I keep seeing the title as "dermatological ontology".

Getting some skin in the game? — Banno

Actually that's very much it. Ain't no world without skin in the game that we skinbags can know anything about.

Reality apart from human personality is a useful fiction. We don't include potholes on some maps, because it'd be distracting.

For Husserl there is a subject pole and an object pole for every act. These are inseparable aspects of experience. For Heidegger there is the in-between, neither subject nor object. — Joshs

I agree, but we don't want to smooth out the actual personal subject too much, because rationality seems to be normative on the personal level. I can disagree with you but not with myself. We definitely distinguish as personal subjects between other subjects (from whom we demand and to whom we offer reasons) and thermostats or parrots.

Exemplary daily exorcisms of foolery (re: meta-ignorance (i.e. agnotologies (e.g. pseudo-discourses, sophistries)); expectations misaligned with reality (i.e. self-immiseration, alienation, dukkha); maladaptive habits of mind (e.g. mis/ab-uses of communication, judgment, knowledge), etc) aka "spiritual exercises". — 180 Proof

:up:
expectations misaligned with reality
To me this hints at ontology. What is this reality ? The sciences are a prime source of information, but I contend that the personality has to synthesize a 'grand narrative.' Your offering of what philosophy is for is a great example of that.

I'd call that ontology. I don't see how a specialized science could do the same job. To be sure, this kind of ontology might be called 'merely' a private spiritual practice. But I think you and I both aim for a truth that is not merely yours or mine.

The teaching of the sciences embodies the appropriate philosophical ideas for those subjects. — jgill

I very much think that a mathematician or physicist or biologist can do genuine 'ontological' work themselves.

My OP would also apply to nonapplied sciences --anything that the outsider can't cash out in terms of the 'miracle' of technology. A certain kind of pure mathematician is in the same boat as the apparently useless ontologist. [ G. H. Hardy thought his own work was useless, but it became useful (I'm thinking of crypto's use of number theory.) ] But I think both characters are doing something 'scientific.'

But being philosophical might help smooth out the bumps in life. — jgill

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Fair enough. I think all of are philosophical in the navigation of our identity. Who am I ? Who should I be ? Fundamental questions in a free-ish society. Probably literature is just as good if not better at this task (dramaturgical ontology, choice of the hero path, like a discipline or inflexible point of honor.)

you sometimes see ‘scientists puzzled over why consciousness exists’, — Quixodian

I think we both agree that they have simply assumed a flawed ontology. It's crucial that science looks around any particular human subject. It's absurd to radicalize or misunderstand the first genuine necessity and (pretend one can) look around human subjectivity altogether.

I'm a fucking empiricist [ like Husserl, who experience conceptuality as we all do ] , and I can make no sense of human cognition peeping around human cognition. I use my body to see, my brain to think. I can, when I'm around, pretend that I'm not around, but that don't mean I'm not around.

Instead this individual can see farther or better (is less biased or incomplete) than that one.And our specialized knowledge is largely necessarily dormant ('viral' inscriptions) and distributed -- no room for it all in the living single subject. We have to trust one another.

So there's the human/environment dyad and the individual/community dyad in a difficult-to-untangle relationship here, hence the confusion ?

wouldn't it be the case that many people think philosophers have annihilated human values, unleashing relativism, hopelessness and nihilism? — Tom Storm

Excellent question ! For my money, the first big shock was just Voltaire and the wrecking crew of his time. The Enlightenment itself (atheism, humanism, autonomy, democracy) is what seems to trouble most people. Atheism implies/threatens nihilism. Even pluralism makes it hard to believe in my DIY household gods, because humans fundamentally need (are) community and recognition. In my view, this was 'bound' to happen in some way or another, given our nature as 'exponential' 'time-binding' primates. Is the issue that technology didn't bring Utopia ?That we are spoiled freed slaves who take our relative liberty for granted, use it primarily to cry for a return to slavery which is at least less lonely ? [ I'm against resentment. Virtue is its own reward. Hard to let go of wanting a pat on the back of course. ]

You reference more specifically what I'd call educated irrationalism. I see this as offending most people in exactly the same way that Voltaire does. A few others, like Husserl in his day, are offended by the treachery of these paradoxical clerics. More seriously, critical rationality was always already self-critical. Sometimes a daring self-critical thesis is revealed to be unstable or self-cancelling. Ideally this is revealed in conversational research and the thesis is patched or abandoned.

some professional philosophers have been known to pontificate : to speak from authority, — Gnomon

I don't think it's that easy for a professor to speak from authority (they can be ejected for speechcrime), but certain movements seem to take certain assumptions / styles for granted.

complex abstruse esoteric language — Gnomon

Sometimes thinkers are saying simple things in a complicated way.

Sometimes thinkers are saying complicated things in a simple way.

Only insiders can tell the difference. I think this is a hard truth, because one becomes an insider --- able to genuinely follow and appreciate canonical works --- only with years of serious study. I don't pretend that insider-ness is an exact binary status, just to be clear.

Lately I use ontology as a synonym for philosophy because I personally like to stress its [ur-]scientific intention apart from the search from wisdom.

A person can be relatively wise and virtuous without caring much about the fussy details of ontology.

Yesterday, upon the stair,
A hurried man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
I wish, I wish he'd go away... — jgill

:up:
I love this classic. Just a hint of madness. Great parody. Wittgenstein might have included it in his unwritten book o' philosophical jokes. [ I think I saw it where the second line is 'I saw a man who wasn't there.]

Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it's much more serious than that.
— Bill Shankly

Philosophy is football with the universe as the ball, and everyman the referee. — unenlightened

:up:

Great quote. Like it or not, we seemed forced to do philosophy, and I include the possiblity of trying to avoid doing so, which just means a mess inherited unexamined beliefs.

Is the 'examined life' really Better ? I don't know. I can't help myself. Husserl talks in his introduction to the first English translation of Ideas about having fallen in love with philosophy -- as fateful as falling in love with a bad but beautiful woman.

What criteria have to be already in place in order for scientific criticism to be intelligible within any given community of researchers? And what sort of discipline is best suited to question and replace these criteria within which normative questions of truth and falsity, and correctness of method, gain purchase? — Joshs

Did you ever look into Karl-Otto Apel ?

Apel's strong thesis is that his transcendental semiotics yields a set of normative conditions and validity claims presupposed in any critical discussion or rational argumentation. Central among these is the presupposition that a participant in a genuine argument is at the same time a member of a counterfactual, ideal communication community that is in principle equally open to all speakers and that excludes all force except the force of the better argument. Any claim to intersubjectively valid knowledge (scientific or moral-practical) implicitly acknowledges this ideal communication community as a metainstitution of rational argumentation, to be its ultimate source of justification (1980).

https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/apel-karl-otto-1922

I first read about Apel in Zahavi's book on Husserl and intersubjectivity. I take him to be sketching a minimal foundationalism, relying primarily on the exclusion of performative contradiction. This is not so far from Brandom's coherence-aspiring subject. Behind it all is a quest for autonomy.

Ok. The focus on the instruments threw me off. There are norms governing the driving of cars on public roads. Is that significantly different ? I like Popper on this. Science is a secondorder mythmaking tradition. One ought to modify claims in response to effective criticism, the results of experiments, etc. We let our theories do our dying for us, identified more with the critical-synthetic process than with our current pet thesis.

To whose transcendental ego have you favored as your own? — Mww

Feuerbach, following Hegel, perhaps demystifying Hegel, writes pretty well on this stuff. The main idea, beyond our sharing the same sense organs and mammalian feelings, is that we are symbolic-cultural beings. As Husserl puts it, we have categorial intuition. I see an apple as an apple, not as a blob of red. I hear my mom call, not indeterminate noise. Though I can also hear a noise as indeterminate. ' I heard the strangest noise.' We swim in conceptuality like fish in water. And we also live and move and have our being in normativity. We pay debts, keep promises, and keep our stories, try to agree with ourselves at least if not with others. We are fundamentally discursive, temporal, and normative beings. We are also profoundly social, and 'I' am largely 'we,' perhaps even primarily the 'we' of hundreds of long [not-so-]gone generations in terms of the changes they wrought on my current concept system -- the hand-me-down intelligible-discursive structure of my lifeworld even. As Heidegger puts it, the living past leaps ahead as the character of our expectant interpretation. Thrown projection.

Note that the local subject (individual person) matters (Dramaturgical Ontology), but it depends on its community, at least to become a discursive normative being, after which it might become a hermit and write ontology to be published posthumously (or thrown in the fire every morning).

Do these not contradict each other? Or, how do these not contradict each other? Can a thing be both for and through, and independent of that for which it is for and through? — Mww

I use the word 'entangled.' It looks to me like a Mobius strip. What's weird about my view is its stubborn and intense anthropocentrism. Apparently I disagree with early Husserl here in a serious way. It's not about cheerleading the species but rather a fidelity to a genuine empiricism. We are humans, and if roses look red to us...then they just are bloody red. Folks can talk of round squares and 'seeing around' human seeing. We both like Kant. We both know how easy it is to talk nonsense without realizing it. And I am aware that I'm on the edge here myself, trying to juggle hatchets and alligators.

We have no possible experience of world without us. Tautological. The only world that wecan speak about meaningfully (without bluffing) is the one that we've seen with or through our sense organs and timebinding concepts --- the lifeworld.

The donut and the donut hole exist simultaneously and interdependently. This seems to me at the moment like the best way to do justice to both the subject and the object -- and to avoid the absurdities resulting from treating either as absolute or unfounded.

I'm not exactly sure what you are asking. I'd just say that rationality is a kind of virtuous responsibleness. It's like paying one's debts, keeping one's promises. Notice that these are also essentially temporal. A self is a self-referential pattern in the dimension of time. A rational person keeps their story straight.

Are you looking to reduce normativity into something simpler ? If so, it seems to me that one has to argue for such a reduction, a performative contradiction. As far as I can tell, human existence [ I excluse the comatose, infants, etc.] is fundamentally and irreducibly normative.

So no subject/object dualism? — Mww

I am comfortable distinguishing between persons and their encompassing world. But it seems that the world is only for or through such persons. We know nothing about a human-independent world anyway. Folks talk of round squares, to be sure. They abstract/ignore 'functioning subjectivity' within this same 'functioning subjectivity.' In other words, as living persons they fantasize about a world without living persons, but naturally in terms of how that world is given to the human nervous system -- in terms of their experience as living persons in the familiar (life-)world.

Note that the world is independent of any particular individual subject (my mother was here before me), but not of all of them at once. So my 'transcendental ego' is the entire human species.

Of course cultural immortality is a common way to speak of a writer's or artist's mind, as incarnated in objective forms, continuing to "live-on" in the minds of other embodied souls. — Gnomon

And of course that's precisely what I'm referring to.

But such an unexperienced "life" may be cold comfort to the dead or disembodied soul, with no sensory organs plugged into the non-self system. — Gnomon

The issue is perhaps whether one identifies more with the cultural self or its host. To read a great writer is to assimilate, to some degree, the spirit crystallized in the work. I think the marks are themselves 'dead,' but as traces of life they can guide living flesh [or the discursive normative self 'inside' this flesh ] to the same insights that inspired their inscription.
Like anyone, I'm attached to my own flesh. But I can make a respectable empathetic leap as I imagine a young man, with fresh sense organs [my eyesight ain't what it used to be], coming to certain glorious realizations all over again. Maybe, if the gods love me [just an expression --- if I'm lucky, I mean ] , I can even contribute a little footnote to the canon of worthy traces, a slight clarification of the essentially social and universal ontological enterprise -- a noble-seeming aspiration at least.

Really? That's not obvious to me, you'll have to elaborate. — goremand

The notion of being 'rational' is essentially normative (ethical). One prides oneself on not being credulous, on [autonomously] thinking for one's self. One is ashamed to contradict oneself, embarrassed to find oneself caught in a performative contradiction. One resents being described as a kind of 'machine' that did not reasonably (autonomously) decide but was rather 'programmed' by its environment. 'You are just saying that because you are white/black, male/female, rich/poor, straight/gay.'

This folk psychologism is a twoedged sword. If I'm an irrational robot, then why aren't you ? Precisely when you make such a self-cancelling claim ?

Rationality is universal. It applies to all of us in the rational community. You don't get your own logic. Neither do I. It's an aspect of a humanism which has liberated itself from scripture. Both the species and its individuals are grasped as autonomous beings, ideally subject only to the laws they themselves recognize as legitimate. Basically, rational people all agree that they have a sort of better self in common, namely a rationality that binds them all. 'May the best human win [ may we fallibly defer for now to whoever makes the best case.]'

Brandom focuses on this sort of thing. He calls it scorekeeping. As discursive subjects, we all hold one another responsible for our claims. The basic rule is that you can disagree with me, but you can't disagree with yourself. For the notion of the rational self is precisely of its logical cohesion or unity.

Kant’s most basic idea, the axis around which all his thought turns, is that what distinguishes exercises of judgment and intentional agency from the performances of merely natural creatures is that judgments and actions are subject to distinctive kinds of normative assessment. Judgments and actions are things we are in a distinctive sense responsible for. They are a kind of commitment we undertake. Kant understands judging and acting as applying rules, concepts, that determine what the subject becomes committed to and responsible for by applying them. Applying concepts theoretically in judgment and practically in action binds the concept user, commits her, makes her responsible, by opening her up to normative assessment according to the rules she has made herself subject to.

The responsibility one undertakes by applying a concept is a task responsibility: a commitment to do something. On the theoretical side, what one is committed to doing, what one becomes liable to assessment as to one’s success at doing, is integrating one’s judgments into a whole that exhibits a distinctive kind of unity: the synthetic unity of apperception. It is a systematic, rational unity, dynamically created and sustained by drawing inferential consequences from and finding reasons for one’s judgments, and rejecting commitments incompatible with those one has undertaken.

Here's another one.

The essential point is that in characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says. — Sellars

Ah, I see. My take is that subjectivity requires a world that encompasses it to make sense as subjectivity. So I can't make sense of the world as fundamentally or most basically an independent subject.

On the other hand, I only know my own encompassing world in terms of the 'lens' or 'window' of my cultural human flesh which seems to contribute to the meaningfulness and color of the lifeworld. In my weird direct realist view, roses really are red. One might say that human cognition paints them red, so that they aren't really red, but to me this is a bluff --- for we can't see around human cognition. The world we can talk about is exactly the world for human cognition. The world apart from human cognition is a kind of bad check that cannot be cashed, a round square.

Human bodies are real;
Experience is a condition of an intelligent subject;
The body is not an intelligent subject;
Bodies do not experience. — Mww

OK. I take it that you endorse something like an immaterial discursive subject ?
Correlated with the body ? Or what ?

Speaking more carefully, I'd say the subject is just a person, a total human being. We typically say a person 'has' a body because of our profound timebinding conceptuality and, as Brandom takes from Kant, the profound normativity of the discursive subject. Basically the personal subject lives, as discursive and rational, in a ( normative ) space of reasons.

So I'll concede that, strictly speaking, bodies do not experience.

Yes, precisely that meaning of free. Regarding our 'eerie temporality', I have lately been speculating on the forum whether consciousness might not actually exist - ie. have a "size" - in the temporal dimension, versus just traversing time. — Pantagruel

Have you looked into Husserl's notion of the smeared moment ? Like T. S. Eliot, he thinks about what it means to listen to music. In short, there's no 'pure' (punctual, pointish) now but always anticipation and drag. So even the now is smeared, if we ignore the useful calculus fiction and just direct our attention to how life is given to us.

I haven't heard of Brandom. I have a rather love-hate relationship with linguistics. — Pantagruel

Some of his work gets too deep in the linguistic weeds for my taste. But his creative reinterpretation of Kant's unity of apperception is great.

As I understand his work, Kant’s most basic idea, the axis around which all his thought turns, is that what distinguishes exercises of judgment and intentional agency from the performances of merely natural creatures is that judgments and actions are subject to distinctive kinds of normative assessment. Judgments and actions are things we are in a distinctive sense responsible for. They are a kind of commitment we undertake. Kant understands judging and acting as applying rules, concepts, that determine what the subject becomes committed to and responsible for by applying them. Applying concepts theoretically in judgment and practically in action binds the concept user, commits her, makes her responsible, by opening her up to normative assessment according to the rules she has made herself subject to.

The responsibility one undertakes by applying a concept is a task responsibility: a commitment to do something. On the theoretical side, what one is committed to doing, what one becomes liable to assessment as to one’s success at doing, is integrating one’s judgments into a whole that exhibits a distinctive kind of unity: the synthetic unity of apperception. It is a systematic, rational unity, dynamically created and sustained by drawing inferential consequences from and finding reasons for one’s judgments, and rejecting commitments incompatible with those one has undertaken. Apperceiving, the characteristically sapient sort of awareness, is discursive (that is, conceptual) awareness.

For it consists in integrating judgments into a unity structured by relations of what judgments provide reasons for and against what others. And those rational relations among judgments are determined by the rules, that is the concepts, one binds oneself by in making the judgments. Each new episode of experience, paradigmatically the making of a perceptual judgment, requires integration into, and hence transformation of the antecedent constellation of commitments. New incompatibilities can arise, which must be dealt with critically by rejecting or modifying prior commitments. New joint consequences can ensue, which must be acknowledged or rejected. The process by which the whole evolves and develops systematically is a paradigmatically rational one, structured by the rhythm of inhalation or amplification by acknowledging new commitments and extracting new consequences, and exhalation or criticism by rejecting or adjusting old commitments in the light of their rational relations to the new ones.
....
But the minimal unit of responsibility is the judgment. It is judgments, not concepts, that one can invest one’s authority in, commit oneself to, by integrating them into an evolving constellation that exhibits the rational synthetic unity of apperception. Accordingly, in a radical break with his predecessors, Kant takes judgments to be the minimal units of awareness and experience.

https://sites.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/Texts/From_German_Idealism_to_American_Pragmat.pdf

The discursive self is then essentially normative and (Brandom doesn't stress this in this passage) deeply temporal. For I am bound to previous commitments as I contemplate new ones, though I can of course rebuild myself slowly like Neurath's boat.

More generally, Brandom at his best makes the essence of rationality dazzlingly explicit to itself. His website is full of great free texts if you happen to want more.

Sure, and then I'd probably pull the hand back and start screaming, as that is the usual functional response. The functionalist account is in no way lacking in terms of explaining human behavior. — goremand

I don't resent functionalism as a mapping strategy, but on a more serious ontological level it looks absurd to me.

You seem to imply that your words are as empty of meaning as those of a stochastic parrot. You talk of 'explaining' but (respectfully) seem to be reluctant to admit the existence of concepts (the experience of meaning.) Am I to believe you when you speak like the dude in Roadhouse? Is it true that pain don't hurt ? Do you not see that you are making the bold controversial claim here ?

'You don't hear that music...you just think you do. But you also don't have the thought that you hear that music. You have no interior. Not even the illusion of the interior is in there. This conversation never happened. You are an algorithm, because that's convenient for me.'

You seem to miss that science and philosophy exist within a 'field' of normativity. Speaking of human speech acts as merely causal is a self-subverting psychologism. Such an assumption is an analogue of 'I am lying' or 'nothing is true' or 'logic is irrational.' Husserl's critique of psychologicism is illuminating, as is Karl-Otto Apel's description of something like a minimal foundation of assumptions which are already implicit in the concept of philosophy.

In short, there's a line beyond which skepticism is confused performative contradiction, and it's easy to cross that line. One is sure one is being careful, yet the fear of error is the error itself (alluding to Hegel's critique of methodological solipsism.)

Nicely put. I'd say the species itself is similarly entangled with the biosphere, etc. ie. That there is tiered entanglement from most to least animate (correlating with the conditions of being law-governed versus free). — Pantagruel

Thanks ! All this entanglement is another way to say holism perhaps.

By 'free' do you mean normative reason-giving entities like us ? I'm a fan of Brandom. I tend to understand freedom in terms of timebinding responsibility for the coherence of deeds which include speech acts. The responsible subject ( the rational agent ) is very much temporally stretched. Did you ever look at Flatland ? The author used space, but it occurs to me now how eerily temporal humans are relative to other creatures we're aware of. We are spheres among circles if time is spatialized.

Brain storming/imagineering/musing/rumination! which is unrestricted by any notion of 'can't go there because.....'
Such, can cause thoughts in scientists that that they would otherwise, never have thought of. — universeness

:up:

Reminds me of Popper's appreciation of metaphysics. I know also that some great scientists have loved philosophy.

:up:

Also (as I'm sure you know) there's 'masters and possessors of nature' from Descartes.

Feuerbach finds it (this basically Luciferian humanism) implicit in Christianity's theism.

But if man is the end of creation, he is also the true cause of creation, for the end is the principle of action. The distinction between man as the end of creation, and man as its cause, is only that the cause is the latent, inner man, the essential man, whereas the end is the self-evident, empirical, individual man, – that man recognizes himself as the end of creation, but not as the cause, because he distinguishes the cause, the essence from himself as another personal being.

But this other being, this creative principle, is in fact nothing else than his subjective nature separated from the limits of individuality and materiality, i.e., of objectivity, unlimited will, personality posited out of all connection with the world, – which by creation, i.e., the positing of the world, of objectivity, of another, as a dependent, finite, non-essential existence, gives itself the certainty of its exclusive reality. The point in question in the Creation is not the truth and reality of the world, but the truth and reality of personality, of subjectivity in distinction from the world. The point in question is the personality of God; but the personality of God is the personality of man freed from all the conditions and limitations of Nature. Hence the fervent interest in the Creation, the horror of all pantheistic cosmogonies. The Creation, like the idea of a personal God in general, is not a scientific, but a personal matter; not an object of the free intelligence, but of the feelings; for the point on which it hinges is only the Guarantee, the last conceivable proof and demonstration of personality or subjectivity as an essence quite apart, having nothing in common with Nature, a supra- and extra-mundane entity.

Man distinguishes himself from Nature. This distinction of his is his God: the distinguishing of God from Nature is nothing else than the distinguishing of man from Nature.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/essence/ec10.htm

It's hard to make sense of your talk of all of those useless fictions. Is anything real ? If not, then 'fiction' is meaningless.

Are you really (earnestly) claiming that human bodies experiencing the world aren't real ? What can 'real' even mean in such a context?

Agreed, semantic robustness is valued in science. — PhilosophyRunner

Just to be clear, I'm not pissing on science. I love science.

But I've got some experience with math and physics (went to school for that kind of thing, also computer science), and to me it seemed that people all too readily settled for a very 'local' semantics. It's presumably because of the specialization of knowledge. Everyone is afraid perhaps to speak outside their little yard. The positivist boogey man will get them ?

:up:
Yes, ethically motivated.

At the very least, earnest ontology is a will toward truth. I bring no blueprint for the better mousetrap. I like to think that I aspire toward a relatively radical self-honesty for its own sake (which is maybe to say that I find self-honesty apriori noble or worthy and worth striving towards.) It's important to be honest with others, but this is trickier, for reasons I probably don't need to go into.

However if you set up a questionnaire that you asked a selected representative sample in the mall, where in addition to verbose answers they also rated parts of their experience on a numerical scale, you are likely to find it easier to get that published in a scientific journal. It would also help if you performed a statistical analysis of the responses. — PhilosophyRunner

Sure. I happen to be trained in statistics. But you are arguing the trivial claim that Husserl, for instance, is not understood as a natural scientist. No one disputes that.

A phenomenologist, though, might ask what the hell a p-value actually means. I don't mean its fairly clear technical meaning, which I understand better than most, but its larger meaning in relation to the world as a whole ---its place in the lifeworld. As Russell put it, math is the game where we never know and don't even care what we are talking about. Except I'm not a logicist, or a formalist. Intuition plays an important role, even if 'diagrams' and numerals are necessary supplements.

Where I see a divide between phenomenology and science is in the method. Science (I would say all sciences) requires a level of methodological robustness that is not required by phenomenology. — PhilosophyRunner

Phenomenology is obsessively methodical, though. I'm talking about Husserl and early Heidegger. Obsessively methodical.

You can talk to people in a mall about experience and write a book about it in free form, and this book may be well received in phenomenology circles. — PhilosophyRunner

I really don't personally mind if you are sold on the wonders of phenomenology, but such a statement suggests that you haven't much looked into it. Correct me if I am wrong, and I don't intend to be rude.

.

.
We definitely value predictive power, but I'd say that semantic robustness (an intensely developed clarity) is another genuine value that can't be quantified.

People can talk to one another and get a sense of others' development in this dimension on this or that topic, so it's not entirely subjective. It's just messier than physics. Like Husserl, I was a math guy before I got into phenomenology. We all learned the math without bothering to talk about what it all meant. Which statements were justified was clear enough, but what those statements really meant was hardly addressed. Ontology is so squishy and 'just opinion,' right ? [Ah but that's an ontological claim...]

In my view, Husserl was reacting to the groundlessness of science of his day. It was impressive and successful in some sense, but it was 'floating' semantically. What did it mean ? So he looked into the deepest and most foundational nature of logic and conceptuality. This project in itself is like the essence of philosophy as a kind of science of science. For Husserl, and for any genuine philosophy, conceptuality is not subjective. My act of thinking about numbers is mine, but the numbers have a sort of independence, if not perhaps from all human cognition of them, at least from any particular human's cognition of them. I note that Popper eventually postulated his World 2 and his World 3, which is not so far off.

Ok but well, that intuition is bound to vary from one person to another. If we want meaningful discussion and not just sit around in a room and think (though I guess Husserl loved that) we can't insist only on our preferred way of conceptualizing. I someone has a problem with how you conceptualize experience you can't get around this by saying "it's irreducible". — goremand

Have you looked into Popper's idea of basic statements ? Inquiry has no choice but to sometimes take some claims for granted. It can always return to problematize them.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/#BasiStatFalsConv

In essence, basic statements are for Popper logical constructs which embrace and include ‘observation statements’, but for methodological reasons he seeks to avoid that terminology, as it suggests that they are derived directly from, and known by, experience (2002: 12, footnote 2), which would conflate them with the “protocol” statements of logical positivism and reintroduce the empiricist idea that certain kinds of experiential reports are incorrigible. The “objectivity” requirement in Popper’s account of basic statements, by contrast, amounts to a rejection of the view that the truth of scientific statements can ever be reduced to individual or collective human experience. (2002: 25).

Popper therefore argues that there are no statements in science which cannot be interrogated: basic statements, which are used to test the universal theories of science, must themselves be inter-subjectively testable and are therefore open to the possibility of refutation. He acknowledges that this seems to present a practical difficulty, in that it appears to suggest that testability must occur ad infinitum, which he acknowledges is an operational absurdity: sooner or later all testing must come to an end. Where testing ends, he argues, is in a convention-based decision to accept a basic statement or statements; it is at that point that convention and intersubjective human agreement play an indispensable role in science:

Every test of a theory, whether resulting in its corroboration or falsification, must stop at some basic statement or other which we decide to accept. If we do not come to any decision, and do not accept some basic statement or other, then the test will have led nowhere. (2002: 86)

In the past, I've argued pretty reductively against a focus on subjectivity, and it's true that rational norms and concepts are primarily public and ego-transcending, or philosophy would be impossible.
So I'm with you on a fidelity to the tradition of critical thought. We cannot, except at the risk of performative contradiction, argue against the conditions for the possibility of rational discourse.

But we must also avoid simply adopting yesterday's ontologies and milking them for therefore unjustified epistemologies. (Truly ontology and epistemology look endlessly entangled.)

I think there's a strong argument that the world that humans can talk about without spouting nonsense is only given through or to human beings. This world is real, and not our dream, but we can't say anything about it apart from our entanglement with it. Its mode of being given to us is something that we aren't going to put under a microscope. The world is there, it has being. As John Berger puts it, seeing transcends concepts. I can look around and yet not put my seeing as seeing into words, though I can of course report what I see.

I claim that an honest look at your own experience will reveal that you, like me, see objects right away as of a certain kind. I see apples, not red lumps. I can focus on the redness of the apple, ignore everything else, peel that redness off. None of this is more or less strange than 'intuition is bound to vary from one person to another.' You trust in our sharing, more or less, in a realm of public concepts. Should I ask you to put these concepts under a microscope ? That's like putting a smell under a microscope or holding a microphone up to a picture. The world is given in different dimensions or aspects simultaneously, including a conceptual dimension or aspect. If someone wants to play skeptic and deny it, it's hard to take them seriously, for don't they offer universal concepts that are supposed to bind me as a rational agent ?

For human beings in general, as normative subjects, responsible for their utterances, and for philosophy in its deepest intention and essence, the 'space of reasons' (Sellars) comes first. It's a performative contradiction to argue otherwise. So we need not construct it from or justify it in terms of something else. At most we can explicate/unfold its way of being.

Even scientistic secular humanists, a tiny subset of the population, are lit up with the holy fire of the righteous truth, and they count themselves as members of the one of the countless versions of spiritual-cultural Elite.

The Q-Anon lady is heroically doing Research and saving children from demons who merely look like humans. And so on.

William James nailed it. We are fundamentally dramatic-heroic beings, understanding the world as a stage for good guys and bad guys -- vertically.

It says that intelligent agents such as ourselves can be explained and understood solely in those terms, and that the qualitative domain - the felt quality of existence - has no intrinsic reality apart from that. — Quixodian

If the point is just that mind is embodied, that the subject needs a world, then I agree. But of course I insist that we live in quality and meaning, and that primarily quantitive 'maps' are something like useful fictions or mere aspects of the larger lifeworld.

Hence the requirement for the vertical dimension, the qualitative domain. — Quixodian

Ah but you speak as if we don't all of us already live in such a domain. In our historically late liberal pluralistic societies, we are lost in a maze of differing conceptions of that vertical dimensions. Socrates is probably only possible within such 'decadence.'

People crave community. They also crave recognition as individuals.

The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.
...
Mankind’s common instinct for reality has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism. In heroism, we feel, life’s supreme mystery is hidden. — William James

These days, when I hope to win another human being's attention and respect for my precious individual snowflake value, I have to compete not with other individuals but with the entire internet, a veritable dream machine, all others individuals at once, expertly curated by bespoke filters. So we largely bore and annoy one another, at least when sex is not an option and there's no money or fame to be obtained via cooperation. Of course parents and children often have strong bonds, at least when the children are young.
***
The most plausible situation I might have bothered hoping for once is a generalized Denmark. It's not that I don't feel your sense of something missing in our style of civilization. But then I think 'Solomon' is right about some kind of fundamental emptiness to human things. A show entirelessly without substance. But one can only say so with a complicated irony. Life is richly meaningful in one sense and yet lacking 'substance' in another sense.

Nihilism and transcendence sleep in the same bed.

Discursive practice is made of the fundamental particles of the universe which is the intra-action. She talks about discursive practice rather than the atomic 'speech act'. Our discussion and her book are defining each other in a mutual process, a thread is an experiment that might work or not. — unenlightened

I think we are mostly on the same page. The 'Lifeworld' is a dynamic meaningdripping unity. But it's given through or to distinct personalities in distinct bodies, which are admittedly permeable and do not have exact boundaries.

You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44214/preludes-56d22338dc954

Where in his works does Kant clearly and convincingly explain precisely how the "nature" of a given empirical object of everyday a posteriori experience can be generated by human sensibility and understanding simply applying space, time, and the categories to what he calls the given manifold of sensation? — charles ferraro

I think he 'illegally' takes for granted the commonsense realism that grasps in the usual way the causal relationships between eyes and apples and trombones and ears. This same commonsense realism is absurdly denied by simultaneously (tacitly) being appealed to. Kant inherited the methodological solipsism from others. Philosophers generally took it as obvious, despite its serious shortcomings, because of its genuine advantages.

In the sciences we see emergent hierarchies, and the lower do provide the foundations for the higher, but it certainly doesn't follow that the higher can be exhaustively explained or adequately described in terms of the lower. — Janus

:up:

This is part of my point in Dramaturgical Ontology. Personality is a very 'high' or complex thing, yet its function is absolutely fundamental. It is the window through which the world shines, but it's stained glass. The world depends on my personality, as does my personality on the world. And this is true for all of us. And it's an old insight. Attitude changes the object. The stoic works at transcending resentment and greed, changing the world he lives in by changing the lens through which is shines. So the high and the low are terribly entangled.

The reductionist is an escapist, enjoying the temporary relief that comes when complexity is simply ignored rather than clarified. To be fair, it's nice to get lost in maps that don't include the terrible self-referential complexity of ontology. I love a game of chess.