It seems myopic to criticize someone for being on the wrong side of a socio-historic movement. Every author expresses his or her ideas through the lens of their cultural milieu. If we were to restrict our studies to whoever stands on the right side of moral history, where would that leave us? On some kind of remote moral pinnacle and faced with an impossible task. Society is a product of the conflict of viewpoints, and wealthier for the diversity. Heidegger's writings obviously have an exterior, that is the context in which they were framed. They also have an interior, which it would be a gross trivialization to view as propaganda. His writings undoubtedly are the work of a brilliant mind, with much of value, perhaps not for everyone; but our culture would be the poorer for its loss.

Wow, that's quite a detailed analysis. I'll follow up in a few days when I've finished. I will say that the narrative style of the first chapter was tortured and confusing in many places. However now that's settled into a more traditional form in Lorq's history I'm warming. If I was less of a finisher I might have put it down in the first chapter.

There is no meaning of life. We just exist, and die. And life goes on, and on, and on. For million, billion of years, etc etc etc. — niki wonoto

Translation: I have failed to find meaning, therefore no one else can find meaning either.

It places rather a high valuation on your personal abilities and experiences. Perhaps there are people who have had significantly different experiences than yours. Perhaps quite a few.

Nova
by Samuel R. Delany

Suicide: A Study in Sociology
by Émile Durkheim

I think the essence of metaphysics is that it is always about what is a little bit beyond what we think we know - hence the 'meta.' Some people just flat out deny there is anything there. Like Dennett. To me, Dennett's "proofs" always amount to little more than the confession that he, himself, is incapable of envisioning anything beyond the limits of his own current understanding. Which is sad for him, but doesn't really prove anything.

The evolution of our civilization has been widely exaggerated. — ssu

I agree. The majority of people think they are living in an advanced and enlightened civilization without even understanding what civilization is. It is a dangerous and destructive prejudice.

The Poverty of Historicism
by Karl Popper

Yikes. That one does look intense. I'm a big fan of classic and golden-age sci-fi so on the list with Nova though.

Nova by Samuel R. "Chip" Delany. — Jamal

Nice. You read others by him?

I'm getting to the end of this book on ontology. Hartmann says that average scientific minds focus only on abstraction, failing to achieve the "overall synthesis" whereby science becomes part of the totality of experience:
This situation cannot be remedied, but there is a counterweight to it, namely, PHILOSOPHY. It is the enduring task of philosophy to be the conscience of science and to always lead it back to a living comprehensive vision.
(Hartmann, Ontology: Laying the Foundations)

isn't every position metaphysical? — Tom Storm

Exactly.

even that naïve realism is true — Tom Storm

Yes. Nicolai Hartmann describes the 'natural attitude', which is engaging with reality as if phenomena are independently real, which is exactly acting in the context of a natural realism, epitomized by science. However, while phenomena may be translucent, in that we see the world through them, they are nevertheless there, and become evident upon reflection. Which is why science isn't a substitute for metaphysics.

I think the earliest mention I made of metaphysics was that "metaphysics needs to continue to inspire scientific exploration, while ethics guides technological implementation."

How might one invalidate metaphysics? — Leontiskos

I don't even understand why one would want to?

But if positivism replaces metaphysics and then "denies that there is metaphysics," hasn't it invalidated metaphysics? I agree that not all positivism aims at direct invalidation of metaphysics, but I would also want to say that denying the existence of metaphysics counts as a significant form of invalidation. — Leontiskos

I think it is a common ailment to have metaphysical presuppositions while denying metaphysics. I don't believe denial is equivalent to invalidation, no.

The cows put out 1 ppm of methane. The plants take up 1 ppm of methane. That's what net-zero means. — frank

Yes, and it also means that there is always a correlative amount of methane hanging about in the system. It doesn't just flow from the butt of the cow into the tissues of the plant.

Are you of the opinion that Comte ignored metaphysics but did not attempt to invalidate it? — Leontiskos

I would say positivism in general represents the frequent tendency to elevate epistemology to replace metaphysics while denying that there is metaphysics. So in a way I guess my answer to your question is yes.

I'm not seeing this. Let's say we start from today. There's an average of 1.7 ppm of methane in the atmosphere. This average covers seasonal variation. Now we'll add a cattle farm in Mexico, and it's truly net zero, which means that after 12 years, its output is entirely absorbed by its input. — frank

You are not grasping that this is a system and there is a definable quantity of methane within the entire system that correlates with a specific population level of cattle. Ergo any decrease in the population of the cattle is simultaneously a decrease in the associated methane level. It is irrelevant over what period of time the cattle achieve a net-zero methane balance.

If cattle farming were truly net-zero, this wouldn't be true. — frank

Yes, it would be true. This is why:

This is true. But what is not mentioned is that the more cows there are, the higher the stable amount of methane in the atmosphere is — unenlightened

This is exactly what I have been describing. Livestock population levels correlate with a certain systemic level of methane.

The fact of the matter is, we should be making whatever reductions even remotely make sense and actively searching for new possibilities to do so. We have been quite content to radically disturb the biosphere haphazardly in aid of profit, we should be courageous enough to do so systematically in aid of human well being.

But it's the nature of a cycle that as methane is emitted today, the components of yesterday's emissions are simultaneously being taken up by plants. This is the argument, anyway. — frank

Right. And if all methane-producing elements in the environment were somehow eliminated, the methane levels would drop. Whether, in the grand scheme of things, a cow is "methane-neutral" is a pretty hard to say. But biologically (vs systemically) speaking, cows are "methane generators". If all cattle were gone, methane levels would decrease.

Any process that involves methane, for example, involves the transport of that methane throughout a cycle, portions of which are stored for durations in the environment. Carbon is stored and flows in such a cycle. And nitrogen. Viewing cattle as an abstract point of methane data is unrealistic. Short-term, a cow is a very-high-net methane producer. Reduce the number of cows and you must reduce the net-methane load in the environment.

Even if that were true, there is a certain "environmental load" to maintaining any greenhouse-gas involved process. If scale of cattle-farming were reduced, the "environmental load" would also be reduced. Which is part of the goal, I think.

One thing that I suggested was that the value of philosophy lies both in the academic body of knowledge, and in the quality of the minds and personae produced by exposure to the philosophical milieu. Aristotle was the tutor of Alexander and may have contributed to the shape of history significantly in that way. The sophists were highly regarded as teachers and probably exerted much influence independent of the content of their philosophies.

the situation is already stabilized. The current number of cows won't cause any additional global warming. The total methane level from cows is already constant in the atmosphere. — Agree to Disagree

There isn't a shred of logic in these statements. Even if it were true that output was stabile, that doesn't imply that the situation to which the output is a contributing factor is stabile. And the fact that the current number of cows won't cause "any additional" global warming just means that the ongoing amount of their ecological impact isn't decreasing. Which is the point.

Ignoring metaphysics and invalidating it aren't the same thing though. Same thing for teleology. As Nicolai Hartmann says, it is an error to believe that the reasons for an illusion are themselves illusory.

You can't get "ought" from science, so philosophy will always be around. — RogueAI

Yes, ethics is a pretty strong contender for 'practical philosophy', I agree.

It seems that what we mean by philosophy might be the glue that holds together all of the other formalizations of human understanding. For example, suppose we try to make scientific knowledge the gold standard of meaning. Even in the days when it was possible for one person to achieve a comprehensive scientific understanding (renaissance man), features of human life continued to be evident that defied scientific explanation (art, love, spirit, etc.). Today, scientific understanding is simultaneously so broad and detailed that even the most gifted scientists only really understand certain aspects of it. Even if your area of specialization is quantum cosmology, you could not claim to have a privileged ontological understanding, because dark matter and dark energy form explicit lacunae in that field of knowledge. Hence philosophy exists to constantly challenge simplistic reductions and to chart the boundaries of the unknown, relative to the project of human existence. If it were abolished as a discipline, people would still attempt to make sense of life. String theory, proven, would not help a single person make a more-informed moral decision.

But most people seem to refuse to accept personal responsibility for the problem. They claim that it is all the fault of the oil companies. Climate change will not be solved with that attitude. — Agree to Disagree

Neither will it be solved by doing nothing. Humanity should be trying every reasonable approach consistent with good ecological practice to counteract what it knows to be contributing factors to climate change. It may well be that some types of remediation are more effective than others. That's why they need to be tried. Now is not the time for quietism. The will to effect change is essential. As solutions are tried our understanding of the mechanics of the problem will grow, leading to new, better solutions. That's how it works.

Today there seems to be no "first philosophy," and therefore we have philosophies rather than philosophy. — Leontiskos

That's funny. Hartmann laments that he cannot "reclaim" the use of the term "first philosophy" in his major work on ontology which I am just reading.

"Why should we really return to ontology at all? Wasn't the foundation of the whole of philosophy at one time ontology? And hasn't this foundation crumbled beneath it, leading everything that depended on it to a state of utter collapse along with it?"
~Nicolai Hartmann, Ontology: Laying the Foundations. Opening paragraph.

The Decameron
by Giovanni Boccaccio

One way to get at this is to consider that no epistemology can be installed without appeals to the nature of the subject. We might talk of the entanglement of epistemology and ontology, because the ontologist has to make a case for claims, and the form of such a case will presumably imply or manifest an epistemology. — plaque flag

Yes. Hartmann goes further and talks about something which encompasses both the object of ontology and the subject of epistemology. Now you could get sticky and say, well, that more comprehensive reality is itself what is ontologically primary. But Hartmann elects to maintain the posture of separation, which allows for further investigation into their unique natures. His dyad of Dasein (the ontological ) existence and Sosein (the epistemological) essence are linked together through a kind of pragmatics of primitive action. Sosein and Dasein are related in almost systems theoretical terms, where the Sosein of a specific individual tree (its unique essence) has its Dasein in its place in the forest.

The knowledge that people have of reality is itself a part of reality, as an event among other events

This I firmly believe.

Interesting that my new read, Nicolai Hartmann, contests this fundamental dyad of object and subject, saying it is a hypostatization of the relational nature of consciousness (i.e. an unfounded metaphysical assumption) and that there is an avenue to pure being through some kind of pre-reflective 'natural attitude.' This smacks of Collingwood's 'absolute presuppositions.'

However Hartmann's method is also aporetic, embracing the antinomian nature of the development of philosophical thought and its key problems. So I can see this challenge to my fundamental intuitions about the inextricability of objectivity and subjectivity as part of an overall dialectical progress.

Ontology: Laying the Foundations
by Nicolai Hartmann

"Hartmann developed a pluralistic, humanistic realism that attempted to do justice to both the sciences and the humanities. Hartmann may be regarded as the first genuine ontological pluralist of the twentieth century."

Philosophy, in my opinion, should instead recover its ancient roots of being a human experience, a spiritual activity, — Angelo Cannata

I'd agree that it should be 'animated' by this spirit.

I think philosophy can be different by taking on the task that traditionally was held by religion — Angelo Cannata

Yes, I think talking about spirituality as something metaphysical takes away the hocus pocus from the former, rather than introducing it to the latter. I would say 'in spirit' I agree with you.

Our lack of knowledge of knowledge is at the heart of the problem of knowledge. — Fooloso4

Among the paradoxes of the figure of Socrates...is that we cannot classify him as belonging either to the theoretical or the practical world. Every attempt at such a classification immediately turns dialectically into its opposite....Our "knowledge" is transformed into "ignorance" (Cassirer, PSF4, "Basis Phenomena")

This accords with my perspective on the ongoing dialectical tension of antinomies.

already contains within its relational dynamics the precursors of language, consciousness and thought — Joshs

Is it animism? Is it panpsychism? Something else? I know lots of people would draw the line of consciousness at homo sapiens. I prefer the bio-evolutionary perspective that can discern intelligent behaviours in coral colonies. That is more the type of awareness that interests me. People like to draw a certain line in different places.

There cannot be an infinite regress in which what is recollected was not a some time first learned. — Fooloso4

That's certainly the logical conclusion. :up:

This all may be, but my understanding is that the theory of anamnesis is a species of innate knowledge theory. Do you have citations pertaining specifically to the fact that this knowledge had to have at some time been gained directly?

In the Charmides Socrates suggests that wisdom is knowledge of what you know and don't know. — Fooloso4

But Socrates' belief in anamnesis implies the things you don't know you have in some sense forgotten (hence the Platonic strategy of evoking knowledge through dialogue). Unfortunately this creates a nasty circularity.

In other words, the current state of philosophy is not the whole of the story of what philosophy is and will be — Fooloso4

Exactly. And this is exactly the nature of consciousness itself, its present experience is a living amalgam of the past and future, per Cassirer: this monadic being is therefore not contained in the simple present....but rather encompasses the totality of all aspects of life, the present, past, and future...

As I suggested on another thread (all things being related) this can be comprehended as a kind of "experimentalism," a metaphysical conception that is realized through and as the scientific method. Again to quote Cassirer (sorry but it is what I'm currently reading): We experience ourselves as having an influence...[an] essential, constitutive aspect in all our "consciousness of reality."

In other words, I guess, we are engaged and implicated in constructing reality, and reality is what is engaged by the construction thereof.