I don't think in bullets points. Mind is holism.

If......,then? Are you quite sure you know what this means? If "if" is, there is no "if" about it! If "if" is not, it's all pretty damn iffy! Is "then" continuous to this dilemma?

Well, perhaps I seem impertinent. When others bring up authors I become impatient. Why do so many philosophy discussions hinge on the character of authors of texts? In physics, there is lots of interest in who Newton was, but we do not go on endlessly about the guy's psychic makeup in an effort to understand his three laws of motion. Why then do we do so in philosophy? There is a reason. Human character is the central theme and meaning and mystery of philosophy, and yet it is fundamental to the conduct of philosophy, especially in a scholastic or academic setting, to repudiate this. But despite this, careerists harp on personalities as if crucial to ideas. I read the same books others read, and maybe then some, but I see little point in lengthy discussions on the ideas of third parties. I prefer what might be called 'table stakes'. Fine, refer to texts and authors if you will, and certainly give credit where it is due, but discussions should be limited to the actual views of the actual interlocutors. Little is to be gained by bashing heads over what is going on in a third party's mind, though this is precisely what those who have or aspire to a career in the field not only deem a worthwhile activity, but the only activity permissible. I had one instructor who made an assertion to his class that he believed an original idea impossible. “The scariest thing in the world,” he said, “is a blank page!” This attitude derives from the very real circumstance that reason cannot proceed without its antecedent terms. It is from this that Heidegger derives the, false, assertion that “Dasein is always already in a world.” And, presumably because this is internally inexplicable, “Dasein is always in a mood.” I wonder if the term 'Dasein' might not have an alternative origin, not “Da-sein”, but “Das-ein”, that one there. It certainly biases us to regarding person as a quantifier. But time is a value or worth, not a quantity. And its most explicit term is the characterology of a necessary yet untenable presumption and prior, a priori, commitment to understanding time as a quantity. Quantum theory is a reduction. It is the derivative, the summation of mathematically defined and ordered probabilities reduced to presumably uniform quantities. What gets forgotten is that the result of this calculus enforces being unrecognized the real energy of the indefinable differences this process obscures. The enigma arises because one set of valid reductive terms results in a detectable event that represents one reality, while another set of equally valid reductive terms results in a contradictory event. Something is clearly going on that exceeds our confidence in the calculation. But what does this might be our misperception of the need for antecedent terms, or for how real and prior to our finding it we assume the world to be. That is, we take the received terms, rational logical or mathematical antecedence, or world, to be inductive. As if the product of the reduction were a justification or discovery of the inductive term antecedent to it. But the evidence, in quantum, cosmology, even logic sociology and political entities or polities, is that the product of the reduction is proof of the untenable character of the induction, and that, therefore, the intimate result of the reduction, the final reductive term, is the inductive term. That is, the changing character of our presuming induction is antecedent to rational reduction. In the world that difference reveals itself as an enigmatic universe, at the extreme scale, however obvious and profane and face-value may seem the macro. But its most explicit term, and language of presumed induction and rigor of reduction, is the characterology of that presumption. That is, it is the character of changing commitment to that presumption each of us is, and the drama of evincing that difference each of us is, through each other, to that presumption that discourse generates. It really is the most personal and intimate interactions amongst us that generates that language of our perceptions of even the most “objective” and “rigorous” calculative terms. The least term of matter is an unquantifiable probability, or mathematical impossibility. But even this has a real outcome, for chaos is only chaos if nothing in it pertains to the quantifier. However, if there are communities in this chaos that oppose each other in any term of that quantification, such that the untenable presumption of a priori induction becomes recognizable, then something real occurs, something as real as the wholesale re-characterization of antecedence. Hawkings thought we could obviate this by pretending that community, his 'string theory', is quantifiable. But the material effect of that infinitesimal chaos is not yet reductive enough for the full explication of the real. A further reductive term is required. That further reductive term, so far as we yet can know, is the human person, and the discourse of persons intimating the characterology, through each other, of the language of our changing confidence in the precedence of the quantifier. Heidegger is committed to Being as the inductive term a priori to reduction, and is therefore, either in his early or late works, not giving us any perspective of a real world.

Gary's 1st law: The least term of time is all the differing it is.

And I thought scholasticism was dead! But the ghost of The Duns still lingers among us, it seems!

Does A=A? or does A=B? Can both be "true"?
Does 1+1=2? Which one? How many is one?
If 1+1=2, how the hell does A=A? Or A=B? Is A one thing and B another? Are they two?
How much confusion does it take to get those committed to such nonsense to ask a simple question about their fundamentals?

Putting down Sartre is as popular a sport as always, it seemve you read his two works on 'imagination'? You see, he caught-up Husserl (and he was more a student of Husserl than Heidegger) in the 'intentional act'. In his later work, albeit strewn throughout with the angst of his times, he graphically draws our attention to the infernal isolation of the methods and practices of his time, and ours. You cannot 'deconstruct' a mistake. All we can do is exacerbate it. Viva la 'differance'? How do we break the isolation? At least Existentialism brings our attention to the issue. Sartre offers no solution, he is committed to the stand that it would be dishonest to do so, and we should admire him for that honesty, which we cannot say for Heidegger. But there is a solution. A solution so real that we stumble through it even in the most intensive commitment to deny it. That is, there are changes in the certitude of our presumptions even as we pursue an effort to secure them. Those changes are called emotions. They do not secure anything as true or real, but they do evoke the terms necessary to pretend we can be sure about what we deem true and real. It is as much a mistake to embrace the flow of that evocative change as it is to pretend it is impertinent. But these two mistakes divide and yet encompass philosophy today. The truer and realer dynamic is that, by expressing who each of us is, and by posing real variations to the meaning of the terms we otherwise think we share, the personal character of each one of us becomes the origin of the terms the other employs to deny the reality and pertinence of the changes that come to those terms, through each of us. The isolation is the myth, that we need each other, and need each other free from each other, is what is real. It is the defeat switch to the isolation both science and myth would hang around our necks.

Actually, Heidegger, infamously, wrote the book on metaphysics. Quantum physics is a summation of anomaly reduced to the infinitesimal. The theory is that this summation is accurate because the anomaly is rendered so close to zero as to be mathematically equivalent. Unfortunately, to complete the argument requires that that value, 1/∞, as a positive value and as zero. We 'zero-in' on the value that mathematics cannot define or describe, and then cancel it out. The thing is, the very value we pretend to be looking for gets discarded. It's a process of washing the baby, then throwing it out, while saving the dirty water as if this is what we are looking for. If we do not get over this obsession with finding only the lawfully predetermined outcome we cannot grasp reality at all. Life is the defeat button to such presumption. Heidegger was just doing in a more archaic form what physicists and logicians are still doing now.

Relativity is “bent”. It brings to mind the use of that word in C S Lewis. But relativity still holds time to be a continuum, a dimension. Physicists, like all other sciences, begins by isolating a variable in a context of what can be assumed constant. Philosophy has no right to do so. Indeed, it is thhe abiding task of philosophy to root out all presumption, and to do so wholesale. A philosophical proof is a very different matter from a scientific one. In fact, philosophy itself has yet to come to grips with this. Heidegger, like virtually all others in the field (if there are any exceptions I know only of Socrates) is hell bent on finding something that is is as the meaning of time. But time is anything but what is. What is most real is the departure time is. What remains is only responsibility of recognizing the worth of the departed. The possibility of that response, as the recognizableness of that worth, is what realness is. And the act of recognizing it is the most completed act of reason and what consciousness is. There is something personal that time is. Science can only count its periodicity. But there can be no such count of a completeness so real as the worth of the departed. Nor can that response completing its being real be self-contained or anticipated. It cannot be “authentic” or “resolute”. By the way, Heidegger can never have seen the inside of a blacksmith's shop if he thinks the hammer teaches the metal anything. Even a cursory glance at a blacksmith's practice demonstrates the material is the teacher, not the mind. The notion of mind over matter, the idea that god teaches the mind and acts in the world through the mind's imposition of a divine design onto the material of the world, is pure Calvinism, which is really the whole source and essence of Heidegger. But if time is the moment of departure, imparting a responsibility of recognizing the worth of the departed upon all that remains capable of responding in the act of that recognition, then there is a dramatic-dialectic between that act of departure and that response of realizing its worth in which the logical qualifier supersedes the quantifier, and does so as its most rigorous term. The question then is, how much does that moment of differing from the continuity of time, as the most rigorous term of that continuity, have to be of superseding worth to that quantifiable quantity for it to be more real? Even to be more what realness is?

String Theory is a frantic effort to save the quantifier from the chaos of unformed matter at the smallest reaches of our commitment to quantifying it. We are hard put to concede our unjustified commitment to find being something that is, rather than the dynamic between departure and recognition. But that dynamic is a logic of contrariety, not contradiction. That is, the fundamentals of geometry, mathematics, and logic are, in real terms, hopelessly incomplete. Their only completeness is in that contrariety in which contraries, each as capable of being the departed as being the response recognized the worth of that departed, form a community as opposed to the continuity of its antecedent terms as to each other in that capacity for worthiness and love. You cannot isolate any jot or tittle of that drama to be confirmed scientifically. And yet it is the only explanation of how we can be capable of sharing our thoughts. Explains, too, why language always comes into being fully grown. Not lexically, but grammatically, and most surely dramatically. This, because time is personal, but so far from divine as to be gloriously profane.

Don't get Kant? Doesn't fill me with a lot of confidence on the claim of being a philosopher. He was probably the most lucid author ever, save, maybe, for trivial ones like Jaspers, Camus, or Thoreau.

Alas, WiFi is only available periodically, so, bye, for now.

Hiding from oneself is a very popular activity these days, if you haven't noticed. But think of it terms of responsiveness and responsibility. Plato favorite rational principle is "aischron", or a kind of rational shame, a shame that, in the face of it, requires us to rethink and alter our opinions. Maybe even to participate in the differing of the world, if done with sufficient rigor and care for one's soul and that of others. Plato did not have a formal logic, Aristotle put us on that road. But what if contradiction only rules our views within the terms of our presumed formalism and antecedent terms? What if the only validity to the law of contradiction is that the last term in the commitment to it re-characterizes all formal rules and redefines all antecedent terms? I think Plato will open up to you a lot more richly if you read him in this light. Act (critical question), and response (rigorous preparation for the shame of the moment recognized the discontinuity of terms and formal rules). In this was two contraries cab become partners in the recognition of a growth in reason unprecedented in our presumptions and prejudices. And since we are parties to this growth, and yet always in an important sense opposed to each other in it, we do in very concrete ways share ourselves more fully than the terms of our world can ever offer to us.