Cynical I get. My only point is that you didn't answer the question. 'Ethics' is an urgent need because we are so species-defective. — 180 Proof

I think I'm slow to offer a particular ethics because it would feel like merely spouting preferences. I think that knowledge might even come, to some degree, at the cost of righteousness. If I cling to an identification with the good, that may force me block out an understanding of 'evil.' This connects to one image (among others) of the philosopher as a kind of alien.

Why then not see this universe as having been created and being maintained, with us having the freedom to act within a range of actions that the outside entity allows us to have? — leo

We can do that. But I should mention that I don't think we're free. The responsible, free agent seems to me like an important fiction, but a fiction nevertheless. As I see it, we're all entangled in the causal nexus. Even if we're not exactly predictable, I think we all have a sense of human nature. To have a nature is to be caught in necessity.

Sometimes we ask why there is something rather than nothing, but aren’t we able to create things out of nothing? Sometimes we have ideas that do not seem to come from anywhere, to be caused by anything, as if they were free creations. — leo

Our ideas appear in our 'minds' in languages that have evolved over centuries, though. And then physical creation depends on a transformation and arrangement of the given.

And I can’t believe that arrangements of atoms who arose out of some random primordial soup through laws that were there for no reason would be able to imagine such things, and feel such beauty. — leo

Our situation is strange. I personally just don't know how we got here. Yes, science can tell a plausible story, but perhaps the ultimate origin that thinking craves is unknowable in principle (it being a kind of projection or impossible object.)

Yes, that too. :up: It offends me because it insults my intelligence to use explanations that aren't intelligible. — Harry Hindu

To clarify the offensiveness, perhaps it's also about the apparent self-deception of those that employ it. I am invested in not being self-deceived --or at least minimizing self-deception.So it pains me to see unclarity presented as rationality. I don't believe perfect clarity is possible, but the pursuit of clarity seems to distinguish philosophy from religion.

I don’t regard Husserl as either an ‘idealist’ or a ‘realist’. He was a ‘phenomenologist’, which is had to accept as ‘neither’ of the others yet not in ‘opposition’ to them. — I like sushi

I grasp that. And, to be clear, I think Husserl is great. I hope to study more of him, but the years pass swiftly. And Derrida speaks to me lately, in spite of features that are off-putting.

I was quite struck recently by how the shadow of Nietzsche runs through the fringes of his ideas - but I’m likely reading something into that point as I’ve looked reasonably closely at some of Nietzsche’s stuff. — I like sushi

Husserl was also aware of Stirner. Any radical self-consciousness has a certain edge. In my studies of Derrida, I read about Eugene Fink, who seems to have developed the quasi-mystical potential of Husserl.

to some strange twisted ‘philosophy of language’ that was welcomed by religious/artistic individuals in an almost clandestine manner. — I like sushi

This caught my eye. I agree that artsy-mystical types can embrace Derrida-inspired linguistic philosophy as a flight from science. But I also think that Derrida offers an anti-theology that strikes at its very core (pure, timeless 'meaning.')

It is certainly a jumble of jargon trying to navigate this and from what Husserl himself says about having a deep suspicion (almost to the point of disregard) about anything called a ‘conclusion’. — I like sushi

Yeah, I have the impression that Husserl was always still in progress. He strikes me as having a great character. He's a noble, likable soul, it seems to me.

What do we make of this?

Like all scepticism, all irrationalism, the Humean sort cancels itself out. Astounding as Hume's genius is, it is the more regrettable that a correspondingly great philosophical ethos is not joined with it. This is evident in the fact that Hume takes care, throughout his whole presentation, blandly to disguise or interpret as harmless his absurd results, though he does paint a picture (in the final chapter of Volume I of the Treatise) of the immense embarrassment in which the consistent theoretical philosopher gets involved. Instead of taking up the struggle against absurdity, instead of unmasking those supposedly obvious views upon which this sensationalism, and psychologism in general, rests, in order to penetrate to a coherent self-understanding and a genuine theory of knowledge, he remains in the comfortable and very impressive role of academic scepticism. Through this attitude he has become the father of a still effective, unhealthy positivism which hedges before philosophical abysses, or covers them over on the surface, and comforts itself with the successes of the positive sciences and their psychologistic elucidation. — Husserl

https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/husserl.htm

I relate to his disaste for an "unhealthy positivism which hedges before philosophical abysses, or covers them over on the surface, and comforts itself with the successes of the positive sciences and their psychologistic elucidation." For me it's into the abyss. And I think Derrida, for instance, tries that.

Thanks for the background. And I do like Heidegger. But I don't see much of a response to my post. Perhaps you can share what you think on the points raised?

how can you not infer a metaphysical Will as a driving force? — 3017amen

I can understand vaguely what is meant. The will-to-live is like a demon at the heart of things. I find it metaphorically true in some sense.

Bonus question: What do aesthetic claims, about beauty and comedy and tragedy and such, mean, and how do they relate to prescriptive claims about morality?

The Objects of Morality
What are the criteria by which to judge prescriptive claims, or what makes something moral? — Pfhorrest

Roughly I think we try to make harmony out of cacophony of drives. While philosophers emit neat little systems of abstract nouns, artists give us flesh-out protagonists, showing rather than telling. Not always but quite often the virtuous protagonist is also physically beautiful. And even our poets (musicians these days) are as visual as they are sonic. We get the total package, an absolute art of virtuous flesh. Musicians offer us visceral attitudes that we can make our own. Not only the words, but also the clothes, the moves,... I'm a bit old to take video-musicians as my exemplars, but I think that many, many people get their philosophy viscerally-lyrically like this. Arguably the primary product is an entire personality. While the less bold imitate as well as they can, the bolder create their own fusions, which occasionally become famous/dominant and keep the game going.

Hey, 180. It was in the same post that I amplified that thought. The cynical intro (perhaps an unconscious rhetorical device to rope in the grumps and haters) is followed by a little birdsong about the better angels of our nature.

It does seem to me that most prescriptive claims manifest the best part of our nature. Good laws and traditions aren't bondage but rather the highest expression of our freedom even (another stolen though[t].)....[W]ith time it became clear [to me] that many prohibitions are simply successful self-sculpture. We live above such things. Humans take profound pleasure in denying themselves things, and this is great. — Eee

We deny ourselves lying and stealing as beneath us, for example. Or we scoff a gas-guzzling SUVs or fast food or sloppy thinking, and so on. We enjoy carving away what is vulgar, too easy. I do think narcissism is involved, even profoundly involved, but I suggest that this narcissism is a group narcissism even when the group is potential rather than actual.

think I mentioned above Husserl’s concern/aim. It was to establish firmer grounds for logic (or rather look to see what the grounds are) - upon which ALL scientific and human pursuits stem from.

He quite literally says the aim is to something like a ‘subjective science of consciousness’ in direct opposition to psychologism — I like sushi

That sounds like what I remember. I studied him some but not as much as others. I've spent more time with Heidegger and Derrida.

If it helps, I'm curious lately about the relationship of time and knowledge. If a science of consciousness is possible, that seems to require that consciousness have a fixed nature or an essence. I think we experience certain basic intuitions as timeless. But how do we know? Perhaps an argument can be made that we just can't help such an assumption. ----which, funny enough, imposes or finds an essence in consciousness --that it can't help projecting necessary (eternal) structures.

I guess this connects to that thread about whether the problem of induction applies to math (and the breakdown of the analytic/synthetic distinction.) How do we know that the Pythagorean theorem is eternally true? Every time we have checked the proof (maybe one just based on moving around shapes) it made sense to us. So we expect it to always make sense to us in the future, and to every possible human being in the future. But is there really such a gulf between that and certain empirical expectations?

Ha. Well, it does look cynical as I reread it. Or cold. But try to see it from a alien point of view, without taking sides. And without dragging in more subjective words. What does a tribe punish or reward? Even an alien without human feelings could find patterns in that. For this you get a medal and a parade. For that you get a noose.

Obviously I could have given a more flowery version. As I said in another thread, the mature person embraces good laws as the highest expression of their freedom.

We also have an intuitive notion of law, but isn’t it the case that it is will that creates law? — leo

I must confess that 'will' was a concept in Schopenhauer that I could never digest. I like many of his ideas, but 'will' struck me as too vague, and I'm still finding it vague here.

The laws that society follows were created by people through their will, and other people follow them. — leo

Certainly human beings created laws, and certainly they had certain feelings tangled up in that. I can make sense of 'feelings' and 'actions.'

Whereas the laws of Nature would be an instance of laws that spontaneously appear without a will involved, and we don’t have an intuitive notion of that. — leo

I agree, and for this reason I expect the fact that we and the universe are here in the first place will remain mysterious. Or even unexplainable on principle, in that any explanatory principle would seem to have to be true for no reason.

There is no reason that the laws of Nature should continue being the same in the future as they have been in the past, we cannot know that they will, that’s the problem of induction. Maybe it is a will that is keeping them constant through time? — leo

I agree about the problem of induction. But note that you suggest the will as an explanatory entity. This would be the law of the laws. Why should we expect to will to continue as it has? The will as intelligible entity (albeit vague) seems to be tangled up in time. It has a nature that can be leaned on as a source of hypotheses.

When I think of that it leads me to the idea that our existence within this universe might be a test, as some religions have proposed. — leo

As you mention, it's an old idea. It does sound like a story that would help human beings make peace with all that's difficult in existence. I grant that it's possible. I could die and find myself in some new realm with memories of this life (allowing for continuity of personality so that I could understand myself to have been resurrected.) I believed this kind of thing in my church-attending youth.

Personally I don't believe it, but I do have other narratives, such as the value of mortality for forcing ourselves outside of our vanities, into a realization of how distributed and networked human virtue and knowledge are. If we were individually immortal, we might remain little monsters. Only together are we semi-immortal. The same great ideas and feelings move from vessel to fragile vessel. It's a hall of mirrors. Our own good and evil is reflected in millions of faces around us. My will is not at all single. For me we're all terribly multiple.

Maybe there is a will that runs the laws of Nature in this universe, a will that has given us freedom to act within these laws, and watches what we are going to do with that freedom. — leo

To me this sounds like God, which is fine. But I need a voice from the sky or a burning bush. And even then I'd look for hidden technology. Even if certain things are possible, I'm also keenly aware that human beings are masters of fantasy. As I see it, we are haunted by visions. Our big brains are like fun houses. Perhaps we only face reality, when we do, in order to arrange things so that we can go back to sleep for as long and often as possible. Even this philosophy forum and philosophy itself is a bit like a dream in the context of the rest of my life. And yet I love to dream philosophy.

Put differently, we cannot ground retention-impression-protention in brain physiology because the latter is a relative and contingent empirical formulation but the former is not. Temporal synthesis is not a psychological system but a philosophical a priori. — Joshs

Husserl's theory depends, it seems, on his possessing the German language, which evolved for many years before it found its way to Husserl. He has to talk to himself in terms of 'protension' for instance. He needs to find words and call them the result of his investigation. So even if we find Husserl convincing to some degree, I don't see how we can do so without also being aware of ourselves as member of some community on a planet that orbited the sun before humans were aware of it.

Scientists can change their models of brain function as much as they like but this should have no effect on the phenomenological a priori of temporal synthesis underlying any and all constitution of spatial objects as well as interpersonally constituted products like particular empirical scientific models , throughout their changes. — Joshs

Husserl seems to assume the discovery of a fixed structure. What does it take to fix this structure and protect it from time? And to what degree does this depend on a realm of meaning independent of any particular language-as-vehicle? If perfect translation remains permanently possible, then philosophy as theology wins. Pure, timeless, exact, indestructible meaning, accessible 'behind' the time-tormented words, words, words...

Why does it seem so difficult to do this when talking about conceptions/uses/senses/etc, of the same term "meaning"? Is it not a reasonable question to ask someone when they're using the term "meaning" what they are referring to? Ought not the speaker know what they're referring to, when using the term as a noun? — creativesoul

If you ask them what they mean by 'meaning,' won't they be forced to add more links to the chain of signs? What do we refer to by 'I' ? Or 'you'? Is there a finite chain of signs that can get this exactly right? If the signs are intelligible at all, they can be quoted or repeated in other contexts, among other signs, and be understood differently.

It's us philosophers who find it difficult to determine the meaning of meaning, mostly because we want to do a good job, and perhaps because we're questionably attached to a project of juicing words for their maximally context-independent meanings. I like the game, but I also see it as an infinite game. The interpretation of any text is one more text that's open to interpretation. This is not at all to say that all interpretations are equal. It's just that to live is to be still determining and interpreting. I think even a dogmatic philosopher is always still figuring out what exactly he means by his dogma. We can repeat the words in our mind, but is this really a repetition of something like exact meaning? Perfect, exact meaning is like God or pure spirit.

“Make sense” is a very telling expression, revealing an embodied experience. ”Make” emphasises our active construction of our experience of understanding, and the “sense” or lack of it ultimately rests on sensory experiences we’ve learned to associate with the words and expressions. — Brainglitch

I like 'embodied.' I'd also add embedded, embedded in a society,embedded in what is expected and prohibited. Embedded in what something that looks like a chair or a knife or a tire is used for. I don't have to remind myself to walk on the sidewalk and not in the middle of the road. This is automatic, along with so many other things, like how close to stand to strangers at a bus stop, how loud to talk.

I'd also add (basically agreeing) that the sense we make doesn't have to focus on sensory experiences. When someone talks to us and we don't understand, we might experience this in terms of not knowing what they want from us. We don't know where they're coming from. It's as if we try to put ourselves in their position as charitable listeners. For better or worse, as online philosophers we are tempted to emphasize differences. Maybe it's easier to see what a theory gets wrong, at least when a theory is the other person's.

So, the persistence and/or continued existence of meaning is clearly not existentially dependent upon any individual user, but rather it is existentially dependent upon language being used in a consistent way. That consistent usage is satisfied - it happens - when a plurality of capable creatures draw correlations between the specific language use and other things. — creativesoul

I agree. Meaning is independent of any particular vessel. This reminds me of one of my favorite themes in Derrida.

Derrida (1930-2004) famously argued that writing preceded speech. By this I believe he meant that the “iterability” of language logically preceded its spontaneous performance...that is, repeatable in any context whatsoever, just as this very introduction to Derrida I’m writing now must be able to signify as an introduction to Derrida after this semester is over [hey! like now!], after I’m dead, after you cease to read it, after the expiration of every element of the context in which I am composing it now. That, writes Derrida, is the very condition of writing itself, without which we simply do not recognize writing as such: if the writing is not “iterable,” it is not writing. — link

We all learn to point at the tree when uttering "tree". This is rudimentary shared meaning:A plurality of creatures drawing correlations between the same things. In this case, it's a plurality of creatures drawing correlations between the name and it's referent(between "trees" and trees).

We all 'agree' that those things are trees and these things are not... by virtue calling those things "trees" but not these things. This agreement is necessary for language to proceed in it's evolutionary process. The 'agreement' need not be an intentional act. To quite the contrary, prior to the ability to voluntarily enter into an agreement about the referent of a name, one must already be deeply embedded in language use. — creativesoul

I very much agree, with only a slight suspicion about 'correlation,' and I associate this with Wittgenstein. One of my favorite philosophical themes is how radically embedded we are in language use. I don't think it can be over-stated. Even this 'I' that doesn't think it can be overstated is, as a sign, embedded in the way we learn to use 'I.'

To be a human is perhaps most essentially to be co-embedded in a language. The 'we' is utterly prior to the 'I' in the sense that the 'I' is only constructed within the 'tribe' and understands itself in relation to other selves. Far from being controversial, I think such things are obvious to those who are willing to make their tacit knowledge explicit against the resistance of theories that tell us otherwise (and often flatter us.)

The only evidence we have is that change occurs because of a will, when we will something we cause change to occur, we have no evidence that things change because they follow Laws independent of a will, that's an unsubstantiated postulate of modern science. — leo

What is the evidence, though, of this will? Of course we have some intuitive notion, but don't we have an equally good intuitive notion of law? The idea of nature includes necessity. To me it seems that something like law is fundamental to any kind of talk of nature of essence. Time is quietly involved in all of our thinking. What can knowledge be if we don't expect what we have knowledge about to continue acting as it has acted?

We don't understand electrons in terms of something more fundamental, unless string theory turns out to be true. That's not the case with ordinary objects. — Marchesk

But we do understand electrons within an entire system of objects/concepts. To me that's a good anti-realist point (holism.)

What do prescriptive claims, that attempt to say what is moral, even mean? — Pfhorrest

In practice this is straightforward. Do X and people will like you and help you. Do Y and people will dislike you and hinder you. We want to be liked and helped. Our dependence is extreme, and therefore hard for us to confess. Part of me would like to be radically independent, even self-created. A younger me held fast to positions that exaggerated the degree to which this is possible.

It does seem to me that most prescriptive claims manifest the best part of our nature. Good laws and traditions aren't bondage but rather the highest expression of our freedom even (another stolen though.) Younger people (or at least my own rebellious youth) tended to understand prohibitions as externally applied. Everyone was repressed. But with time it became clear that many prohibitions are simply successful self-sculpture. We live above such things. Humans take profound pleasure in denying themselves things, and this is great.

If the complexity of some system requires a designer, then why wouldn't the designer require a designer? The design argument leads to an infinite regress of designers. — Harry Hindu

Or, also popular, properties attributed to the Designer that we can't really make sense of. An explanation that's no longer intelligible is no longer an explanation. And that offends because it dresses up we-don't-know in the trappings of clarification.

In other words, being born leads to the possibility of pursuing happiness and this reason is powerful enough to override any negatives to being born for many people. — schopenhauer1

Perhaps. And perhaps all this is just a rationalization for an instinct that overpowers us --especially when it's coupled with what-one-does. Personally I agree that there's something evil or questionable in foisting existence on others. It does violate certain intuitive principles.

All this comes to late for me, of course. I'm here already, and anyone who reads this is here already. If a few of us resist the urge to breed for various reasons, most won't. In the long run, though, it seems that are species must finally fail and go extinct. Is this a tragedy or a comfort? Depends on my mood. Some part of us wants the peace and finality of the grave, even though we won't be able to enjoy it when we have it. Death is a strange object of desire.

...but we should be aware that we are exceptions. — ZhouBoTong

Indeed, and do we not depend on the rule as our foil?

Thank you both for your responses! — Pfhorrest

My pleasure. It's a good thread. We all like to talk about 'our' (cobbled-together) philosophies, right?

Why do philosophy in the first place, what does it matter? — Pfhorrest

To me it's just spontaneous for human beings, or at least something like religion is spontaneous, and philosophy emerges from religion, I think. My own biased view (which I stole from a real philosopher) is that philosophy often steps in when religion fails the individual and/or their culture at large. Philosophy tells a story that answers all the questions you ask in the OP, giving a role (who are we?) to individuals and communities, thereby giving them a sense of being at home in the world, having a right to it --and often to a piece of it that currently belongs to others. It's also hugely important in political organization. Beneath the explicit laws are the unwritten 'laws' that a community doesn't even know it knows. I like (among other kinds) the kind of philosophy that drags this tacit 'knowledge' into the light of articulation.

What do descriptive claims, that attempt to say what is real, even mean? — Pfhorrest

I think we know well enough in a sub-theoretical sense. I don't claim to be Derrida scholar, but I am inspired by what I take as his notion of something like 'no pure meaning.' I can emit various sentences about what is real. I can even swear to you that in my head I know exactly what I mean. But that would be a lie. I don't know exactly what I mean even when the words feel righter than others. As I explore what I mean, I generate yet more sentences. The problem is amplified.

But the problem is primarily theoretical. We'd like (or so we think) to once and for all settle the issue, which is in some sense to kill language, turn it into bones. Our deadest language is (perhaps) mathematical. So perhaps the metaphysical fantasy is having concepts like 'real' so dead and fixed that we can build a castle of theorems, the one book of eternal truth, a divine spiderweb. It's a side issue, but I think the notion of the eternal is tangled up with the philosophical desire to conquer time or escape time. But time, some demon whispers, is language, is us. Hence 'learning how to die.'

What defines philosophy and demarcates it from other fields? — Pfhorrest

It's always still trying to answer that question. For me it's the highest & most radical thinking. It's like religion is the sense of its authority or height. It's like science in its attachment to something like reason. It's theoretically open to those who will try. It doesn't speak of hidden doors. It stays within conceptuality. Roughly.

What is philosophy aiming for, by what criteria would we judge success or at least progress in philosophical endeavors? — Pfhorrest

It's always still trying to answer that question. For me this is intimately related to the questions:
Who am I? Who are we? Who shall I become? Who shall we become?

How is philosophy to be done? — Pfhorrest

As the highest & most radical kind of thinking, this is one more question that philosophy is never done answering. It does feel natural though to keep it distinct from religion, which is not to say that a religious person can't also philosophize about their religious experience.

What are the faculties that enable someone to do philosophy, to be a philosopher? — Pfhorrest

One need only be able to speak/think. I suspect that everyone is at least a bad philosopher.

Who is to do philosophy and how should they relate to each other and others, socially speaking? — Pfhorrest

That's another question for philosophy. Personally I think we are radically dependent on others. I'd be nothing without my books. We'd all be nothing without our lives in which we learned to survive and use language. The philosopher is primarily receptive. Unless I read or talk myself into the conversation, I am likely to come up with a inferior, accidental imitation of a system of thoughts that is centuries old. The individual is a place where different streams of influence mingle. The luckiest have the circumstances, strength, and creativity to fuse these influences into something that others won't willingly forget.

The kind of philosophy I prefer is the kind that we experience as vital to our senses of self. For this reason it's easy to hate those who refuse to recognize our positions as their own. On a practical level, wrestling with difference is nurturing a good life skill. But it's also of philosophical interest. How does one philosopher account for the refusal of another philosopher to recognize his system within that thereby threatened system? What additional stories do we tell when our initial story is met with disbelief or even ridicule? This forum that welcomes all, maniacs fresh off the park bench along with the well-read and respectable, is great place to study such collisions and attempted assimilations of the threatening other.

Good question. Of course, couldn't one ask the same question of Kant's categories? Husserl was well aware of the chicken and egg difficulties inherent in his thesis.

The sequence would seem to be circular. — Joshs

That's how I see it, circular, like a Mobius strip perhaps.

Our map can change to a degree, and it will. But it can never be altogether dissolved while leaving us intact. — petrichor

Yes, because this 'us' is itself just a token on the map. 'Language speaks man.' Or the subject is a function of language. But what is language? It's a thing that's never done naming itself. What I mean by language is beyond the individual in the simple sense that we are here together part of its talking about itself. The same system of symbols has a distributed life in millions of brains. The fact that you said 'leaving us intact' is important here.

Again, this paragraph appears the most troublesome. Open to anyone's thoughts on it: — ZzzoneiroCosm

Davidson's whole approach seems a little strange to me. How is language grasped from the very beginning?

Correspondence theories rest on what appears to be an ineluctable if simple idea, but they have not done well under examination. — Davidson

The problem may be lifting a vague intuition of how 'truth' is often used up to the level of some crisp theory. Why haven't correspondence theories done well under examination? But then which philosophical theories have done well under examination? The entire project of yanking words out of their quasi-automatic use and assuming they can be squeezed for their context-independent essence is suspect.

Under close examination, it becomes apparent (IMO) that we are never done figuring out what we mean. The primary fantasy of a certain kind of philosophy is sharp or perfect meaning (present to something like the subject or consciousness.) Of course this doesn't make trying to speak and live better absurd (though our mortality might do this.)

The now of consciousness is mediate rather than immediate. This radical mediacy at the heart of the supposed pure self-aware subjectivity of consciousness destroys the realist's dream of the purely empirical at the same time that it deprives the subject of its independence from the objects it perceives. Subject and object become only subjective and objective poles of an indissociable interaction in which there is no longer a subject that it is someting like to BE, nor an objective world independent of that subject which it engages with from out of its solipsism. — Joshs

I mostly agree, but what of this speech act itself?

The person demonstrating says and points out to me: “This is rational, this is true, and this is what is meant by law; this is how you must think when you think truly.” To be sure, he wants me to grasp and acknowledge his ideas, but not as his ideas; he wants me to grasp them as generally rational; i.e., also as mine. He only expresses what is my own understanding.
...
All presentation, all demonstration – and the presentation of thought is demonstration – has, according to its original determination – and that is all that matters to us – the cognitive activity of the other person as its ultimate aim. — Feuerbach

The subject and object are vital concepts, despite their imperfections in certain contexts.

No, I'm not - I'm an agnostic. I'm speculating that, given the improbability of the ocurrence of DNA, there may be a design-like process analagous to evolution at work in the universe. — Chris Hughes

Do you think this is the kind of process that science could explore? If not, why not? You mentioned maths being the mere scaffolding.

But even if maths/science doesn't give us the kind of answers we want, they seem more trustworthy than more poetic answers that may make us feel better. When I hear critiques of science in regards to origins or ultimate meanings, I often get the impression that those criticizing would somehow like the trustworthiness of science on the side of their preferred poetic 'explanations.'

Have you by chance looked into A Thing of This World? It's quite a production. As impressed as I was by the gallery of anti-realists, I still had the sense that they were assuming some kind of a pre-theoretical realism in their attempt to provide knowledge and not just opinion.

It simply means there is more to the world than humans. So evolution, stars, big bang, atoms, disease, animals in the deep sea, maybe alien life, etc. We may or may not come to know about all these things. We certainly won't know everything. — Marchesk

I agree. I think a pre-theoretical version of realism is inescapable. It's how we ordinarily think and talk. At the same time, anti-realism makes some strong points against theoretical realism. So my 'linguistic approach' boils down to an awareness of the complexity of language. As I understand and agree with Derrida, the exact meaning of our sentences is not present to us. Nor is it fixed. Nevertheless a certain kind of metaphysical debate proceeds as if it could and ought to be a kind of mathematics of meta-cognition. (I suggest it's more like poetry.)

I see nothing you have written in your threads here that would annoy the State. It is at a level of extreme abstraction. — Coben

Indeed, it seems that @Gus Lamarch is doing a kind of more abstract but essentially Ayn-Randian philosophy. Its something like the exaggerated essence of capitalism.

Well, you are a slave to society who compels you, almost as if a religious belief, to have an opinion about everything and everyone. — Gus Lamarch

Life is slavery. I am a slave to my belly, a slave to my attachment to surviving, a slave even to my curiosity. I am a slave to my need for fantasies like perfect autonomy. The ego is one more spook. Stirnerism is one more evangelism, one more stuffing of the headpiece with straw. Any song and dance that seeks a stage manifests a compulsion to spread the sacred meme, even it it be the supposed anti-meme.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAWaZqDf-VE

P1) The realist argues that “the being of X is independent of its being known.” — PessimisticIdealism

I favor a linguistic approach to this issue. What exactly do we mean by 'being' and 'independent'? In my view we are never and even can never be done clarifying these kinds of metaphysical statements. If we consider various modes of being, some of them sub-theoretical or 'for the hand,' the naive, non-linguistic approach looks even more futile --except to the degree that it provides a kind of wholesome entertainment.

From this vantage, attempting to explain this constituting process in psychophysiological terms by reducing it to the language of naive realism is an attempt to explain the constituting on the basis of the constituted. The synthetic structure of temporal constitution is irreducible to 'physical' terms. On the contrary, it is the 'physicai' that rests on a complex constitutive subjective process that is ignored in the naive attitude. — Joshs

Excellent post. But what we do make of the brain? This constituted object is also constituting.

I don't think anyone would claim that such things are in short supply in this day and age, but some apparently believe that we are somehow unable to synthesize meaning from these for ourselves. The claim is that we need to be chained to a being (ultimate authority), usually referred to as the great chain of being. The enlightenment freed us from these chains. — praxis

I sometimes see a craving for homogeneous culture, perhaps with more tradition and even with less social mobility. I chalk this up to some degree to status anxiety (as Alain De Botton describes it.) While ultimate authorities are often a part of this desire, maybe they aren't its essence.

If the manifestation of DNA has meaning, what might it mean? That life is an experiment? A gift? — Chris Hughes

For me the issue is why we need or trust the manifestation of DNA to tell us that life is an experiment or a gift. As humans we can consider both possibilities and many others. Perhaps we would like something like DNA to save us from the angst of too many possibilities.

On the other hand, life is perhaps more fascinating as a sphinx that can't answer its own questions.

What about such things as money? Does it exist? Does the economy exist? What about newspaper articles? Insurance policies? College degrees? Speed limits? I think most people would agree that those are socially or mentally constructed. But I would argue that such things as rocks are also constructed by our minds in an important sense. There is no line out there in the world in itself separating this rock from the mountainside, saying that this collection of atoms is this particular thing we call a rock, which is good for throwing at birds, kicking, and so on.

A lot of this is a matter of how we humans are functionally related to our environments. What it is for something to be a chair is that it is something to sit on. Supposing all humans were to suddenly die, are there any chairs in the world? Are there any magazine articles? — petrichor

Excellent post. The tricky part is

The way we carve up and associate things and attach meanings to them is largely transparent to us. We mistake it for how things really are out there in the world beyond us. — petrichor

What can this world-beyond-all-carving be if not a kind of internal suspicion within our systematic carving-up of the world? The map is not the territory could be interpreted to mean only that we expect our map to change. Our map appears on itself as a changeable entity? And the world-beyond-the-map is the world-to-come is our map's knowledge of its own fragility?