To annihilate the world in this sense would mean erasing our internal model of the world. Clearly, that's not the case and practice is more like temporarily bypassing particular neural networks, perhaps strengthening some and weakening others in a more permanent way. — praxis

Meditation is not to be understood with talk about materialist reductions. The idea is absurd, for all things become the same thing. As if being in love or experiencing plague symptoms are analytically reducible to regionalized brain functions. No, the matter has to be approached phenomenologically. Buddha, the quintessential phenomenologist, it is said, and I believe this right, takes the world as it appears, and the annihilation of the world in the context of Buddhist thought sees the world as a construct that can be put down, ignored, and this is a affectively revelatory event of profound dimensions.

there is no understanding of Eastern thought apart from this essentially phenomenological description of the world.

And this is contradicted by their doctrine that we create our lives fully and should take responsibility for our own births. — Gregory

Taking responsibility is not the business of the so called so-self. the logic goes more like this: If there is no self, then there is no one to take responsibility. The act of taking responsibility can be understood as the illusory self, which is a construct (a personality constituted by language and cultural institutions), which is a necessary condition for the self effacing finality of nirvana.

The basic message I believe is that you are simply not who you think you are. So is then anatman a tool in the sense that this will disentangle you from yourselves and your own grasp? — Gregory

The disentanglement is Of the empirical self. The no-self, as odd as this sounds, is never put in play, so to speak, for it is a kind of nothing, a nothing relative to our gaze. The Buddha nature is always there, pure and inviolable. How does it, then, come under the "spell" of delusory thinking? this is unanswerable, since to speak and answer would be a deployment of the delusional self. This is not unlike the Wittgensteinian objection that logic cannot be known, for this would require logic to make it so.
It is a metaphysical problem.

2) the world is illusion

This is contradicted by the idea that Nirvana is now, is here. To see the world without mental essences is a goal of meditation. The result is seeing the world for what it is. But what happens to maya? How can you treat the world functionally as real while doubting what it is? — Gregory

But this "seeing the world without mental essences" is just part of the illusion, this kind of thinking that divides and builds meanings out of "differences". Derrida is in the background on this issue. If there is anyone who makes this case, it is Derrida. See his Structures, Signs and Play (and certainly Not his "Difference" which will simply irritate. Think of illusion as, not simply words as tags on things; rather, it is experience, the past/present/future construction is the very foundation of the world. No wonder serious meditation is so hard to achieve. Daunting at best, for one is not just trying to calm the mind. One is quite literally attempting to erase/nullify/annihilate the world.

Time, being a human construct, is a matter of sensitivity and perception.

Time is the inverse to frequency [ t=(1/f) ] and it only points in a positive direction. Because it is a construct, the only question becomes: Is it sound and valid? — Rocco Rosano

Soundness is a reference to the world. You deploy an abstraction, thinking deductively, as if there were something axiomatic about the metaphor of "positive direction." Antecedent to abstractions like this, there is the world. One must look here first.

The question is not a logical one until the terms of what is there to be determined are set in place. One must say what the world is, that is, what is there in our midst that gives rise to the concept of time. We find here the apriority, as Kant would put it, but this begs the question: to what does this apriority refer? HERE was are mystified, for the return on this question is more concepts that presuppose time; even time, as a concept, presupposes time.

And one makes the final and dramatic move toward indeterminacy in all things. A move grounded, I would argue, in Kant's exposition.

And this is where philosophy assumes the place of religion, which is the final move philosophy can make. Without the nonsense, which is the point.

Which is why it is helpful to think of time in terms of William James "specious present", that duration, perhaps 2 seconds or so, in which we combine the immediate future, the instant present and the already passing moment in time. Anything less than that is something which we aren't aware of consciously, at these levels we react unconsciously.

If you deny the future and past, you cannot make sense of the present, because it has already past. — Manuel

And Derrida refers to the "metaphysics of presence." The argument, the elephant in the room argument, is that amidst the theoretical work, there is the inscrutable givenness of the world. That time as a philosophical concept is so readily deconstructable, which simply means it falls apart so readily under analysis at the basic level, leaves the theory entirely "open", that is, indeterminate. But the same applies to space, logic, my grandmother and everything conceivable. ALL are subject to the came critical assault. For one reason, because their basic conception is bound to time, and if time is indeterminate (at the basic level of analysis), then everything is.

Not really. We see, roughly, when photons hit the eye and react to the photo-receptors we have. We aren't conscious of this process. We become conscious of it when we study mammalian vision, but, aside from the discussions, we don't see photons, nor do we see how the brain turns this into images.

And there is plenty of study in linguistics than show that we cannot introspect into our language faculty. What we get in consciousness are fragments, not the process by which we get these fragments.

Until we get rid of this idea of "access to consciousness", we will remain stuck in philosophy of mind, because, as a factual matter, the vast majority of the things we do don't enter experience. But this should be rather obvious, requiring little times reflection. — Manuel

True, we are not conscious of a zillion things in a given moment, but give this situation its due: when the photoreceptors are brought into an observable, occurrent event, the meanings that seize upon the content are conscious. Even the idea of the unconscious itself is entirely and is necessarily, a conscious conception. the unconscious has never been, NOR CAN IT BE, ever witnessed. This "nor can it ever be" breaks ranks with empirical concepts, the assumption behind them being that what is not known, can be at least conceived as being known.

The unconscious, and again, at the basic level, that is, philosophically, (certainly not in regular science) a nonsense term. Even the extrapolation from what is seen to what is unseen cannot apply here.

My whole point was that concepts exist as ideas in our mind before we give them names!

You totally missed it. And it took me some time to explain all that. Pity! — Alkis Piskas

Then let's look at what you wrote:

This is how I can see concepts are created: We first have an abstract idea, i.e. a concept, about something and then we give it a name. Ancient people, where watching a river flowing, seing the sun rising and setting every day --an illusion of course, since it's the earth that is rotating and orbiting-- etc., and these observations, penomena were giving them a sense, an idea of continuous change and movement, which is very similar to that of time, but they didn't have a name for them. At some point, they had to invent words for them for description and communication purposes. One of them was "time".

The problem with this lies with "at some point." It sounds as if time came into conceptualization through an act of abstraction from the actual events of flowing rivers, blowing winds, and the like. As if some philosopher sitting on a rock was musing about the need for a word. this certainly is how philosophers likely came up with what they have, but it is not how the term 'time' was brought to conceptualization. This occurred in the everydayness of our affairs. The before dinner, after the game, in two minutes, an hour earlier than yesterday, and so on with all the time words, came to us in pragmatic circumstances long before things were abstractly conceived. Indeed, the abstract could never have become an abstract if there were no that-from-which-it-is-being abstracted-from. And empirical science is an incremental process (again, see Kuhn's famous book).

But these abstract ideas are not confined in the description of phenomena in the external world, which we perceive through our senses. They can refer to things that exist only in our mind. For example, how has the concept of freedom been created? From the idea of getting liberated from a state of being imprisoned into something or enslaved by someone. The sense of relief and the idea of being released, at some point gets "materialized" in the word "freedom" (or whatever came before it). — Alkis Piskas

But what is a phenomenon int he external world if not that which possesses the basic terms of the abstraction? If you take time as an abstraction, then the question goes to what was there in the world prior to this, out of which time the abstraction, was abstracted? If you want to move to what the mind only can "see" apart from the empirical entanglements, one still must deal with the abiding historical language that made those mental moves possible. And these came forth out of their predecessors, and so forth.
When you talk about ideas "only in the mind" you refer to what is called apriority (made famous by a philosopher whose name I will keep unsaid). But apriority, the universality and apodicticity of logical propositions, has a very long history of observation and abstraction, prior to Aristotle an Plato, and likely deep in prehistory.
But if you are still not convinced that terms like time are, for meaning to take place at all, welded any intuition (apriori or otherwise) we might have antecedent to the concept, consider that in order for our understanding to be able to apprehend something "as it is" independently of the perceptual conditions imposed upon it in the actual act of perception, then ask: how is it that anything "out there" can get "in here", that is, IN the conceptual matrix?

This is how I can see concepts are created: We first have an abstract idea, i.e. a concept, about something and then we give it a name. Ancient people, where watching a river flowing, seing the sun rising and setting every day --an illusion of course, since it's the earth that is rotating and orbiting-- etc., and these observations, penomena were giving them a sense, an idea of continuous change and movement, which is very similar to that of time, but they didn't have a name for them. At some point, they had to invent words for them for description and communication purposes. One of them was "time".
But these abstract ideas are not confined in the description of phenomena in the external world, which we perceive through our senses. They can refer to things that exist only in our mind. For example, how has the concept of freedom been created? From the idea of getting liberated from a state of being imprisoned into something or enslaved by someone. The sense of relief and the idea of being released, at some point gets "materialized" in the word "freedom" (or whatever came before it).

So there's no word "time", until we get the concept of time into a word. That is, until we give a name to the idea of constant change and movment. Yet, it still doen't exist in the way a river exists, but only as an idea in our mind. — Alkis Piskas

The trouble with this kind of thinking is that is assumes a time when there was no word/concept there for time. Consider what happens with a genuinely novel phenomenon: When the approach is made, there is in place in the perceptual constitution that receives it a vast system of thought---referring to even the most primitive epistemic involvement with objects, moods, and practical affairs, i.e., everything: when language is brought into the world of an infant, it itself is a pragmatic "issue", the matching sounds with objects, fitting these on logical constructions of sentences and paragraphs all in a future looking event of anticipating moments and resolving matters at hand. In order to address something new (and yes, perhaps your are thinking of thomas Kuhn's "Revolutions" here, with it popularized "paradigms" of science) it is not,no matter how sui generis it appears to be, "discovered"; rather is it "made" out of the possibilities of the existing system. To borrow: New encounters come into a mind, a culture that is "always already" endowed with interpretative meanings and standards. think also of the way they tried to conceive in science fiction in the 1920's what the world would be like in the future. It looked an awful lot like a weird exaggerated world of the 1920's.

So when you think of how ancient cultures conceived of time, certainly there were language inventions that created novelties that became the next dominating paradigm which was in turn built into a system that itself would yield to new paradigms (as in Kuhn's book), but NO ex nihilo novelty. And this is the point: time came upon not as a response to natural phenomena in some revelation about what was there that suddenly was discovered. Rather, time was conceived OUT OF a matrix of existing thought, and the novelty was a modification of things language was already doing with time. time is not a simple construction at all. It is a complex and evolving idea.

When I say time is no longer time at all, I am referring to the massive intuitive and empirical concept that time IS. The actualities that are "out there" that thought is a response to is certainly "there" are not to be dismissed, but to try to conceive what this/these would BE without the personal and historical matrix is nonsense. Time's "isness" is this very matrix, and the "invented words" you mention are not stand alone referents to their objects. They are integral parts of an entire evolving language that essentially "deals with" the world.

The thought of myself is not myself. The thought of a tree is not a tree. — Alkis Piskas

See the above. It is not as if when you refer to yourself you directly refer to the body of thought in which a self is conceived. It is rather, when you refer to yourself, it is NOT a simple reference, not just a singularity. the self is a complex of self related thinking that is in the "region" of the reference. A structure (so called structuralism) is "behind" the self, the tree, that richly informs the occasion implicitly of referring. think of a brain storming mapping out of ideas for inspiration. Start with a simple idea, yet surrounding this is a complex of inter related thought brought out by the mere suggestive power of the original simple idea. Those discovered thougths are already there. They stand at the ready to deal with the world.
The "actual self"?? A very big issue in philosophy.

Don't talk to me about more reading, pleeeease! — Alkis Piskas

Apologies.

physicists are day dreamers that somehow get paid to daydream, like you said they believe in time which is different then knowing — MAYAEL

Physicists are daydreamers?? I wonder what this means.

Right. This is about what I said. Time itself cannot be fragile; it's concept only can be. So, are tou agreeing agree on that but just don't want to accept it directly? :smile: — Alkis Piskas

But without the concept, time is no longer time at all. It is "something" but then, the moment I mention it, the concept is in play. The thought of time IS time as far as time can be even conceived. So when we speak of time, we are speaking of a concept. References to what is there that is NOT is a concept, that stands independently of conceptual contexts, that IS in some unassailable way, are attempts to declare an absolute. But, according to the "fragile" nature of language, such talk is impossible: the mere mentioning precludes it!
And this goes for everything, from cats and dogs to interstellar phenomena. When we speak of these, they are thereby in the context of speaking, not sand alone entities proclaiming what they are by their presence. Of course, as you say, "time alone" cannot be fragile, if by this you refer to what is there independent of language. But it is not independent of language, because to behold it at all with your intelligence is to bring whatever something is, INTO language.

You lost me. Too complicated for me to get involved in! The space in my mind will be distorted! And I'm afraid that my mind might even be exploded! :grin:

Indeed, how can you perform all that thinking? What I can only get are complicated optical illusions, like this one: — Alkis Piskas

Not that complicated, just unfamiliar. But yes, it gets complicated when you read, say, Husserl:

Where do we get the idea of the past? The being present of an A in consciousness through the annexation of a new moment, even if we call the new moment the moment of the past, is incapable of explaining the transcending consciousness: A is past. It is not able to furnish the slightest representation of the fact that what I now have in consciousness as A with its new character is identical with something that is not in consciousness now but that did exist.

This is from Husserl's The Phenomenology of Consciousness of Internal Time. A very worthy read. I have it on pdf if you want it. Husserl is not easy in this, but really, if you take it slow, you will get it, and it can change the way you think dramatically.

I don't know what that "something can be. But I thought later that "a mind inside a mind" might not be the case, but rather a different "mind", i.e two minds working parallely, which anyway, doesn't make sense either. So it's useless to speak about any of them. That's why I use to say "a part of my mind", refering to what is customarily called "unconscious". This at least makes more sense. — Alkis Piskas

Hard to talk about. One has to read her way into it, really. The disclosure of truth can only occur AS a disclosure. But when questions are asked regarding what is "behind" disclosure, then one is lost. Bring up any idea at all and one is instantly in the familiar (if you know the jargon, that is). Hard to discuss because on the one hand one cannot deny that knowledge claims about the world all fail at the basic level. Yet, the world is this imposing , undeniable presence (the feels, the sensory immediacy, the affectivity, and so on) that is the very thing that cannot be possessed in the knowledge claim. It is not some "way beyond other" but it is an "other" that is right there before you. This is where knowledge claims fall apart, in my cat, at the bus stop, under my feet, and in anything at all. One FACES the world of indeterminacy when questions are brought to bear on things right before you at the basic level. This is, it can be argued, the heart of existential thought. Existence is not thought (notwithstanding Heidegger, et al). So what IS it? It belongs to eternity, so to speak. Transcendence. See Eugene Fink's 6th Meditation.

At lot of reading here. See Derrida's Khora, the Violence of Existence, How to Avoid Speaking, and others. See Levinas. See Human Existence and Transcendence by Jean Wahl.

Always trying to get people to turn away from Science magazines to "real" philosophy. All I mention here I have on PDF. You are welcome to it. And btw, I am just an amateur philosopher. I am like you: I read. The question is, what does one read and where does one's curiosities lie? If you really want to get to the core of the human philosophical situation, continental philosophy is the only way. Luckily, the internet is saturated with freely given lectures and essays. You can read Heidegger's Being and Time just as I did.

Indeed, this guy was quite problematic! :grin: I can only find problems and emptyness in his "sayings", like the above position you mentioned, which for me means absolutely nothing. Giving a logical answer has nothing to do with defining logic! You give dozens of logical answers everyday about a dozen different subjects. Godssake, man. Enough! There. Because you have ignited a wick in me that started a fire! :grin: — Alkis Piskas

Wittgenstein, and I am thinking of the Tractatus, not Investigations, isn't saying every judgment is about logic any more than particle physicists are saying every judgement is about atoms and molecules. Witt is saying that all that can be sensibly said has a logical structure. Facts are not out there beyond what a person's logicality can do; they are rather inherently logical. I think of opening the window and my mind is miles from the logical structure of my thinking. Yet there it is, the conditional form: If I pull up on the frame, THEN the window will rise; also, more fundamental propositions like, there is a window, the window is closed, closed windows obstruct air flow, etc. All that lies before us in any given moment from sticks and stones to star systems are on a logical grid of the understanding. Read Kant for an intro.

This is Aristotle, then Kant, then Wittgenstein. Logic is a systematic way to lay out the formal structure of all we think and say.

No, I didn't say that. I didn't speak about any theory. I just mentioned that the word "unconcious" was invented by Freud.
I stopped being interested in and talk about the "unconscious (mind)" since a long time ago. I'm only interested in and talk about the conscious mind and consciousness! :smile: — Alkis Piskas

I don't take issue with the assumption of an unconscious to the extent that it yields an understanding of the dynamics of a conscious set of affairs. The assumption that there are underlying motivations and conflicts is simply a given confirmed in "talk therapy" all the time. But to posit unconscious motivations is merely to say that the foundation for talk about motivations is absent, therefore, we must extrapolate from the seen to the unseen just to get a working knowledge for understanding, NOT to establish an metaphysical ontology. Think of Freud's ID, e.g., as mysterious X that never shows itself, but from which things manifestly issue. What do these things tell us? Ontologically they tell us nothing, it can be argued, because they are beyond language, and the moment they are spoken or thought, they are no longer what they are, for the taking up of them itself is radically "other" than what they are.

I am guessing a lot of this is unfamiliar. As it was for me not too long ago.

Do you maybe mean "The fragility of the concepts of time and the unconscious"?
Because neither time nor unconscious does actually exist to be fragile or strong. — Alkis Piskas

I wonder how you will find the following:

Time and the unconscious are always already conceptual, are they not? To even bring up the idea of time is to have a concept in mind; it is part and parcel of what it "is". And this kind of thing is to the point here: To bring up anything at all is to quality that thing by the terms set in the bringing it up. There is no innocent, pure "time" that is free to be considered apart from the concepts that are in the mentioning.

The fragility refers to the assailability, which is shown readily, easily. Take space: where IS something? If a given location (under the dresser, in Miami, inside the box, and so on) is given by a reference to a broader, more inclusive spatial designation, and this certainly is the case, then the rule for identifying spatial identity will inevitably end an inquirer up in eternity, a concept of true indeterminacy. talk about something "Under the stairs" is analytically reducible to an indeterminacy.

About time: As you said, we use the terms "past", "present" and "future" conventionally. They are points of reference. We use them mainly for description purposes, and they are indeed very useful. But it is very easy to see that neither of them exists: past is long gone, it' not here, it's nowhere. Future has not come yet, so it's nowhere either. Present --which we usually call "Now"-- is the most controversial concept of the three. For one thing, it cannot be "grasped" because from the moment we refer to it, it has already passed by. But we can define it in a context, as a period of time, e.g. "At present" or "At the present time" or "Presently", refers to a period of time existing "as we talk". (Note: all the references to the word "exist" are figurative, since time does not actually exist.) — Alkis Piskas

An interesting analysis of time: Focusing on the presence of what is before me, qua presence reveals a dynamic: As I make reference to, say, the future, I deploy, in the act of reference itself, the past which informs the reference regarding language and habits of experience that are "enacted" in the event. But the event itself is necessarily a future looking affair, an anticipation of what the thinking is "going to be," and so the past is always IN the future reference; reflections on the past are, as temporally structured events themselves, future looking in the event of the recollection. Thus, past, present and future is, in this brief analysis, a dynamic that really has none of any these three concepts; time is "all of a piece," that defies representation altogether, for as one speaks such a thing, this past/present/future is presupposed in any and all possible time references. The daily familiar time language seems to be entirely a fiction at the basic level.

One conclusion is that language never touches down in the intuitional givenness of the world. to think at all is to bring what is before one under a language representation. Of course, your answer to this is to say contextuality is the requisite setting for meaningful speech to take place. Even at the basic level, thoughts about philosophical indeterminacy only become meaningful themselves in a context of foundational talk (philosophy's true domain, I argue). More mundanely, to say that yesterday was warmer the next week's forecast, I am making perfect sense in talk about weather, temperatures, predictions, and so forth, but to think one can understand at all "outside" of contextuality is impossible. That makes it impossible to discover what it could even mean for an idea to be about what is not an idea. Rorty takes this tact: no such thing as non propositional understanding. Ideas "refer" to ideas, and truth can only occur in propositions, and there are no propositions "out there".

This kind of thinking is radical. It entirely undermines the possibility of foundational talk, that is, talk that refers to what is not in an established totality of meaning. It says that inquiry and research are not "closing in" on the nature of things, as science would have it; but rather, the indeterminacy that faces us when paradigm meets actuality, when words about, say, ethics, meet the foundational giveness of actual pain and happiness, is an actual structural problem that does not go away via "paradigm shifts" and bigger telescopes.

About unconscious: It doesn't actually exist either. It's a term invented by Freud and it is rejected by a lot of psychologists today. If there were an unconscious mind, it would have to be inside mind, i.e. a mind inside a mind. We use the term conventionally, as we do with the terms mentioned above regarding time, to mean whatever is inside our mind that we are not aware of, i.e. it is "hidden". It is also very useful. We say, "I did that unconsciously", meaning without thinking or being aware of it. — Alkis Piskas

Not so much a mind inside a mind, but "something". It is a very sticky wicket, but is where inquiry has to go: Any attempt to talk about the unconscious is going to be met with talk about what is conscious, since the inquiry itself is conceived consciously, and any idea that is even possible to address it will be conscious. It is the old Wittgensteinian problem: try to say what logic is, and the very best you can do is give a logical answer! Question begging at its worse. But, and this is a mysterious "but", one quickly encounters Kierkegaard. Actuality, the "raw" feels of the world, are not concepts, and when a knowledge claim is brought forth in the "saying" of something, the saying hardly possesses the "feels". In fact, it is entirely "other" than the feel. Truth, as Rorty holds, may be a propositional matter, but reality is not (he disagrees); presence of the presences all around me is not presence of propositions. Propositional knowledge may take it up, speak contextually about "it", use it, have purpose for it, write volumes and libraries of contextual thinking, but there is that impossible "presence" that refuses to be reduced. This is the other/Other of the world.

So it is not so much of a metaphysics of the unconscious that is so "fragile". This is all too clear. It is a metaphysics of the conscious! THIS is where indeterminacy is revealed.

Where to go from here? The answer lies in ethics and aesthetics (as Wittgenstein said early one).

I can't see where does the contradiction lie. Psychotherapy (and other techniques) is based on exactly that process: bringing things that lie in out "unconscious" to our consciousness. This helps us to understand problems that lie hidden inside us and affects us and out behavior negatively, But in general, this is a very natural process that occurs with us every day: I have a name in my mind that I cannot remember, however hard I try. Suddenly, it pops up in my head: "I remembered it!". I don't know how much percent, but the very larger part of our is hidden from us at any given moment. We can say that it lies in our "unconscious", but only for description purposes. — Alkis Piskas

I thought you said Freudian theory, theory of the unconscious, was merely an invention.
But I do see. But even now, as you produce speech and writing, what is the constitutive source of all this? best answer science has is the brain, brain chemistry, billions of neurons and axonal fibers connecting them; and so on with this kind of talk. But this altogether dismisses (or better, simply misses, being, as is usually the case, completely unaware of it) the paradox of phenomenological accounting: to posit brain science itself occurs as a phenomenon. In order to do the kind of explaining required, there would have to be a position outside of phenomena that "observes" a foundation for this scientific observational foundation! In other words, phenomena cannot be a basis of explanation for phenomena.

Talk about the unconscious always already is talk about conscious thinking about what the unconscious is. Even the unconscious itself is this.

The phenomenon of Kuhn-loss does, in Kuhn’s view, rule out the traditional cumulative picture of progress. The revolutionary search for a replacement paradigm is driven by the failure of the existing paradigm to solve certain important anomalies. — Moliere

Of course, it depends on how you define progress and if this can be done in a way that something noncontingent is IN the progress. Kuhn's paradigms refer to science, but the question is begged: what is science's progress really about, that is, what is it that is progressing forward? If it is merely anomalies that turn up in normal science, and these are simply to be taken as constructions upon constructions, and there is no foundation to be "discovered" then you have the endless permutations of an infinite and evolving yet aimless science; apart from the localized settings of categorically assigned meanings, going no where.
But then you have the actual world, the that-which-is-not a language setting at all, or better, that which appears in a language setting (everything) but reveals itself to be wholly other than language. If the search is for something noncontingent (and I think it does come down just to this) that is, if you will, in the fabric of the experiential basis for scientific observation and work, and not simply a derivative idea born out of paradigmatic normalcy, then the answer lies apart from the language.

This goes to a more basic inquiry into language and the world: is there something in our midst, as responsible thinkers committed to the scientific method (I think is was Putnam who coined the term :hypothetical deductive method. But he got this pragmatic notion from, was it Peirce? Dewey?) that is PRIOR to science itself? And by prior I mean presupposed. Of course: it is the foundational intuitive landscape of experience itself. Here we find value, affectivity, the ethical/aesthetic dimension of the world.

Herein lies the answer to your thinking: science makes progress in an objective and noncontingent way is it progresses toward greater value. As to how this works is a further matter, of course, entangled as value is to factual affairs. But the presence of this value dimension that stands in the midst of scientific inquiry (for what does not stand in this way?) does reveal something Kuhn did not consider (though I haven't read everything he wrote) in the equation of replacement paradigms.

Language is mysterious for me. How does a child learn to connect words to actions and objects. If i point to a vase and say "vase", how does the child know that I am referring to the material object and not the pointing action, or the color of the vase for that matter. There is something we learn about language through social action and I don't think we can put our fingers on it. Is it indeterminate? — Gregory

You are missing the essential part of language acquisition: it occurs in time. See the pragmatists on the hypothetical deductive method (aka, the scientific method). What is, say, nitro glycerin? The anxwer comes in the form of a conditional: IF it impacts a surface at a certain velocity, THEN it will explode. That is what it IS. All things we encounter are things we already know. How was this acquired? imagine a no nothing infant, noises all around, modelled language everywhere. Eventually you make the connections: IF this noise is made, THEN the color RED is present. Hmmmm; noise...the color red...Eureka!
Of course, infants don't think like this, but it is fairly intuitive that the process is like this.

The meanings we encounter in the world are forward looking. We don't know, in the knowing, what things are; we know what they do, the results they produce.

I recently found Neville Goddard and how all is one in God. It seems true, and listening to hours of Gregorian (sic) chants confirm it for me. I never understood the meditation thing but I don't doubt "reality" on a daily basis either. I find myself on my bed typing this and it all seems as real as can be. The cell phone even appears "to be" exactly as it looks, without any noumena behind it. So I get the idea of something beyond this world which engulfs it, but the regular daily things seem pretty clear and obvious to my perception. That's why it strange for me to read people saying that truth can't be found. Isn't there the truth of today? But putting all peoples' perspectives together is where the meta comes in. How is it that truth makes sense to me but others use words that contradict it? In moral questions it gets worse. I think it's wrong to ever kill another human, while others think self defense, death penalty, ect is valid. We have to ask our consciences those questions, and the truth part in prayer or meditation, as you say — Gregory

What the "real" is, I cannot say. That is, the issues that come out of trying to contextualize what it is to be real don't make things clearer until enough work is done that familiarity begins to yield, and one begins to understand what Kierkegaard meant by repetition. Look at it in this (somewhat Wordsworthian) way: There was a time when I did not have any of the impositions of language and memory taking hold of the world and in their grasp, defining it. Of course, being so young, nor did I have a structured personality to understand anything; I was a non-egoic agency, and the world was "pure" phenomena. This idea of pure phenomena is the way Husserl talks about "things themselves" that appear in a lucid apperceptual encounter with the world in the employment of the "method" of reducing experience to its phenomenal underpinning. It is a method, his "epoche," and not simply a thesis! Starting with Husserl is not a bad idea, and his Cartesian Meditations are very accessible. Anyway, in the reading and the practice of the epoche (phenomenological reduction), there is, one could argue, a regressive attempt to regain what was lost in the process of enculturation, and what was lost is the ability to spontaneously witness the world in a purely forward looking (rather than a backward recollection) way, with only an unmade future, a "nothing" before you, but FREE of the learned anxieties that qualify a typical lived life (see Heidegger's What Is Metaphysics). This kind of encounter is like the atman realizing she is the Brahman, if you want to use that language (language is the prison cell and the key at once. Better to be very cautious of any language, I say. See Levinas' Totality and Infinity, though it will drive you a bit mad trying to understand what he's saying. Such works at first need to be "read through" imperfectly, then adjacent readings about this, and then others about these, and so on.)
I think Rorty and Derrida have truth right. See Derrida's Structure, Sign and Play (not his famous "Differance" which will just irritate you). Even to utter the term 'truth', you are in a vast language context out of which there is no exit, for to conceive of an exit is an act of language. So our understand of anything is always already a language affair. I can't really do this justice. You'd have to read these guys, watch online lectures, etc. As I see it, truth eventually points to its own delimitations, and truth itself calls for a shutting down of the world, that is, culture and familiarity.
As for ethics, killing others and all of its confusions, I put these down altogether, and ask the foundational question: what IS ethics? It is a thing of parts. Long discussion. See John Mackie's Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong for the opposite of what I believe about this. It is masterfully written. I take the exact opposite view, though.

but I also know the letter is not as if the essence of "being a letter" does not leap out at me from the thing there before me. — Constance

this has an unintended double negative.

All inquiry eventually ends but not in clarity but in confusion. There are always some presuppositions that haven't been examined in the philosophical sense i.e. they were put into service as (vague) intuitions - like Clarky keeps reminding us about how metaphysics is about utility rather than truth notwithstanding truth is most useful...or not (lies can be quite handy as well). — Agent Smith

Confusion only if one is confused. Science proceeds on a body of assumptions, but does not claim because these assumptions have reached their conclusive and final completion that they are confused. It is a "work in progress." What takes up indeterminacy is where determinacy leaves off. It is finding that field of inquiry which takes up at the basic level themes of indeterminacy that is first order of discovery.

Confusion at first is always the case. Who gets Einstein at first glace? But language constructs contexts, and contexts are interpretative settings for the world to be seen, understood. How is this division between metaphysics and the given world contextually framed? It goes first to Kierkegaard and the "impossible" difference between language/logic and the world. As I see it, the difference between a toothache and its misery, and the language we use to "know" what toothaches are. The understanding is conceptual, is Kant's old claim. But he was right.

So, how can one study, consider or even bring to mind actuality without language. "How to Avoid Speaking" Derrida asks. The world, in this raw presentative sense, is entirely other than language, so when we speak of it, we are always already at a distance. And we can see this at the intuitive level: there is a letter on my desk. I know what it is, but I also know the letter is not as if the essence of "being a letter" does not leap out at me from the thing there before me. I give it a context in which it acquires its intelligible identity, and it is this I am able to speak, tell others about, and so on.

Here, we have actually encountered metaphysics. It is there IN the actuality I face. We "call" things, that is, take them AS contextualizing language, the unnamable what it IS, is utterly alien to the familiarity that is context.

Heidegger thinks language is of a piece with the letter, and I think he is right, that is, as I see it as a letter, this "seeing as" fills the object, cannot be extricated from it as what-is-not-actuality. However, this does not change the actuality that is there and presents a profound deficit of understanding. It does not follow that actuality therefore "fits" into the schemata of established and familiar thought. We "face" metaphysics as a radical OTHER, just as we face, say, spatial eternity as radically other: It is not confusion we feel when we put our intuitions to the task of acknowledging infinite space. It is an event of our interiority, not a logical contradiction. We do this kind of thing all too seldom, I mean, allowing exercise to these threshold intuitions. Eternity is an existential confrontation, an impossibility that is IN the world's finitude. Massively interesting by my thinking. The letter on my desk is precisely this.

I tentatively agree with the ethical indeterminancy you mention in that everyone has to follow their conscience. Not everyone will agree on those. But we do agree that we share a world. That's how we can have this discussion. It's spirit to spirit. The unconscious and the super-ego are united parts of us, although we usually live in the ego. They show the ego has value as an identity. They mediate each other. I've struggled a lot with the idea of anatman and I think it is resolved in finding more unified states of consciousness. Who knows what it is in its essence! How we experience the soul/spirit is key (and I think overuse of the word consciousness is a problem). And I think I can know that truth is real and also that the past happened somewhat like I remember. If I eat fudge and I latter have the taste of fudge in my mouth, I know why I'm tasting it because I connect the logic with the memory. — Gregory

What follows will sound a bit odd.

It is not a mundane indeterminacy, as in cases of moral differences of opinion It is a meta-indeterminacy, an ontoethical (I suppose you could call it) deficit that shows up at the level of basic questions. This is the kind of thing religion is made to address. It is a progress in existential philosophy that moves from Kierkegaard through to Derrida. Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety puts forward the radical distinction between thought and actuality, then Husserl has his way: the world of daily lived experiences as they are articulated by science sits on top, so to speak, of an intuitive landscape. The philosopher's mission is to describe this phenomenological world, a VERY different "place" from science's world.

This requires a method of reduction, the phenomenological reduction. Hard for one to imagine there being anything "mystical" about Western philosophy (putting aside Eckhart, pseudo? Dionysius the Areopagite, and others), but Husserl really opened a strange door: We live in a world of implicit and explicit foundational assumptions; what if we terminated those assumptions and could witness the world itself?

Are we here aligned with the prajnaparamita? Isn't the metaphysics of meditation a reduction of the familiar to the "thereness" that underlies it? Now we ask, what is ethics? and are faced not with centuries of intellectualizing, but the world and its essential presence, and inquiry into ethics is metaethical, a purified experience, if you will.

As for memory, it is not being challenged that we have memories. The question is, what does it mean to have memories? Husserl's reduction, I am arguing, delivers the world from a reality constructed out of assumptions grounded in familiarity and pragmatics. What we call the past is a pragmatic concept, i.e., it works to think like this in solving problems. The whole world of language and culture is just this, and their claim to truth, reality and the rest are reductively annihilated in meaningful meditative states.

Of course, all of this is impossible. Just ask Heidegger. But I think Heidegger just didn't have those kinds of experiences, those weird, quasi mystical, Eckhartian intimations of....whatever. The Husserlian phenomenological reduction, I argue, has only one consummatory end: the apophatic termination of the world (very Kierkegaardian, really).

There is also a connection to the world. We can make some sound judgment about what animals and bugs are, right? Confusing one's imagination might be a problem because it is our connection to imagination that gives us access to memories. I know the memories were formed in this world because I am still in this world. I know my thoughts come from me and also that memories come from the past. Otherwise you are just a thought floating in nowhere — Gregory

Heh,heh--a thought floating nowhere. I like that. But what if being here is shown to be just that? the trouble lies in a reliance on common vocabulary, but historically, we can see how vocabularies have come and gone. What it is to be "somewhere" is very different from, say, Christendom in the middle ages. Being somewhere now means being an evolving organism whose reason and emotions are what what hve been viable in the competition for reproduction and survival through millions of years. This is the planet Earth, just ask a geologist for an entire library of discussion on this.

The question goes to a "discovery" of something that is not subject to revision, something not made by cultures' languages and values. If there can be nothing discovered that is both actual and immutable, then we are floating nowhere, and there is nothing in a scientists telescope or microscope that is going to change this. Now a true epistemic nihilist will say, like Rorty (who would deny, like Nietzsche, that he is a nihilist; he would claim that it is the metaphysicians who are the nihilists, denying this world in favor of another) that talk about a nonpropositional intuitive knowing is just absurd. There are language games with bad vocabularies, and a bad vocabulary is one that says there are things that can be "discovered" in the world. We are not floating nowhere because this idea of nowhere is simply a meaningless term, borrowed form familiar usage then thrown out of bounds into some made up otherworldliness.

I call Rorty and his ilk nihilists because they are intuitively deaf. Religion is largely a fiction, I will grant that, I mean, if you're reading a bible and its tales, it's a good yarn. But to think religion was conceived out of the need for entertainment is simply, if you'll pardon the term, stupid; massively so. Religion is a response to our foundational indeterminacy, especially in ethics. This indeterminacy is not a fiction. It is not where my cat is. It IS my cat. It IS myself and all things. THAT is the difficult intuitive transition to make. Our language must deal with our "floating" as a problem to solve.

There are two other sorts of camps. In one, indeterminacy is a failure of knowledge, the breakdown of certainly that leads to a skepticism , alienation or even nihilism. In the other camp, it is the determinacy associated with certainty that leads to lack of intelligibility, alienation and fragmentation, because understanding and meaning are functions of relevance , and relevance is a function of the structure of time , whereby the present occurs into a past history such that the world a always recognizable and familiar to us at some level. Meaning , understanding , determination and relevance require a dance between past and present in which the past is adjusted to the present, while the present bears the mark of its past. To determine a present is to produce it. If rather than a making, we think of determinism as a finding of what was already there, we have been lured into confusion. — Joshs

Interesting the way skepticism, alienation and nihilism works: the more one puts the question to regular affairs, the more these affairs become that which that which is alienated. To see that indeterminacy is there, "in" the cat, is to see that all along, "cat" assumptions have been radically incomplete. Usually inquirers work from an assumption of "the usual" being a baseline for deviation; I think it is the opposite: one sees in the pervasive aporia that it is the ordinariness of things that is out of touch, somehow wrong, a failing to understand.
Relevance a function of the structure of time? Well, yes, insofar as everything is. Time just has to be drastically qualified to be made sense of. Because IN the, for lack of a better word, present, not a fleeting anything but a firm reality, past has its only place, and it brings question to whether these words really are covering up something that does not fit common sense.

Last Thursdayism? Have you read about it?

You're on the mark that the past is a question mark i.e. we can't be certain as to whether it's real or just our minds playing tricks on us - memory ain't perfect (Mandela effect, confabulation, false memories, etc.)

Memory-past skepticism, what does it entail? You say we're led towards metaphysics. In what sense? How? — Agent Smith

Consider two camps: in mine, everything is metaphysics. In the other, everything we call metaphysics is nonsense. For me, it is clear: all basic level inquiry leads to indeterminacy, whether is it about quantum physics or my cat. Ask me what my cat is, where it is, how old it is, if my cat exists, properties my cat has, etc., and I will show you the road to deconstructing my cat into oblivion, referring to all knowledge claims that make cats cats and fence posts fence posts. Time seems particularly fragile because it falls apart so readily. Yesterday? You mean that-which-is-not-this-occurrent-event? Something outside "outside" an occurrent event? No sense can be made of this. Such a thing is unwitnessable.
What does this entail? It depends on how interested the inquirer is. You start putting everything into play in terms of basic meanings, then the world can fall apart. After all, what makes the world what it is a learned phenomenon. We "make" the world from moment to moment. The question is an intrusion, undoing certainty, useful for solving problems. Metaphysics is simply the final problem, which is where religion usually dominates. But religion is reducible to philosophy.

Philosophy's purpose is to eventually replace religion.

I can show time by speaking of my life. I know surely that these events happen. Some people doubt this philosophically and say the world could have started last Thursday but they betray a lesser understanding of time if time is so unreal the past may never have existed — Gregory

But the response to this invites a broader discussion of "speaking of my life." What "event" are you talking about, that is, how does such a thing bear up under analysis? I can tell you with confidence that I just had breakfast. How is this confirmed? By more recollection of language that was taught to me when I was a child and reinforced constantly and became a part of the fluidity of experience. People do not question this kind of thing, and the certainty runs high! But here, I am taking this assumption and revealing its instability at a basic level; simple, really: no past event has ever been encountered as a past event. And this whole affair of the recollection confirming what-is-not-a-recollection, that is, the past, is nonsense. The past can only be affirmed within a language "game" if you will, in which things make sense WITH other things; I mean talk of today, yesterday last century and so on are meaningful only with a system of time words.
Time is just as real as any other useful contextualized idea. ALL such ideas are analytically "fragile" when attention is put on a more basic level of assumptions.

The past-memory infinite loop conundrum

Q1. How do you know the moon landing happened in the past?

A1. Because we have a memory of it!

Q2. How do we know it's a memory and not our imagination?

A2. Because it happened in the past!

Goto Q1, happy riding the merry-go-round! Tell me when you've had enough, ok! — Agent Smith

I am saying that the concept of the past is nonsense AS some kind of demonstrable, witnessable, logically sustainable possibility. The thinking leads to an apophatic denial: The moon landing, e.g. i remember it, hearing of it, reading about it, witnessing televised accounts and so on. Let's say I was there and observed it first hand. In order to say the past IS the past, there would have to be some observable presence taken AS the moon landing in my recollection that reveals true past and not just an adumbrated past, a mental simulation. Past would have to demonstrably past AS past, as if the past could leap out of its no-longer-there and declare itself as there; it would at least have to show up at least once, and even in theory would have to be plausible. But all of this is precluded immediately given that every accounting the the past can only be a present adumbration, a memory we call the past.

This has implications that are quite interesting, by my lights. It introduces us the impossibility of language's possession of the world; to an apophatic cancellation of knowledge claims "beneath" the regularity of assumptions of given time words. I am late!; see you next Tuesday; yesteray was my birthday' and on and on. We know time vocabulary is a common feature of lived experience, but this is philosophy: what is it really?? One encounters metaphysics instantly, IN the simple analysis of our routine conversations.

Hegel in the first chapter of his Phenomenology also says that the present cannot be settled. I don't know what he means by this. I see time as if a point traveling along a line. The line doesn't exist but the point does. It seems very unfragile to me. I'm not sure about the unconscious — Gregory

Time as a concept can make sense in different ways. You can think of it a fleeting "now" or as past, present future. You can look at time as an apriori intuition, that is, a succession of events that has a structure of the form, two distinct events cannot occupy the same moment (as two colors cannot occupy the same space); such a thing is impossible. But is this just a logical impossibility? Or an intuitive one?

The line you speak of is first a geometrical representation. It is not "what time is" but a way of illustrating it, and like all analogs there is going to be the problem of not allowing that which is analogized to be affected by that which is brought in to illustrate. Time is not an object, and so it is a different, and far more difficult problem: you don't really have before you that which the analog is supposed describe, in the way you have a cat that has it very apparent ability to "pounce suddenly" carried over to someone you know who argues in a way that exhibits this same quality. Where is time itself to make the comparison? is it an intuition? Sure, in the same way logic is an intuition, that is, the structures we use to illustrate logic, the modus ponens, etc., have something there that shows itself, but never does logic itself "show up"!
What we try to do when we talk about time is metaphysics. There is the world and we give the world expression in language. I am simply pointing out that language falls apart instantly on examination of the way time is put together as a concept. Past? Show me the past. At the very moment you try, the past is not there; only a "sense" of presence that presents itself AS past. And all possible accounts of the past cannot reveal the past, demonstrate its existence.

Will to power does not mean that the will wants power. Will to power does not imply any anthropomorphism in its origin, signification or essence. Will to power must be interpreted in a completely different way: power is the one that wills in the will. Power is the genetic and differential element in the will; it does not aspire, it does not seek, it does not desire, above all it does not desire power.” — Joshs

I cannot imagine something that is not "anthropomorphic". Not in the naïve sense, but in that all that I acknowledge is of a piece with myself. I am, if you will, all over it and through it, even if it is other than myself.

Had to read deleuze to to respond so I "read through" Nietzsche and Philosophy". This is a metaphysical concept, as I see it, a metaphor grounded in the material acts of "will" that are witnessed in dasein (if you want to talk like that; I think dasein is useful when I want steer clear of science and its largely unthematized metaphysical assumptions about what a person is).

As I see it, when I recognize time and the unconscious as obvious impossiblities, it is a far more simple analysis, prior to Deleuze and Nietzsche. It comes off as a logical abstraction at first, but a close and honest look at it is something of a revelation. It "finds," on close attention, an intuitive counterpart, not at all unlike reaching out intuitively to eternal space and encountering the impossibility of it. This is not an abstraction.

The unconscious: A contradiction on the face of it. Certainly it does not put psychologists out of business, but at the basic level of analysis it directs one away from a confident empiricism and more toward, say, Eugene Fink's Sixth Meditation which discusses the "primal philosophical act of the reduction."

Not without its opposition, I know.

As I recall , determinism for you is closely tied to intrinsicality, a property inherent to something that can be located dependably outside contextual change. I believe this kind of determinacy is another name for meaninglessness. — Joshs

I would call it, depending what "it" is, threshold meaning, which is where we "are". It is not as is if there were some line firmly drawn between propositionable determinations and the world. We impose this kind of rigidity on the world, and philosophy's job, I claim, is to take us to where meanings run out, and see this the way Caputo does (though without the biblical intrusions): as an an apophatic and revelatory philosophy, free of the both Freud's claims of illusions and Nietzsche's brand of nihilism, and wide open in the vicinity of affirmation. What is, after all, love, happiness, suffering, wretchedness? This is the kind of question that I privilege over all others. Truth is what leads to affective affirmation and Nietzsche was right about this, but wrong about will to power, whatever that could possibly mean (if all you do in life is overcome illness, as it was with Nietzsche, "will" takes on a perverse reification, is the way I see him).

he present ( primal impression) isn’t indeterminate, it’s specious, complex. Retention and protention (anticipation) belong to the present. They are a part of the immediate ‘now’.

Gallagher(2017)writes “primal impression, rather than being portrayed as an experiential origin, “the primal source of all further consciousness and being” is considered the result of an interplay between retention and protention. It is “the boundary between the retentions and protentions”

The primal impression comes on the scene as the fulfilment of an empty protention; the now, as the present phase of consciousness, is constituted by way of a protentional fulfilment. — Joshs

Indeterminacy is what you get when determinacy is out the window. All claims that exhibit a determinate designation of time possess a baseline indeterminacy due to a collapse of determinate language. One says she is in a room. Is this sustainable as a knowledge claim if she does not know where the room is? Yes, if the conditions of the proposition are settled entirely within the conditions of being in a room and no more (as, say, an electrician might want to know only if the power outlet is in a room of outside, and no more than this). But no if inquiry is taken to its limit.

I can see that Gallagher would be right about this as well as I can see that psychologists are right about short term and long term memory, and that Kant is right about time's structure being apodictic. But the point I want to make is more simple. The immediate now has no meaning if not played against a past or a future possibility. But these possibilities reduced to immediacy are instantly contradictory: what is immediate is impossible to conceive without temporal dimensions, that is, having a beginning and an end, but such a structure analyzed in these time words suffer the failure to produce instances, "observable" either intuitively or otherwise demonstrably, of past of future. These collapse into indeterminacy, I am saying, because no determinacy can be made about them at the most basic level.

I believe you are correct. It is about "reality." But "reality" is a difficult subject → that most people do not want to address. It requires a very careful vocabulary. — Rocco Rosano

Or, it requires a clear reduction. It is not a furtherance of theory we are looking for, but a clearing of theory. What it is about the world that intimates "reality" is a clutter of historical metaphysics. But beneath this, one would ask, isn't there something intuitively foundational? E.g., when we speak of God, but deliver the concept from its fictions, is there not something undeniably there that necessitated the fiction in the first place? This is the "essence" of God, one could argue. The concept is only as meaningful as the meaning it possesses.
Being careful about vocabulary is right, but it also has put metaphysics IN language, the ALL of cognition, as Rosenzweig put it. But the language of the world is indeterminate.

I think it would be better if Metaphysics was thought of as the study of reality. It would be difficult to mention something that might not be entangled with the fundamental of reality. — Rocco Rosano

But then, this is just what I have been talking about, reality. What else?

Exactly. You gave no argument. — Jackson

Trust me Jackson, 180 Proof is clueless about Kant. His Wiki is the full extent of it.

I don't think it is such a hard job, because something like religion of philosophy, with spiritual exercises, was already practiced by the ancient Greek philosophers: Pierre Hadot has shown us this. Today there are several movements, like philosophy experienced as life, secular spirituality, atheist spirituality, postmodern religions, atheist Christians and so on. I think they just need to clarify their positions, to gain awareness of what the core of their tendency is. I think all of this can be fruitfully embraced by the umbrella term "spirituality", once it is cleaned from its confusion and ambiguities. — Angelo Cannata

I would bow at the alter of the phenomenological reduction!

The harm principle is an important principle, but there are a number of problems with it. First it is overdetermined. If every harm done was unjust, then self defense would be unjust. However, in many legal systems (All I now of in fact) self defense serves as a justification, not only as an excuse. So some harm must be just.

Then again, it is also underdetermined, because sometimes one's action (or inaction) might not directly cause harm, but are still considered unjust. You do no harm when you do not save a drowning child because her drowning is not caused by you, but we might hold you acountable for not aiding nonetheless. This is more controversial, but I think it is relatively uncontroversial to think that when you can prevevent big damage by sacrificing very little one ought to do so.

You might well end up with the harm principle as an important principle after you complete your via negativa, but it is not the bedrock of justice, unless you define it so broadly that it totally covers justice. (envery injustice is harm and every harm is injuctice, that renders the principle meaningless). — Tobias

Do no harm IS general and nondescript. It is also the default defeasible position of ethical/just actions. IF you are looking to cancel over and under determination, then you will have to do away with principle making altogether, for principles are essentially general, dismissing the accidental features of a particular case. This is the final stopping place for apophatic inquiry about ethics, and all things, really (which is why it is relevant to religious enlightenment). But you're right, it really doesn't take one to a place where theory can move forward, that is, unless one is interested in looking at the affective underpinning of ethics/justice.

Apopahtic inquiries work like dialectics: what IS the case plays against what is not, and from this something emerges (unless you're a Hindu or the like; then "nothing" "emerges"). An innocent man is put in prison, and this is unjust. See what Strawson has to say about this: there is that collective resentment that responds to this. Is this the kind of thing you are looking for?

I see no real difference between ethical issues and those of justice. The latter rests on the same values, the same principles essentially the same arguments; the only difference is the context, that is, issues of justice are often involved with legal entanglements.

Not clear about doing no harm by not saving a drowning child because the drowning was not one's doing. Holding one accountable for harm and that one doing harm have no discernable difference regarding ethics/justice. Why else accountable?

I like the inclusion of love, that draws us to the analogy of love and law. So, is there something loving about law? I think there is, but that is difficult to articulate. Staying on the path of the negative, law is not love, but is it then a kind of love, what relationship may there be between the two? — Tobias

Love, empathy, compassion, on the positive side; then resentment on the negative side. These are affective, not argumentative. Interesting, the dialectical interplay here: we are livid that a woman, say, strangled her child, but then the case comes out and we find she was severely mentally ill. The resentment lingers, but there is no one to pin it to, and we are forced to relegate it to the amoral, "ajudicial" bin of natural events where resentment sits, "unconsummated" if you will. The dialectic: anger, a sentiment well grounded and established in the collective regard for such things, then meets its nemesis, a failed justification. But the anger is repressed, collectively, and we do not appreciate this. We want, so it goes, Justice! there is no synthetic resolution here, and we all just have to live with this, the rotten things happening to good people. This is part of our foundational ethical relation with the world. We are ethical being, but the world is not ethical at all.
Even the most heinous criminal behavior loses its connection to justified resentment when the the cards are genuinely played out, and motivations replace freedom.

So Kant's categorical imperative should have resulted in his being a Utilitarian since the hedonistic principle of Bentham was synthetic a priori? — Hanover

Bentham was not doing metaethics. He simply accepted the premise that pleasure could be quantified. Very hard to do, but there is something in the attempt: better to be a pig satisfied than a philosopher unsatisfied, or not? Quantifying the "good" of experiences, addressing the claim that Beethoven is better than rock? One would have to "observe" the aesthetics to compare, and most would say this can't be done, or, shouldn't be. But the ethereal against the "hard", this is not an impossible question.

Anyway, what Bentham was dealing with, value, generally speaking, is, if you want to talk Kant, synthetic apriori. It is there in the midst of the world (though Kant's idealism remains an open question) yet, and this has to be carefully considered: the joy of being in love or the agony of torture, are not contingent. The "propositional" putting it forth IS contingent, for language is interpretative and its contingency lies with meanings bound to other meaning to make meaning. But the non-propositional experience of agony is not contingent.
As I see Kant, there are two problems. One is the indeterminacy of the universalized maxim. I mean, should I steal? No. But wait, the "principle" in question is not about stealing in general. it is a bout stealing under conditions x,y, and z. What are these? This question so relativizes the principle that it vanishes altogether: the choice before one is a completely unique entity of impossible complexity to distill into a principle. The ought, in other words, meets reality, and is reduced to a homily the universalization of which is nor more than a heuristic.
the other problem has to with duty: Is not one motivated to do one's duty? One must "desire" this, no? There is no such thing as rational disinterest.

You are making an impossible distinction here, arguing that there are two definitions of terms (1) the absolute meaning and (2) the contextualized meaning. All actually fall under category #2. — Hanover

That is right, and it is a big issue.

But think of it as Kant thought of reason. All rational affairs are given to us embedded in experience in the world, the actual content of which is, as he calls it, sensory intuition. Add to this the bulk of the living experience teaming with affectivity, etc. and you have all that Kant wants to dismiss, for analytic purposes, in the effort to discover the apriori form of judgment. He calls his foundational concepts 'pure'. Now, there are no pure concepts, really. This is an abstraction from the actual experienced world which is messy. But, it is not as if there is nothing in this actual world that aligns with Kant. This is logic. Again, there is no "logic" in the world; it is an abstraction from judgments we make. But the logical structure of thought is a feature of the lived experience. There is "something" in experience that is rigid and uncompromising, like modus ponens, in deductively structured thought.

Here, the issue is not logic and pure reason, but affectivity, or value. It is given to us in all of the messiness of lived life, yet analysis recognizes in this a feature which belongs to it, to the contextualized affairs of everydayness. The analysis doesn't obfuscate the quality, it simply brings it out and reveals it. Affectivity is already "reified", if you will, for it is discovered, not made (something Richard Rorty doesn't deal with well, if you've read him), so there is no chance of inventing it. Kant is essentially describing! the world's structural features. Here, I make this same claim: it is not about they way the world is interpreted historically in religion and so forth; It is about a descriptive feature of the world that is there for analysis.

The question then turns to affectivity. We have to look to the way it is experienced to discover what it is (and thereby discover what the world is). Music, art, being scalded and burned, falling in love, getting a splinter, you know, the various and sundry afflictions and blisses we deal with. These kinds of things saturate life. And it is here I claim we discover this "absolute" presence. That it is discovered IN the world cannot be understood as a a deflationary reduction to the mundane interpretations of everydayness. Just the opposite: It is found IN the world; this makes the world something that is just this.

There is no essence to the term "yellow." "Yellow" means however it is used, and there is not a Platonic form that represents true yellow from which to measure. You're arguing essentialism, which isn't a sustainable position. — Hanover

Not that. the term essence is ill advised, so if I used it, I invited ambiguity. Yellow as presence, is all I mean. You may argue that presence is also an embedded term, but this would lead to arguments of higher complexity. It is being understood as a "pure" phenomenon. The language that gives us this is and interpretative indeterminacy, but the presence is not. A tricky issue.

If one holds to hedonism, pleasure is good by definition, but that position isn't universally held. — Hanover

That pleasure is, call it apriori good, is my position. Pleasure qua pleasure cannot be other than good. It is apodictically good.

But I'm saying sometimes we ought to harm and that your view is idiosyncratic, but you just keep telling me it's obvious we shouldn't harm. — Hanover

I'm telling you that do no harm is a foundation that gets entangled with complex affairs in which things are brought into competition and contextualized, relativized, and it is here doing harm becomes ambiguous. But harm itself carries an absolute proscription. Consider the color example. It remains what it is, most emphatically and without exemption, an absolute one might say (though this term is difficult); yet it can be taken up is countless ways that compromise this simplicity. Generally speaking, pleasure os good. But there is that exam on the horizon, so now it is bad to simply indulge and fail to study. This has no bearing whatever on the good of pleasure, though. That caviar Hitler had as he ordered thousands to a horrible death was no less delicious.

The idea that love is undisputably good is a most Christian sentiment and is understandably a sentiment that might be thought of as universal by someone immersed in Christian society, but, believe it or not, Judaism finds hate a virtue when deserved, drawing a sharp contrast against the Christian virtue of turning the other cheek.

"Regarding a rasha, a Hebrew term for the hopelessly wicked, the Talmud clearly states: mitzvah lisnoso—one is obligated to hate him." — Hanover

I take it to be neither Christian nor anything else. For me, it is simply observation, nothing more. It is a reflex to assign a metaethics to some familiar institution, I know. But do consider it to be entirely independent of any of these contextualizations. Look at it as a phenomenon, a pure phenomenon, as you, say, luxuriate in the thought of the beloved, sitting in a meadow. All judgment and relativities in abeyance. The feeling simplciter is simply there.
Ethical issues are often hard, obviously, and Jews and their nazi tormentors are among the worst cases. Strawson argued in favor of resentment as part of the social morality, and I suppose it is. As long as we see that when we draw up these ideas, there is a foundation upon which this sits. Do no harm. But why not? Because harm hurts. What is wrong with something hurting? And then, what is right about something happy and pleasant? You see how these questions answer themselves?

But, once we clarify that spirituality is not a belief, but rather philosophy practiced as a whole human experience, the language of spirituality is automatically set in the context of philosophy, and philosophy has in itself a long and strong tradition about cleaning language from confusion. — Angelo Cannata

Well yes, something like this I would agree with. The devil is in the details. Hesse's Siddhartha imagines a world where every young boy wants to be a sadhu, just run out to the forest and meditate and find God. No more than a nostalgia, now. I suppose for a society to take philosophical religion (??) seriously, it will require serval cultural revolutions. Perhaps when AI delivers us from all labor, or Skinner's Walden II catches on. Who knows.

Not trying to be difficult here, but the idea that there is universal agreement on what is good (or not good as the OP suggests) and we just need to talk it out to see what it is so we can arrive at this naturally understood goodness necessarily assumes Attila the Hun and Adolph Hitler don't get a seat at the brainstorm session. On what basis do we exclude them? — Hanover

It's a merely descriptive matter, like the color yellow. One can imagine the color yellow being worn by fascists, the favorite color of a serial killer, and so on. But yellow remains yellow. Context relativizes. Then, there are the two kinds of love, aren't there? One is an exaggeration, perhaps, as, Freud loved cigars. Then there is being IN love. The latter serves the point best, but the love of a cigar, exaggeration or not, is still inherently a good thing, whether it is Stalin smoking it or Jesus (and we all know Jesus loved a good cigar!).
It does get confused when love becomes entangled with other affairs, and even the loving, liking, adoring, and so on, can become ambiguous, as with masochism: how much is he genuinely enjoying this? Not so cut and dry as a school boys romantic affection. But when it is good, it is not contingently good, is the point. The "goodness" is there on the sleeve, so to speak, and unalterably so, unless it becomes entangled in a competition, a comparison, and then, it is problematized.

No, that is not the principle I seek. Sometimes harm is needed for the greater good. Punishment, afterall, is harm. So, would you abolish all of criminal law? What about self harm? How far would you take harm? For instance drug addiction harms yourself but harms society as well, because of the costs of healthcare. When I am talking to a pretty girl or man, I might harm you because you wanted to talk to her / him instead. So no, unfortunately the harm principle sensible though it is, does not cut it. — Tobias

But your approach is apophatic. This leads you to foundational things. Do no harm is THE defeasible default principle. It is arrived at, not in the complexities that stir the pot of ethical issues; there is nothing apophatic about this. After all of the "not this, nor that's" of apophatic reduction, do no harm is simply what is left. 'Harm" is exceedingly general, but it covers all possibilities for what justice COULD BE about. No harm in the balance, then no issue of a justice nature.
Of course, once IN the actual world of human affairs, the harms of the world get entangled and indeterminate. But prior to this, harm carries its own injunction NOT to do something; it is inherently wrong, bad, evil; it is the existential basis for anything at all being wrong.

Silence however... prhaps there is a deep insight here. The claims to justice might do more harm than good. So, perhaps, one of the first insights of the via negativa on justice is that one should not impose one's conception of justice on others... — Tobias

I think justice is a subcategory of ethics, and ethics is has an existential essence: the bad or good of actual experiences, like scalding water on living flesh, or falling in love. These are absolutes. One does not argue about love being good. It always, already is. This means that it survives apophatic inquiry, the kind of weeding out what isn't necessary, or is merely accidental. Love cannot be bad. It is as impossible as a logical contradiction.

Too bad that in my question you don't recognize Joseph Campbell's question. He wondered how it is that one can tell whether one has indeed had a religious/spiritual experience, or whether the feel good feeling one has is simply due to having had a good meal. — baker

But this just begs the question: what does having a good mel have to do with the qualitative nature of experience? Certainly there can be a causal relation between the two, but this says nothing about WHAT the experience IS. Looks as if you are looking some kind of reduction of experience to physical brains states, such that a brain chemistry's analysis can yield up what an experience IS. This is obviously not true; the worst kind of question begging: how does one know what brain chemistry is? Why, through brain chemistry!? You should see that this is one way to approach the justification for a phenomenological approach.

Some "spiritual practices", "tips & tricks", consumption of intoxicants, altered states of mind due to physical exertion readily produce in one's mind a feeling, feeling x. This, however, doesn't yet mean that one is x. — baker

Same problem. An experience due to exertion, the light headedness, the runner's "high" and the like, are seen to be causally related to the exertion and it effect on physical systems like the brain's, but talk about this, even at the detailed chemical level says nothing at all about what the elation itself is. It tells you nothing about the nature of value. You will have to deal with the Tractatus here: the good feeling of a runner's high is entirely transcendental. Of course, all experience is, at the basic level, transcendental. We, e.g., think before we commit to ontology. Thinking is a structured experience, so the ontology can be no other than someting that issues from this structure, and since we have no access outside of this, we are committed to a general indeterminacy in all things--THE foundation to our existence is indeterminacy.
So what I claim is that experiences need to be assessed and understood for what they are, as they "appear" for appearance is all one ever has. And this is not to invoke talk about "representations" and their objects that do not appear. The world "appears".

For example, one can read some productivity literature, hype oneself up, put some of the advice into practice, and then one feels more productive. But whether one is actually more productive or not is something that yet needs to be measured. — baker

This raises the issue of making an error in judgment. Certainly this happens all the time, as when my dogmatic Christian neighbor insists the gay couple down the street is going to hell for eternity. But this is not about unjustified beliefs. It is descriptive, merely. Go into a strong effective meditative state, control the breathe, especially the release, out and slow, and at the end when the breathe cycle is complete, linger. It is a remarkable experience of control.

Serious meditation is not an easy thing to account for. One must, I hold, see that it is not about the brain, even though there is science's strong causal claim in the background. The brain is just another phenomenon, and it has no more relevance here than knitting. The brain is a phenomenon, and its causal relation to experience is phenomenally acknowledged. So, one simply witnessed the breathe, the intruding thought or feeling, the dismissal. the breathe is simply this rising and falling and the work one has is about controlling this, for the breathe is a most insistent attachment. After all, we yield to the breathe's insistence as we do to a thought or a feeling. The calm that issues from this exceeds familiar calm, and the world "settles" in such a way that one actually stands on the threshold of a sublime stillness, and the concepts of existence and reality take on an extraordinary meaning.
Look, I can't convince of the validity of this. But if you're going to criticize it, you should know something about phenomenology. A medical diagnosis is inherently pathological in its judgment, and this implies a standard of what is normal that issues from everydayness. In serious meditation, you are not in everydayness at all! Meditation is the cancellation of just this.

One can make oneself "feel the presence of the Holy Spirit", through prayer, going to a church, using intoxicants. But that alone doesn't yet mean the Holy Spirit is indeed present.

There is a difference between feeling safe, and being safe.

There is a difference between feeling that one has overcome egoic thinking, and actually overcoming egoic thinking.

And so on.
Feelings are easy enough to conjure up. Facts that can be measured, not so readily. — baker

But all of this talk belongs to a world of assumptions one gets from high school text books. Here "all schools are in abeyance" says Walt Wittman. You have to go there. I live in a world of dogs and cats and shopping just like everyone else, but I also read Kant through Derrida, and I have learned that this everydayness is a fraud, at the level of basic questions, lacks reflective justification altogether. Facts? Are these Wittgenstein's facts, on the logical "grid"? These are free of value content. So then, what IS nirvana? The most extraordinary value experience.
One thing Witt did was he took value off the table for discussion by claiming to be transcendental and unspeakable. This gave analytic philosophers the license to ignore THE most salient feature of our existence: affectivity. The meaning of life is not about facts; it is about the depth and breadth of affectivity.

Strange that the Buddhists say the Noble Eightfold Path and the Four Noble Truths. — baker

Heuristics! That is all this is. Sitting under that fig tree is not at all about the four noble truths.

I am afraid I do not understand you. Yes, Rawls offers us a cataphatic approach; under the veil of ignorance we would necessarily choose a system in which advantages for some are only justified when they also benefit the least well off. However, why would he need God? It is just the light of reason. Anyway, my approach would then be to look at cases which we find unjust and see whether we can distill such a principle from it, instead of resorting to reason under the veil of ignorance. — Tobias

A reduction, then. It is there already, from Mill and before: do no harm. This is the principle you seek. Not so much apophatic, which is reductive to a vanishing point, like the eastern notion of neti neti, which leads to a vacuity where one finally discovers that it was language and the world of particulars that was obstructing insight. Apophatic inquiry leads to "silence".

I highly suggest the entire video though, even if you're familiar with the concepts. I'm curious to see what people think. — Philosophim

Not that causality is more fundamental than time. Causality IS time. You have to put Einstein on hold: time is the condition of the perceptual apparatus that is available to Einstein so that he could make observations and think at all. First perception, then science, is the order of analysis.

For example, let’s think about the faith in God that is in Christianity. In this context, God cannot be conceived but perfect. The only alternative, in order to conceive God as not perfect, would be to conceive God entirely as a human creation. If God is not a human creation, then he must be perfect. If God is a perfect being, he is exposed to all the contradictions implied by perfection, that are, in a synthesis, all about being not human. But we, as humans, need something human. This is the problem of all religions: they have depth, profoundness, they are revelatory, but they lack humanity, exactly because they need to be based on something conceived as perfect, otherwise, if it is not perfect, it cannot escape being a human fantasy. — Angelo Cannata

But philosophy's job is avoiding the devolvement into fantasy. I take issue with it "all about being not human". God is constructed out of what is human. The issue is to avoid the enlightenment philosopher's talk that misses that misses the side of the barn by parsecs. See what Rorty says in a footnote:

All that I (or as far as I can see, Derrida) want to exclude is the attempt to be no propositional(poetic, world disclosing) and at the same time claim that one is getting down to something primordial--what Caputo calls "the silence from which all language springs."

See, he wants to commit to idea that the whole of our world, the logical grid of the tractatus, the being-in-the-world of B&T, Levinas' "totality" (which he gets from Heidegger and this probably comes Husserl somewhere), simply has no metaphysical foundation. My thinking is that it is ALL metaphysical, but not the extravagant Platonizing; just the, as Levina put it, realization that the desideratum exceeds the desire and the ideatum exceeds the idea. That is, our indeterminacy at the level of basic questions.

Anyway, the missing the barn door is here: it is not "the silence from which all language springs," as Caputo put is, but from which all affectivity springs! Language is nothing without affectivity; it is simply an abstraction. We are beings bound to a world of caring, of music and art, loving and hating, and on and on, and this is what cries out for meaning beyond the totality: it is that ethical/aesthetic dimension of our being. E.g., why are we born to suffer and die? And have blisses and miseries and horrors, and so on.
Non Christian philosophers almost Never go here. Metaethics has been theology and affectivity, well, a matter of "taste".