We cannot say what philosophy is before doing philosophy. What philosophy is is determined and evolved in the course of doing it. What the most basic questions are is determined and evolved while we deal with those ones we think they are.

I think that now philosophy is more and more realizing that the basic questions are about humanity, how to be human, rather than trying to understang how things work to master them, that is metaphysics. — Angelo Cannata

Not a new era of nuts and bolts metaphysics. Religion is philosophy's new task. Popular religion did not survive the Enlightenment (as we witness its violent death throes today), but the issues that religion was there for on the first place are now exposed and open. Metaphysics is now REAL metaphysics: the encounter with the foundational ethical/affective deficit of being human minus the narrative and the faith. This deficit is of course an epistemic one, that is, we don't know, but the knowledge sought is not more of the Same (Levinas).

Yes, yes, about humanity; but humanity at the threshold, not the ethical nihilism of Rorty (see Critchley's critique of Rorty's private ironist). I think you are in this boat, committed to ethical nihilism, for what is this if not the refusal allow philosophy is proper place: as THE new "religion". Metaphysics can finally be purified, if you will, freed from God, freedom and and soul and useless metaphysics. What IS metaphysics, asks Heidegger? What is that primordial wonder? One thing: it is not a vacuous metaphysics. Why did Kant HAVE TO talk about noumena? Because it was there in the midst of phenomena, only he missed the grand point, didn't he? Phenomena revealed noumena because phenomena IS noumena.

I think we need to be always careful in proclaming the end of things such as philosophy, literature, art, cinema, that I have seen proclaimed in several contexts: we should, more humbly, talk, if anything, of end of one kind of of philosophy, not of philosophy as such. It is the end of philosophy meant as domain over concepts, things, but actually, surreptiously, domain over people. In this context, the choice to teach literature, be interested in poetry, or in politics, can considered a symptom of need for a new way of meaning philosophy. The way Kierkegaard talks about time or eternal present is not a metaphysical way, is not a language organized in a dominating way; he talks in an existentialist way.
After realizing that we need a weak philosophy, we need to build a good relationship with metaphysics, because the things of the past cannot just be put in the bin and forgotten. I think that a good relationship with metaphysics should be in the form of a dialogue, rather than adopting passively metaphysics as if it was contraditions-free and well working to get domain over things, reality and people. Metaphysics can be helpful to tell literature and poetry that, even if we have a certain human ability to shape and even create reality, nonetheless we cannot ignore that we need to face humanly humiliating experiences, such as suffering, death, contradictions, inconsistency, forgetfulness. At the same time, we cannot be just pessimistic, because weak or postmodern philosophy, as well as art, literature and a lot of other human experiences, are able to show that we can make miracles, unpredicted wonders.
In this context philosophy ceases to be the place where people look for conclusions, answers, solutions, formulas, that is all stuff to exercise domain, and becomes instead perspective to work, do research, open dialogue, plan comparisons, explore horizons. When we realize this, we can see that philosophy is far from beind ended, there is lot to do and to work on, and it doesn’t need to retrieve any disguised metaphysics or masked realism to gain reputation or to keep afloat. — Angelo Cannata

That was perhaps off putting what I said, but philosophy is not going anywhere ELSE as I see it. As you would have it, it would devolve into the "philosophy of" this and that. For me, philosophy's world is the most basic questions, and these face foundational indeterminacy. Where Joshs says, "Derrida is no sceptic, and he never argues that knowledge is ‘impossible’, only contextually embedded," I say, this is simply putting basic questions on a par with auto mechanics, and you can't do this. Philosophy is that "undiscovered country" dimension of our actuality, not some theory that can be argued away. Heidegger's What Is Metaphysics was very Kierkegaardian, sans the religious fixation. This is the "existential" margin or threshold, and it affects different people in different ways. For some it is not an intellectual impasse, but momentous encounter with the Other of our existence. Levinas, Marion, Henry, et al, and their so called French theological turn explore this.

See Caputo on Derrida. I agree with this: Derrida brings us to the death of philosophy, where to speak at all is to put forth distance. We tend to treat our basic indeterminacy as something familiar, we "totalize" it, as Levinas would say. What is it not to totalize? See Husserl's epoche, for a start. From there, one stops asking, like the Buddhist, the answers are revelatory.

THE foundational insight is not intellectual, which is essentially pragmatic. It is affective. Rorty is right, the truth is made not discovered. But what good is truth as truth? None. This is just a confusion. Truth is, as Dewey put it, merely consummatory, and this is of a piece with the body of experience which is inherently affective. The division is analytic, merely. There is no division, really. Philosophy's real job is to "reduce" the world to its essential presence so that it may be encountered.

as if literary movements didn’t already share in the metaphysics embraced by philosophical eras. — Joshs

Literature is an evolving concept. It reflects the issues that arise and complicate our lives, and it has in this "relevance" and moves with the times. This is very different from philosophy which has its world grounded in basic questions, questions that do not change with politics, ethics and social norms.

In this context philosophy ceases to be the place where people look for conclusions, answers, solutions, formulas, that is all stuff to exercise domain, and becomes instead perspective to work, do research, open dialogue, plan comparisons, explore horizons. When we realize this, we can see that philosophy is far from beind ended, there is lot to do and to work on, and it doesn’t need to retrieve any disguised metaphysics or masked realism to gain reputation or to keep afloat. — Angelo Cannata

That is a lovely obituary.

Then you referred to an established meaning: how can we realize that it is established, since our mind is part of all the things that are subject to change? — Angelo Cannata

I think you have your finger on something here.

How do we know that all knowledge experiences are hermeneutical if the same hermeneutics applies to itself? How can logic say what logic is? How can permanence ever be discovered if impermanence lies within the very asking? If impermanence is presupposed in the very concept of permanence? It is here we have reached the end of philosophy, which is why, I am sure, Rorty simply gave up and started teaching Literature. He knew Derrida and Heidegger very well, and, I suppose was inspired by Heidegger's privileging of poetry and its special power to ironize the world and thereby make new meanings, determined the answers to such questions were "made not discovered".

But this issue if change is about Time, the "existence" of time, I might put it. Time is change, Kierkegaard's repetition that does not look back and recall, but is forward looking, ever forward looking. The is a lot of Kierkegaard's "Concept of Anxiety" in Heidegger. If you want understand the reconciliation between Heraclitus and Parmenides, as I see it, it lies not in Plato, but in Kierkegaard, and his nunc stans, the eternal present. Wittgenstein was a BIG fan of Kierkegaard.

One also has to keep clear: there is no past nor future. These "are" presence"s". One has never witnessed a past or future event. Of course, this problematizes the present as well, it meaning vanishes without past of future to contextualize it. Is this the way to some apophatic affirmation?

Thanks, I'll read it this weekend, perhaps.

Do tell how you distinguish between
on the one hand, religious/spiritual/philosophically deep/profound experiences or insights,
and
on the other hand, the feel good feeling you get after a good meal, or the experience of hypoxia, or what comes up when under the influence of intoxicants — baker

How do you distinguish the influence between the good feels in general? One simply does. Keep in mind that hypoxia is a term that belongs to pathology, that is, assuming something's wrong. How would Thích Quảng Đức.the Buddist monk who immolated himself in 1963 be pathologically assessed? The answer? Very easily.
I push kriya yoga to its limit. Pays off. It's only a pathology if you are on the outside looking in.

Such "stepping out of texts" is, for all ordinary practical intents and purposes, impossible.
What you're doing is just ditching standard religious texts, and firmly embedding yourself in other texts. — baker

Which is saying, there is no stepping out of text, and if you were Derrida, I would know what you mean. But read Caputo on Derrida, his Radical Hermeneutics. You may be averse to unorthodox approaches, but you should know where orthodoxy itself has it end. It is like this: Try any interpretative reduction that is possible, any at all, and you will end up in the contingency of language, aka, deconstruction. Deconstruction is all pervasive, because language itself is its own indeterminacy. For me (and you are free to read his Structure, Sign and Play, Of Grammatology, and others) it translates into a perceptual indeterminacy (not unlike Sartre's Roquentin and the chestnut tree, if you've read Nausea), not merely an abstract theory. Look at the world and realize the object you behold is NOT possessed by the language that claims it, and does so with the powerful grip of familiarity only. This is Husserl's epoche at its perfect realization. This is what Buddhism is all about, I would argue: for language has its "grip" deep into the conditioned psyche; a lifetime of socializing that began in infancy.

Digression - isn't it the case that Rorty is controversially a part of the pragmatist tradition? I know he is described as a neo-pragmatist, but isn't he more of a post-modernist? — Tom Storm

Yes, that sounds right. But he followed Dewey, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Kuhn, and Derrida and on the other side of the fence there was Davidson and others ( I can't keep up with him, clearly. I'm just an amateur). Dewey shared with Heidegger the idea that when we enter into, call them knowledge environments, we have this pragmatic relationship with the things around us, what Heidegger called instrumentality, ready-to-hand, like the chair, the latch on the door, the floors and lights and so on. These are NOT to be conceived spatially in the usual sense, but temporally, and this is Rorty's pragmatism. I think of it in the terms of the structure of conditional propositional (the essence of the scientific method): IF I reach out and push up on the switch, THEN the light will turn on. This is foundational for our knowledge relationships with the world. I hold that language itself is a pragmatic phenomenon. What Heidegger calls "presence at hand" far more interesting.
There is a lot more to it, obviously, but this idea that we make the world through these internalized pragmatic structures of relating to it is essentially pragmatic. Beneath this (all the greats have layers!) there is, of course, indeterminacy. My view is not to dismiss this as an unmade future waiting to be realized by my "free" creative acts, but to pull down
Rorty gave me my favorite turn the tables question to "realists" (whatever that could possibly mean): how is it that anything out there can get in here (one's head)? This is the way of materialism, and if you're going to be a materialist, then you will find this single impossibility that undoes your thinking.

What does "phenomenology" or "pragmatism" or "Rorty" have to do with anything I've argued? — 180 Proof

Derisive comments about Kant, and adoring ones about Peirce, et al, but then Peirce did have his "long run" views). But the traditional pragmatists are in their foundational views committed what could be called a pragmatist ontology. They could talk like naturalists, as did Rorty, James, Dewey and even Quine, but, well, to put the matter in a popular vein, tree falls in the forest, etc.? No sound, no tree, no falling, no forest. I call it pragmatic phenomenology, and the first great phenomenologist was Kant.

Look, no analytic philosopher worth her ink is going to think foundationally like a scientist. None do. Because they have all read Kant, at least, and know, not that the solutions to the issues will one day be achieved, but that they cannot be achieved because the matter goes to the structure of thought and experience itself: idealism cannot be refuted unless you move to language philosophy, which really is a radicalization of idealism, but certainly drops dichotomies and dualisms of the traditional sort.

Once you start asking real questions about basic epistemic problems, you find some form of Kantianism is staring you right in the face. Kant's problem was synthetic apriority. Dewey's experience" is similar, only it is not the presence of mind in space and time, it is pragmatism (in space and time?). Rorty's post modernism is obviously not Kantian, but what did Kant do?: he looked at judgment of the everyday kind and discovered it had form that could be analyzed. He was, arguable I suppose, the first language philosopher. Post modern thinking begins with this.

See Robert Hanna's KANT AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY for a well thought out argument.

No really. Ask yourself, what is a pragmatist's ontology? Why pragmatism, of course. Truth is "made" not discovered. Surely you don't think Rorty is a naturalist at the basic level?

I think that perhaps physics does show promise of being about the world and not limited to an idea only. The other special sciences are different in crucial respects. — Manuel

Who knows. I don't see the promise, though. There is only one true "undiscovered country" and this lies with revealed philosophy, with revealed phenomenology, which is already in our midst. the whole enterprise of what we are and do has only one dimension that survives deconstruction: affectivity. That is, foundational questions like, what is it all about? are questions about value, affect, a reduction of suffering, procuring happiness, and the like. "Knowledge" is mostly pragmatically incidental to this foundation of what we are.

You're describing the experience of zoning out. — baker

And you remain mundane, as always.

I have always understood religion to include epistemology, and other philosophical disciplines.
Granted, some religions are more explicit about this than others.

In regard to this, I've had strange experiences with some religious people. For example, when I asked a Christian what the self was, he told me that this was the field of psychology, not religion. He preached eternal damnation to outsiders of his religion, yet he thought it is psychology that decides what exactly it is that burns in hell forever. Bizarre! — baker

Christians are the MOST compromised in their clarity of thought. You might as well ask a child. Christians are my pet peeve because they think dogmatically, the enemy of inquiry. Kierkegaard went on and on in his distain for this kind of thing. Popular religions are messy things, and I don't care about this boring dimension of our lives, the way we manufacture entanglements. Might as well be a politician.

Beneath all of this, where the primitive beginnings are and the world, the "originary" world, shows itself, this is philosophical. Here you find foundational indeterminacy, which reveals itself as a wonder and horror of our being here. One has to step OUT of texts to witness this.

I think the inner nature of nature (pardon the redundancy) will remain a secret, beyond our understanding. But, that's idiosyncratic. — Manuel

Just to say, I know you are not fond of postmodern thinkers, but your recognition of this redundancy is the kind of thing that puts language itself on the foreground of, well, suspicion. The nature of nature is an excellent redundancy, because it forces the hand of inquiry: what can this possibly be if not a reference to itself? Do our ideas EVER reach a world that is not "idea"? This kind of thing puts "aboutness" in serious peril.

vacuous quip. — 180 Proof

Talking out of your hat. Dissing Kant, then saying nothing at all about this. You know, the pragmatists are all closet phenomenologists, if you give pragmatism is full due. Rorty was a big fan of Kuhn, the professed Kantian, as well as Heidegger and Derrida. Dewey, a naturalist, but what does this mean to a pragmatist? It means that Kant's empirical reality, minus the noumena, is all there is to talk about. Like Quine, he gets his empiricism from a hundred and fifty years of talkin, indirectly or otherwise, about Kant.
All analytic philosophers know they work in his shadow, that rises and falls, and takes many forms, but never disappears. Analytic philosophy always begs an essentially Kantian question: that of epistemology.

This really makes no sense. You say "I know that things are", but "are" you say, has a completely indeterminate meaning. How can you possibly know that things "are", when you cannot know what "are" means. Your statement is basic contradiction "I know that things "are', but I don\t know what 'are' means". — Metaphysician Undercover

Take my cat: The term 'cat' is arbitrary: you know, the noise we make and the knowledge we have of those furry living things never gives us something indubitable, not that is is wrong to think of it as a cat, but that this kind of knowledge has no determinate foundation. It is up in the air when questions about it are the most basic.
But what happens when we remove ourselves from this, if you will, ready to hand environment of knowing and we ask ontological and epistemic questions, not just in academic curiosity, but existentially, apart from the text, IN the world? Can we meaningfully say that because our language is indeterminate, then, say, my cat does not exist? So here: there is something intuitively absolute, "pure" even, about the givenness of the presence of the cat that is not language bound, and this is a kind of "knowledge" that exceeds the usual contextualized knowing.

Is that all that language does is ‘say’ what ‘is’? Doesn’t language PRODUCE what is rather than merely express an already extant ‘it’? By language we don’t have to limit ourselves to words. Derrida said there is nothing outside of text , but he didn’t mean
symbolic language. He meant to include pre-linguistic perception , affect and valuation. This self that comes back to itself via a detour through the other is already a kind of pre-verbal language game. Could not the divine or the Good reproduce itself always differently through this enacting of subjectivity? — Joshs

If I take you correctly, since there is no interpretative standard that can stand as a center to deny one over ay other perspective, then each perspective is thereby no less real or proper or privileged than any other, and I find this kind of stunningly right. BUT: value, ethics, affectivity, aesthetics: this dimension of the world is, using the best term available, absolute. "Centers" are interpretative variables. My sprained ankle is, qua painful, not an interpretative event.
The divine reproduce itself differently? I don't think I follow. Things, affairs can always be different from what they are. Accidents, is the old term. But it is impossible, I hold, that pain can be recontextualized out of its, as best one could say, badness.

Could you please elaborate on that claim. — Agent Smith

Take pragmatism, the Dewey, Peirce, James, and then Rorty. Take Rorty: a thoroughgoing naturalist, like Dewey (like Quine), in many cases. But behind this there is a kind of phenomenological pragmatism. All pragmatists are, and I think there is no way out of this, idealists. Even Dewey comes to this, no? After all, meaning issues from experience; it is an experiential "event". How does meaning encounter the world? Though problem solving. How is problem solving "about" the world? Well, if the world is taken as a problem to solve, then it is history, the retained resources of problems solved, that one is "dealing with".

But where do they get their authority from , for the later Wittgenstein? I would suggest only through a particular language game in which that sentence is being used. Its authority would thus be contingent and pragmatic.
The above sentence , for instance, would be a tautology that doesn’t actually tell us anything — Joshs

It is a reflection of an intuition. Take causality, a very strong sense that something cannot be a spontaneous event. The strongest I can think of, this "apodicticity". I cannot say wath this is, or even imagine what saying so might even be. But this intuition itself is not a language game, nor is, I claim, injunction not to do something in the intuition of the experiencing o suffering. Twist my arm, and it is not language that I "see".
What to do with that which is not language yet cannot be accounted for by denying that it is language is, again, as I see it, getting to a genuine foundation. Causality? Who cares, really? But affectivity, ethics, this kind of thing is inherently what matters, even if I don't have a language to say what it is. even if I were, as Foucault put it, being ventriloquized by history, there is this foundation of actuality that has a palpable "presence", beyond what a language game can say. Witt said in Nature and Culture that "the good" was his idea of divinity.

All that's left to do is make systematic guesses, oui? Without the possibility of ever knowing whether we go it right or no. — Agent Smith

That is the fallacy of scientism. Making systematic guesses is science's job. But philosophy's "guesses" are thematically different.

You misread my meaning again, sir. Kant's anthropocentric fiat isn't even false (i.e. metaphysical, and in the manner to which he objects) as evident by knowledge derived through fundamental particle physics / astrophysics, evolutionary molecular biology, pure mathematics (e.g. Lie Groups, Number Theory, Axiomatic Set Theory), as examples, which we cannot perceive directly (via "intuition") and are "beyond" human experience. The CPR is a masterpiece of metaphysical (subjectivist) fiction IMHO. — 180 Proof

Not to ruffle feathers at all! But this here sounds like the fiction to me.

What do you mean by ‘logicality’? The ‘S is P’ propositional structure? Belief statements? — Joshs

I mean that the insistence of ideas like, one cannot conceive of a thoughtless world, retain all of their authority.

"Not that ‘before’ we came along that it didn’t exist"

"IT"??? This is the problem.

I'm refering to the uselessness of self-mortification practices. — baker

Perhaps not so useless; after all, it is not something to be measured by how it looks in the dress, the posture and behavior, and so on.

The moment we 'pull away from the participation', we stop being religious.

What use is the 'broader context' to a religious person? — baker

Well, the broader context is philosophy's world: pull away from mundane affairs and ask more fundamental questions, like what does it mean to know something, not about the weather of if the couch is comfortable, but anything at all. But when you arrive here, you face indeterminacy, which is a term I lifted from others to use place of metaphysics.
When you face indeterminacy at the foundation of all of our affairs, you are where religion begins, and where philosophy should be. The former is fiction, largely, the latter analysis.

Well, I find "intuition" as an equally faulty word, because that word as we normally use it, has mental experience implied within. — Metaphysician Undercover

But this line of thinking simply denies that there is anything "there" in some emphatic, irresistible way. I may not know what things are, but THAT they are, notwithstanding "are" being interpretatively indeterminate, is impossible to deny.

“… the logical edifice of the Tractatus came tumbling down and with it the whole notion of ‘logical form' that.played such a central role in Wittgenstein's — Joshs

Really? Tumbling down? As I understand it, the picture theory of language was abandoned, but the insistence of logicality was not. For me, no one has ever convinced me that idealism of some kind is wrong. How does anything out there get in here? I just don't see it. Why am I not listening and observing activated "neuronal networks" ONLY?

Yes, a priori, this kind of conjecturing must be projections and imaginations. We can still try to "describe" it. Like if I say, "What do you think a dog's perspective is like" and you say, "It has a lot to do with smells, patterns of reward, belly rubs, and such" I can still meaningfully gain some insight into this from my limited human perspective without actually "being" a dog myself. Of course, I am never going to have the POV of a dog, but it can be discussed like anything else.

I'm just saying not to use Witty to weaponize any inquiry on metaphysical or epistemological conjectures. Sometimes it's more about how to view a subject matter, not necessarily getting at "it" directly. We all know that there is a contradiction in thinking about non-perspective, but the dialogue surrounding such ideas is not thus a non-starter, it's just keeping in mind that it can only be conjecture. — schopenhauer1

I would agree if it just wasn't for that pesky absence of -perspective that is at the center of the issue here. The whole idea is to imagine the world/universe as if we were not there to conceive of it. Ever since, long ago, Rorty said he didn't know how anything out there got in here (pointing to his head) I have never been able to get around it. As counter intuitive as this sounds, it simply seems beyond refutation: either I am now "looking at" my brain's interior, or consciousness of the world is not brain bound.
But quite right, this kind of thinking often intrudes where unwelcome.

Nonsense in the Wittgenstein meaning of it? If let's say Earth is no more, what of the universe? That's an event that can (and will) happen. So how is that nonsense? There was a universe "before" humans and "after". So why the hostility? It's not nonsense, you are just unreasonably miffed by the subject. Wittgenstein's idea of "nonsense" isn't a license for shutting down all inquiry in the name of calling out "Nonsense!". — schopenhauer1

Well, not hostile, just in disagreement.


Witt writes:

Thus the aim of the book is to draw a limit
to thought, or rather—not to thought, but to
the expression of thoughts: for in order to be
able to draw a limit to thought, we should
have to find both sides of the limit thinkable
(i.e. we should have to be able to think what
cannot be thought).
It will therefore only be in language that
the limit can be drawn, and what lies on the
other side of the limit will simply be nonsense.


One cannot think of a limit to thought for one cannot conceive of the opposite of thought. It takes thought to conceive. He knows that to have an idea at all in mind is to have logic in play already. One can't imagine a logic-free "world". Having a perspective is exactly the same thing in this matter here.
Imagining a universe before humans is, of course, a conception. When we talk about a Big Bang, it is a projection of what the world is processed in logic and experience. Take away this latter, the BIg Bang is just meaningless.

This just sounds like a complaint without content. If there are no sentient beings. What then? I'll try to use as little words that you don't like as possible here... — schopenhauer1

It's is just an argument from nonsense. To talk about perspectivelessness is nonsense.

Your idea of "bad metaphysics" was just asserted without any jumping from your claim to your conclusion. A philosopher can't just write an article "Bad metaphysics. The end".

But anyways, you seem to be answering your own objections.. Yes, a universe has no privileged perspective on its own. But my question is what is a universe without a perspective? I mean literally, what does that look like? The only thing I can posit that people might say (especially information-enthusiasts) are localized interactions somehow inhering in the universe. But I don't really know if I buy that. — schopenhauer1

Bad metaphysics is metaphysics that has no grounding in analysis of experience. Talk about God as omniscient, omnipotent and so on--one asks, for evidence and it isn't forthcoming. Talk about God as, say, a grounding for ethical affairs that are inherently incomplete due to undeniable features of the given world, then metaphysics is not entirely a fiction.

If there is no privileged perspective, then the term 'perspective' stands in its meaning only against other perspectives, and loses meaning entirely in talk about "a universe without a perspective". Anything you say is already "perspectival"; to speak at all implies perspective; to say "without perspective" is itself a perspective.

I think the idea of the blind spot is a metaphor for the failure to recognize a bias held by our own position - humans often assume a god-like, objective understanding of reality when it is actually a perspective with limitations. In this I think the notion is appropriate and I think Wayfarer states the problem well. — Tom Storm

The idea of a blind spot implies that we re blind to something, something there that we cannot "see". If it is conceived as a metaphor, then it has to be such that both sides of the metaphor are known. I have brought this up earlier: a metaphor only makes sense, as in, Ingrid such a tiger in political conversation, if one knows about tigers and Ingrid. Both. Witt argued that one sided metaphors are nonsense. So the blind spot in this context, would be a one sided metaphor. Blind, but blind regarding what?

I am not discussing knowledge versus other experience here. Rather, I am asking, what is a universe without any perspective? We imagine a universe independent of humans, but that imagining takes on the character of what "we" perceive it as. — schopenhauer1

Yeah, but I think you know where this goes: In order for the "without any perspective" to make any sense at all, the concept of perspective has to make sense. Of course, a perspective only makes sense vis a vis other perspectives. There is no single, privileged "perspective" except in the "mind of God" and this puts the idea clearly in the area of bad metaphysics. This is nonsense.

I’d take time to read that article carefully, it has sound provenance. — Wayfarer

You are right, and I hadn't read it all the way. So now I've read it, and I do appreciate the direction it takes. But my views on this run rather radical, perhaps you've noticed. Take this: 'Our experience and what we call ‘reality’ are inextricable."

I put it quite differently: Our experience IS reality, and this is not an idealist claim. It is just to say that whether you want to talk about what is out there and in here or not, experience is not such that it is to be compared to or set apart from what is real. Then the matter takes its epistemic course: The cat considered out there has no "proximity" to me, since there is nothing about out thereness that is at all intimated. But the presence of the cat there, just as it is, this is where the "real" gets its meaning; this is the "originary" locus where talk about the real begins. It is not "in here" but simply "there". It is the intuitive presence of the cat as well as the eidetic presence of the thought that conceives it, these are, I would argue against others, direct and unassailablein their presence, whatever that means, which brings me to the problem: I say "whatever that means" because meanings distort presence, and the word 'presence' is itself embedded in a system of thought, which is freighted along with the simple utterance.

Hard to put this succinctly; there is a premise lurking in the shadows of all this: the point of philosophical work is not to arrive at propositional truth. It is to realize value; it is liberative (which is why I take Eastern thinking seriously. I suspect philosophy's issues were solved long ago, sitting under a fig tree) Value rules inquiry, not thought; and thought is pragmatic, a utility, to achieve value. We think to make things happen, but thought cannot "deliver" reality any more than a hammer can deliver a house. Language has use value. Talk about universals vs particulars, e.g., is simply more talk about meanings and how they converge, reflect, straddle, agree with, and so on, each other. And this is a big point: Concepts will never converge with the real, but they themselves are real. One simply has to abandon the scientific insistence on a fiction called materiality. Thinking is not disputable as a "presence"; what thinking is about is entirely different. Of course, I did just say that all language is like this, distorting or interpretative, so it has to be explained how a "direct" intuition unassailable in its affirmation, while the language's nature is inherently something assailable.

Anyway, this is where my thought begins on the matter of what is real. Bringing inquiry back to the foundation of all things, the actual presence of the world. One has to ask, then listen at the intuitive center, where, as Eugene Fink puts it, the "being-tendency (enworlding)" is revealed. One discovers, again, I argue, something alien and profound vis a vis our naturally lived lives.

The problem is in the ambiguity of the concept of consciousness. For example, a computer is able to react to the presence of a person or even to the expression of her face. Can we call this consciousness? If the answers is yes, then consciousness is everywhere, because everything is able to react to anything. If the answer is no, then it becomes extremely difficult to show the difference. When I say “extremely difficult”, I refer also to Chalmers’ expression “hard problem of consciousness”. Obviously, anybody is able to show that their position is not stupid, since the very existence of the “hard problem of consciousness” is impossible to prove.
In order to talk properly about consciousness we need first to admit this ambiguity and confusion. The first problem about consciousness is in using the word “consciousness” as we knew what we are talking about, while actually we are in the middle of the deepest confusion and ambiguity. — Angelo Cannata

Frankly, consciousness is not the hard problem, as I see it. It is the one thing IN consciousness (all things are, no?) that is worse then hard; impossible. And that is valuing, our affectivity.

Philosophy can even be considered ridiculous, hypocritical, stupid, in its efforts to assign to quantums and neurons and structures and molecules the task of building a good relationship of man with himself. Pascal taught us not to escape ourselves through the "divertissement", through diversion.
We can even consider noble, honourable, this pseudo-science, because science is research that, as such, improves human knowledge and human condition.
It is an easy fact, though: how can we think of "understanding" ourselves, our consciousness, our being "I", by identifying it as a "hard problem of consciousness", or a matter of quantums and electrons? This is still the typical, prehistoric, rough, mentality of solving problems through "understanding", which means grasping, conquering, destroying, sacking, war.
What I am talking about is not morality, it is knowledge, a different approach to knowledge. You cannot gain knowledge of consciousness through quantums and relativity, because consciousness is you, the subject, the one who is waiting to be met. You cannot meet yourself through quantums and metaphysics. Rather, what Pascal suggested was "esprit de finesse", spirit of fineness, or we can just say spirit. — Angelo Cannata

Teetering on the edge of phenomenology.

Science cannot be the "measure of man/woman" because it is an abstraction that merely quantifies the world, and, as I think you are saying, a person is not some quantifiable mass with weight, density, velocity, acceleration, gravity, temperature, chemical composition and so on. A brain, a body, is this, but a person is falling in love, and off cliffs, and worrying insanely, and wondering, and fabulous, and wretched, and personality, and irony and on and on.

Two VERY different sets of descriptive criteria. The latter, I would argue, subsumes the former. Science is not science until someone comes along, has an interest, invents vocabularies, thinks, and the rest.

And that's the blind spot. — Wayfarer

But of course, all there is, is blind spot, for positing what is not blind would issue from what is blind.

In the Blind Spot sits experience: the sheer presence and immediacy of lived perception.
This statement is LOADED with problematic talk about something that is "blind". One has to wonder how blindness, us, can produce its opposite to set such a thing against itself. I don't think this is impossible, frankly, but it will not be done via any model science can provide.

Yet humans at least act as though we have a privileged perspective to being close to what is “really going on”, more than other animals at least. Now take away humans, take away animals. We get a view from nowhere. Here is true metaphysics. — schopenhauer1

True metaphysics is an idea established by OUR deficit. Take away the deficit, then there is no metaphysics, nor physics. To think of an "absolute" metaphysics is just bad metaphysics.

And it can be reasonably argued that the measure of superiority between species is not about what one knows. One could have all the factual knowledge there could be and still it could be objected: so what? It is not knowledge that is the measure, but value. The depth and breadth of affectivity.

I wonder what all that elephant brain's 257 billion neurons actually do; certainly not philosophy. But perhaps some glorious, unfathomable sense of well being. A world of extraordinary experiential depth and breadth, I would hazard, is there.

:rage: I used to positively hate emojis. Now I see their value.

-Again chronicling is irrelevant. What Rand believed or not is irrelevant. Objectivity stands on its own merits. Objectivity has been an established criterion way longer than Rand's takes on its importance. — Nickolasgaspar

Sorry Nickolasgaspar. I mean no disrespect, but you are starting to sound like a nitwit.

ITs irrelevant to this topic but you can always google it. Well here is the first link I got.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-metaphysics/ — Nickolasgaspar

Nickolasgaspar, just say it. Why do you think Kant is just metaphysical speculation? Proof is in the pudding. Give me a paragraph, your assignment: Write in one paragraph a concise statement on why Kant's CPR is speculative metaphysics.
I'm not going to say up front that it isn't. It's just, if you know it, you can explain it. so explain it. Who knows, maybe you've got something there, but we will never know until you properly say it.
People who have something to say, say it. Spell it out Nickolasgaspar. I'll help you:

In Kant's CPR, he argues.............It is his claim that .......that I argue is merely metaphysical speculation, because........................

-And.....? its the same way. We observe people's brains like we observe all environmental phenomena. We gather systematic information for every aspect of that organ and its factions. That is a text book example of special pleading and an argument from ignorance fallacy.
Our ignorance of specialized knowledge on how the brain works doesn't justify to assume supernatural explanations. — Nickolasgaspar

You have to understand that philosophy's business is necessitated by the real condition in human affairs, which is its foundational indeterminacy. This cannot be ignored since that would mean ignoring a condition in plain sight, and science will not permit this. This would amount to ad hoc dismissal. So we apply the scientific method: What has to be the case, in order for what is the case before us to be what it is. Usually in science, this works out fairly well, no? One's sees mountains' irregular features and asks, why? What caused this? And theory of weathering is born, so to speak.

But what if the question about something has no empirically observable response? As when we ask, what is knowledge? You should see first that this is not a merely speculative question. One encounters the question as one would encounter a any other phenomenon's question. Only here, the question goes to the observer and the act of perceiving, and this is a foundational question, applicable to all things, for all things are first presented as knowledge claims before they are taken up as empirical claims.

If you take up the question of the nature of a knowledge claim, you are thrown into a problem that is unique, for anything you can say is itself the problem, that is, it too presupposes knowledge claims. To think at all presupposes what is inherently part of its own problematic.

Now this is NOT an invented issue. So all that you want to put out there in favor of what science has to say is not even on the table, because, of you will, the putting anything on the table at all is included in the problematic.

Look, at this point, any reasonable person has to see this. So, I don't take issue AT ALL with anything science has to say, any more than science would reasonably take issue itself. So spare me all this endless droning on about what science has to say. Try to put it aside, because after reading your comments, I am truly beginning to suspect you might have a problem, one very unbecoming of a scientist: dogmatism. Consider philosophy a paradigmatic challenge, and you have to switch the mode of your analytical approach. The question presents itself whether or not a knowledge claim

So, sorry for not going tit for tat with you in all you said. It would be pointless. I mean, I read it, but you have to make that fundamental shift away from what an empirical argument would look like; or better: Remember entirely what empirical arguments look like, but ask a question about them, which goes to their basic epidemic indeterminacy. You are invited then to analyze the structure of the epistemic relations, and this is inevitably gogin to be just as question begging as empirical science, but at least here, in the Husserl, Heidegger, and so many others, here one has brought the natter to its most basic analysis, because the work here done is specifically about the revealed features of the knowledge relationship, and this is as far as inquiry can go.

It is because philosophy takes things to this level that you find it disturbingly without content. But this IS the foundation of being human. Underneath the assumptions of all science there are all questions, nothing definitive.

You like to call this an argument from ignorance, but then, all science goes this way! Before there were theories about stellar composition based on spectral analysis, there were questions about what stars were that were unanswered, I.e., ignorance.

No one has mentioned "god" claims. This is your doing.