the value systems I and other liberal urbanities embrace, but exist in spite of them, and are tangential to them. These problems may be a reason for a particular individual to decide to move to South Dakota or Maine, in spite of their fondness for what urban. liberalism stands for. I’d liberal values are impetus r enough to them, they will find a way to remain connected to them by sacrificing certain comforts, or finding an affordable suburb or university town. You said you lived in New York, but I’m getting the impression you didn’t grow up in or near a big city. You write about it like a tourist rather than someone who is familiar with its social dynamics from the inside.

And yet, strangely, whenever these segments of the population see their incomes rise the crisis of "llabor shortage!" is proclaimed. These folks are superfluous to the economy of the future, nonetheless, millions more must come lest we face a "labor shortage." Curious. — Count Timothy von Icarus

They’ll keep coming until they are replaced by automation.

Yet surely offering living conditions marginally preferable to being in the middle of a civil war doesn't amount to much. No? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think the threat of actual civil war is more wishful thinking than a likely possibility. What is it you want? Who is it you are primarily pointing the finger of blame at? What are you proposing as a solution and which political entity or platform do you see as prepared to accomplish it?

↪Joshs

Depends on what you mean by "make an economy thrive." Liberal urban enclaves in the US certainly thrive in terms of aggregate GDP figures. In terms of inequality they are the worst places in the US or Europe. In terms of social mobility they are matched only by the abysmal showing of the Old South. In terms of having a "racial caste system," they are in many ways even worse than the Old South. In Alabama or Kentucky, one might at least find white citizens driving an Uber, selling shoes, etc., and the largest inequality tends to be between the marginally employed and the small town dentist or car dealership owner, not between the similarly poor and billionaires — Count Timothy von Icarus

The urban-based economic engine of the 21st century will mainly benefit those with enough education and the right skills, which leaves out much of the urban poor, regardless of race, and most of those with the right skills and education still struggle with college costs, childcare and housing prices. I suspect most of the reason for the huge disparity in income in the cities is because, as the source of our economic engine, they just happen to be the places with the highest concentration of super-rich.

I don’t think either the left or the right has a fix for this. There may be only patchwork, temporary forms of assistance. The left can offer a safety net and support for education, and some on the far left would offer policies like a sweeping redistribution of wealth and a guaranteed living income. But the right , given its focus on personal autonomy and character, would be reluctant to interfere with the wheels of capitalism.

, the urban elite simultaneously like positioning themselves as saviors of the world's poor while ruthlessly exploiting them. For a long time I pushed back on conservative claims that urban elites favored foreigners to the native poor, but I'm starting to think it's absolutely true. They constantly draw flattering parallels between the "hard working," (i.e., appropriately desperate and pliable) new arrivals versus those pesky natives who refuse to "get with the 21st century" (the century where their wages and life expectancy have stagnated, or as often declined, for half a century straight.) — Count Timothy von Icarus

Now there’s a nice unbiased view for ya. I especially like the phrase “ruthlessly exploiting them”. That’s a nice touch. My 102 year old father has 24 hour caregivers , who tend to be Nigerian, Philippine or from a Slavic country. Are they naive souls being “ruthlessly exploited”? Most of his helpers have been in this country for decades, are savvy about their options in the economy and what they can do to improve their career situation. If they are willing to take jobs that native-born residents reject, who is being exploited? When did your ancestors arrive in the U.S. and what jobs did they take that others didn’t want? Was Ellis Island a plot to exploit naive foreigners?

Of course, the people who see migration as something of a black and white "human rights issue," are also never going to house said migrants in their communities or schools in meaningful numbers. "Not in my backyard — Count Timothy von Icarus

My neighborhood in Chicago was deluged with Venezuelan refugees that the governor of Texas kindly bussed our way. The local police station and Armory were used to house them temporarily. They immediately began trying to find work , selling flowers and candy at intersections with their children in tow. It was a lot for our neighborhood to handle , but we’ve been here many times before. A substantial part of our community consists of Bosnian immigrants from that war, and Vietnamese boat people. We have seen them establish themselves over time and are now an integral part of our home, as our new Venezuelan arrivals will soon be. As the neighborhood becomes wealthier, we do see a slow reduction in transient hotels and homeless shelters, but we are still a supportive community who appreciates the need to continually open our arms to such persons. In fact I would say it’s one of the main reasons many of us choose to live here rather than in a suburb.

I am left thinking the "economy of the future," is more a sort of globalized neo-fedualism, although lacking religious checks on elite behavior, rather than anything admirable — Count Timothy von Icarus

I noticed you said nothing about values systems and their relation to urban culture. Instead you focused on wealth disparity and defense. A simplistic calculus based on who has money and who doesn’t isnt going to tell you anything useful about the social and political dynamics at play today in the era of Trumpism. This has much less to do with where the money is than it does with social values rooted in philosophical schemes. My concern is to see the range of related philosophical value systems concentrated in high density urban areas and universities thrive. I see the result of this election as demonstrating that a majority of Americans don’t identify with these ways of thinking, which doesn’t surprise me. It suggests to me that the cities need to form alliances to support each other in the absence of political support coming from the rest of the country. People like myself who derive great value from this urban culture will continue to be loyal to its ways regardless of the economic challenges.

Is there a connection between the philosophical value systems that have become dominant in universities and urban society and the great divide in wealth? Perhaps, in that the kinds of skills that the new social and bio-material-digital technologies brought into existence shut out the workers who in the past could make a living with a minimal skillset.

Anyhow, I can't help but think that feelings on these issues are sometimes extremely self-serving. Migration can only ever directly benefit a vanishingly small percentage of the population in the developing world — Count Timothy von Icarus

There’s a fairly clearly articulated position right there. Now, let’s see if we can figure out where you get your view of migration from in a philosophical sense. You see, I’m not interested so much in determining a correct approach to migration as I am placing the views of someone like yourself in the context of the appropriate family of discourse on the subject. To be more specific, would you say that you tend to view political analyses of immigration put forth by conservative think tanks like the Hoover institute to be more persuasive than those of left-leaning think tanks? I’ve read nuanced discussion on the subject from both sides, and some overlap too, but overall conservative tend to be less enthusiastic about the overall social benefits of immigration.

The majority of Americans, including in conservative states, support same sex marriage. Electorates in Missouri, Ohio, Kentucky, Kansas - conservative states - voted to remove abortion restrictions or prevent changes in current law. The Republican party is not driven from the bottom up. It has been taken over by a relatively small group of rabid ideologues whose policies don't match those of their constituents…social conservatism is an important aspect of the Republican electorate, but we don't need all Republican voters. A large percentage of Republicans don't support Trump because of traditional values — T Clark

We’re talking about Trump, not anti-gay, anti-abortion zealots. Trump is neither of those. But his policy views are to the right of old line Conservatives in the mold of Bush, who were not isolationists, did not support Putin, did not support high tariffs, etc. Is Trump and Trumpism (isolationist hyper-nationalism, xenophobia, a zest for tariffs instead of economic globalism, a tendency toward authoritarian rule and a love of authoritarians like Putin) the product of “a relatively small group of rabid ideologues whose policies don't match those of their constituents”? If you believe that, do you realize you’re making the same claim about the basis of MAGA that they make about the basis of your support for liberal candidates? Trump supporters like to argue that a small cabal of progressive zealots (Hillary Clinton, George Soros, Bill Gates) and the liberal press under their control manipulate Democratic voters for their own ends, that support for Trumpism is vastly wider than the liberal press claims it to be because of tampering with the vote by Democratic operatives.

Would the Democrats win back workers if they became America-first isolationists, went for high tariffs, anti-immigrationism and the gutting of Obamacare? Maybe. But would you vote for such a Democrat? And isnt that just MAGA by another name? The Democrats can reinvent themselves in whatever direction they want.Both parties have done so in dramatic fashion over the years. But the question is how they can do so now without turning into another version of Trumpism.

In your assessment, is Trump sincere or simply harnessing the available populism? — Tom Storm

Trump thinks like his supporters, so in that sense he is sincere. That doesn’t mean that he isn’t an opportunist, but he’s an opportunist who sees the world the way they do.