The counterpart of science in the political world is the modern Liberal state, which, Habermas reminds us, maintains “a neutrality . . . towards world views,” that is, toward comprehensive visions (like religious visions) of what life means, where it is going and what we should be doing to help it get there. The problem is that a political structure that welcomes all worldviews into the marketplace of ideas, but holds itself aloof from any and all of them, will have no basis for judging the outcomes its procedures yield. Worldviews bring with them substantive long-term goals that serve as a check against local desires. Worldviews furnish those who live within them with reasons that are more than merely prudential or strategic for acting in one way rather than another. — Does Reason Know what it is Missing? Stanley Fish, NY Times
Which reflects back on that age-old dilemma….the body is certainly necessary, but it is not itself sufficient for such subjectivity. What is given to the cultural flesh is useless without that which has the capacity to do something with it, and even if cultural flesh is merely a euphemism for the brain, the knowledge how regarding subjectivity, is still as missing as it ever was. — Mww
This what I meant by "laying claim to words" earlier, you have claimed the word "blueness" and "pain", and now I look stupid by having to deny that I experience color or pain. It is very important that you answer my question directly, no matter how stupid it sounds: why do you believe that you feel pain or that you experience blueness? — goremand
:up:I can’t say I understand, everything you’ve written. But I agree with everything I understand. — Patterner
I wouldn't be too sure about the "abandonment" in actual practice . . . . down deep scientists have ideas they hope will be substantiated by experiment or shown to be wrong. Preferably the former. They are, by and large, human and hope to get there first. On the other hand pure curiosity can be a driving force. — jgill
It is this that allows for, as Kant argued, faith, and I also think it allows for all kinds of wonderful metaphysical speculations, which seem to me just fine provided they are not taken too seriously. — Janus
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schlegel/#RomTur“Philosophy is the true home of irony, which might be defined as logical beauty,” Schlegel writes in Lyceumfragment 42: “for wherever men are philosophizing in spoken or written dialogues, and provided they are not entirely systematic, irony ought to be produced and postulated.” The task of a literary work with respect to irony is, while presenting an inherently limited perspective, nonetheless to open up the possibility of the infinity of other perspectives: “Irony is, as it were, the demonstration [epideixis] of infinity, of universality, of the feeling for the universe” (KA 18.128); irony is the “clear consciousness of eternal agility, of an infinitely teeming chaos” (Ideas 69). A literary work can do this, much as Schlegel’s Lucinde had, by presenting within its scope a range of possible alternate plots or by mimicking the parabasis in which the comic playwright interposed himself within the drama itself or the role of the Italian buffo or clown (Lyceumfragment 42) who disrupts the spectator’s narrative illusion. (Some of the more striking examples of such moments of ironic interposition in the works of Schlegel’s literary contemporaries can be found in the comedies of Tieck—where, as Szondi (1986) argues, it is not merely the actor or playwright who “steps out” of his usual role, but in some sense the very role itself.)
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For Schlegel “every proof is infinitely perfectible” (KA XVIII, 518, #9), and the task of philosophy is not one of searching to find an unconditioned first principle but rather one of engaging in an (essentially coherentist) process of infinite progression and approximation.
For me the importance of the in-itself and the noumenal consists in its sustaining the realization that existence is, no matter how familiar it may seem, ultimately ineluctably mysterious. — Janus
The fact that the philosopher claims to speak in the very name of the naïve evidence of the world, that he refrains from adding any thing to it, that he limits himself to drawing out all its consequences, does not excuse him; on the contrary he dispossesses [humanity] only the more completely, inviting it to think of itself as an enigma.
This is the way things are and nobody can do anything about it. It is at the same time true that the world is what we see and that, nonetheless, we must learn to see it— first in the sense that we must match this vision with knowledge, take possession of it, say what we and what seeing are, act therefore as if we knew nothing about it, as if here we still had everything to learn. But philosophy is not a lexicon, it is not concerned with “word-meanings,” it does not seek a verbal substitute for the world we see, it does not transform it into something said, it does not install itself in the order of the said or of the written as does the logician in the proposition, the poet in the word, or the musician in the music. It is the things themselves, from the depths of their silence, that it wishes to bring to expression. If the philosopher questions, and hence feigns ignorance of the world and of the vision of the world which are operative and take form continually within him, he does so precisely in order to make them speak, because he believes in them and expects from them all his future science. The questioning here is not a beginning of negation, a perhaps put in the place of being. It is for philosophy the only way to conform itself with the vision we have in fact, to correspond with what, in that vision, provides for thought, with the paradoxes of which that vision is made, the only way to adjust itself to those figured enigmas, the thing and the world, whose massive being and truth teem with incompossible details. — The Visible and the Invisible
I also agree that when we try to imagine the existence of the world prior to humans we project our (necessarily) anthropomorphic cognitions. — Janus
On other hand I think it is implausible in the extreme to think that the prehuman world did not exist or that its existence was "human-shaped", even though we are unable to think its existence in prehuman terms (obviously). — Janus
We can't know the in itself, even if only by stipulation, but I believe we can think more or less coherently and plausibly about it. — Janus
We can't know the in itself, even if only by stipulation, but I believe we can think more or less coherently and plausibly about it. — Janus
I'm ambivalent about science too, though, if it morphs into a scientism that claims that everything about animals and humans can be empirically determined. — Janus
But then there is a basic observational aspect of science which is just an amplification of our ordinary observations of the world. For example, "It is raining", "water flows downhill" and countless other everyday observations which can be definitively corroborated or falsified. — Janus
We humans reify our own subjective perspective with the noun label "Self". Since the Self exists invisibly & implicitly inside a vehicle of mud matter, we have no cause to worry about its substance or provenance : the Self is simply Me, and always has been. — Gnomon
Morally, the immaterial sensing Self is more important than the animated body, but since the essence is dependent upon the substance, we have no alternative to treating Body & Self as a unique composite entity : matter/life, brain/mind. — Gnomon
I agree. — Janus
Those "things" of the senses are of a collaborative nature; they exist as affects between what appears to us as the body and what appears to us as its environment, replete with other bodies, animate and inanimate, photons and other phenomena. — Janus
I also think things are just the way they appear (and can appear, with the augmentations of our senses afforded by equipment like telescopes, microscopes, spectroscopes, colliders and so forth). — Janus
I think it follows that there cannot be the kind of strict intersubjective corroboration, which is possible in science, but there can be intersubjective assent to, or dissent from, its findings in the form of 'yes, that's how it seems to me" or 'no, that is not how it seems to me'. — Janus
:up:Phenomenology does not investigate the nature of the things themselves as they appear to us, but rather attempts to investigate the nature of the appearing itself. — Janus
There's a word for 'embodied subjects' that applies to all sentient organisms, and by which we ourselves are routinely described - that is, 'being'. — Quixodian
That's why I will often say (usually to much derision) that the nature of being is the proper study of ontology, and that it should be distinguished from the objective analysis of whatever exists. — Quixodian
Even Husserl recognized that the ego is nothing but an empty zero point of activity, harboring no intrinsic a priori content. This empty ego is not a person, or a human, or a subject. — Joshs
Damasio emphasizes that a brain's first task is keeping the body it's in in the homeostatic happy zone. The brain only models the world in order to better maintain the body it's responsible for. — Srap Tasmaner
I think we have to accept both that what we experience as the 'external world' is a construction, and that we know this precisely because we do know something about how this construction is done. — Srap Tasmaner
There could be that moment of "Why am I doing any of this?" when stuck in traffic on your way to the laboratory. — schopenhauer1
Yes I gathered what you were saying and hence why I was saying that human condition comes first, then investigation and post-facto explanation — schopenhauer1
That does seem to be true. We give reasons for why we do something. What is that, but a story or narrative? We are the creature that has reasons not just causes. — schopenhauer1
I am in general agreement, but would not characterize the statis as "disguised". — Fooloso4
I think this is a bit besides the point — schopenhauer1
Sublimation is the refocusing of energy away from negative outlets, toward positive ones. The individuals distance themselves and look at their existence from an aesthetic point of view (e.g., writers, poets, painters). Zapffe himself pointed out that his produced works were the product of sublimation. — Wiki
The modern philosophers gave themselves a task not entertained by the ancients, to master nature. Philosophy was no longer about the problem of how to live but to solve problems by changing the conditions of life. — Fooloso4
Husserl justifies the noumena Kant prohibits, by assigning a different quality and domain to transcendental logic. — Mww
You won't find it under a microscope. — schopenhauer1
I had a thread on evolutionary psychology where it is debatable how much of human psychology is shaped by biological natural selection (rather than cultural learning): — schopenhauer1
the professionalization of academia and the economic changes of specialized “jobs” has been internalized by nearly everyone, to the point where general inquiry and thoughtfulness is compartmentalized unnecessarily. — Mikie
The point being: the names are fine for ordinary life and convenience. But we shouldn’t take them too seriously. Nearly everyone has the potential to “do” philosophy. It’s just a particular kind of thinking — Mikie
There is a way in which there is something it is like to be me that does not apply to our machine that distinguishes colors and reacts to them in different ways — Patterner
The human condition is our self-awareness. We must deal with our Zapffean programming. Science is a pursuit. The human condition is our very being. The human condition is primary to scientific artifices. — schopenhauer1
So the project is to find a way to explore that aspect that science has neglected by design, that we are calling subjectivity for the moment, and that cannot be the scientific method, but might be, I don't know, poetic, confessional, artistic, moral, sentimental, meditative, spiritual? Perhaps the method of no method? — unenlightened
The rational or theoretical assimilation and dissolution of the God who is other-worldly to religion, and hence not given to it as an object, is the speculative philosophy.
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The essence of speculative philosophy is nothing other than the rationalised, realised, actualised essence of God. The speculative philosophy is the true, consistent, rational theology.
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The proof of the proposition that the divine essence is the essence of reason or intelligence lies in the fact that the determinations or qualities of God, in so far as they are rational or intelligible and not determinations of sensuousness or imagination, are, in fact, qualities of reason.
“God is the infinite being or the being without any limitations whatsoever.” But what cannot be a limit or boundary on God can also not be a limit or boundary on reason. If, for example, God is elevated above all limitations of sensuousness, so, too, is reason. He who cannot conceive of any entity except as sensuous, that is, he whose reason is limited by sensuousness, can only have a God who is limited by sensuousness. Reason, which conceives God as an infinite being, conceives, in point of fact, its own infinity in God.
So when you say 'the truth, not just yours or mine', that's what I mean when I refer to THE mind, not your or my mind. You and I are examples or instantiations of the cultural- and species mind. Individuation is an attribute of only the very topmost level of that mind. But that is the mind which the world is not independent of or apart from - not your mind or mine, but THE mind. It's almost like 'mind at large' but it's important not to objectify or reify it. — Quixodian