I'm not a post-modernist or deeply read in Derrida, but I find myself agreeing for the most part. For me it seems that the anti-foundationalist conclusions of po-mo are an inevitable consequence of a process that began in earnest (perhaps) with the enlightenment project. We have peeled away the layers of the onion and found that there are only layers and ultimately nothing at the core. While this represents a freedom of sorts, it terrifies and outrages those who insist on foundations. Humans seem hard-wired for this, we navigate via certainty. The challenge for us all is how to reinvent ourselves in relation to this conception. My prediction in the short term is that the culture wars will lead us back into flailing 'certainties' and ever escalating cant. — Tom Storm

This "reinventing ourselves" sounds like Heidegger and Nietzsche before him. True, I think. But I would go one step further: I put aside terms like "hard wiring" for this. It suggests a resignation to some inevitable limitation that is undefined. One thing about onion layers is, if you will, the onion itself, which has layers, no doubt, questions about questions, and there is no way out of this. But that about which the questions apply sits there. This is existence. Can this be questioned? Of course. But there is in question the palpable world that does not belong to language. This deserves analysis as a palpable world. Tricky.

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I think that what you're saying was already well known thousands of years ago, and was even discussed by Plato in his Cratylus dialogue.

And all this elaboration on speech and meaning were already discussed very sensibly by Locke, Reid, Priestley and others.

Was there more added later on? Very much so. Quite a lot.

I think you simplify analytic philosophy. People like Nagel, Haack, Tallis, McGinn and a few others are very, very good.

But, to each there own. — Manuel

Derrida is not Plato. Analytic philosophers have been very helpful for me. It is the sacrifice of content for the sake of clarity that I don't approve of. The world is, at its epistemic foundation, a really, impossibly interesting place. Philosophy should deal with this, not ignore it. Post modern theology, the so called French turn, following Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas et al, does this.

I strongly urge you to stop experimenting with oxygen deprivation.
The only things that do "fall away" in oxygen deprivation practice are your cells and tissues, specifically, your brain cells. It's an ascetic practice that doesn't lead to any noble attainment.

Again, I strongly urge you to stop experimenting with oxygen deprivation. — baker

Fear not, I breathe. It is not as radical as it sounds. But you are invited to wonder what the experience is about.

Why should I be content with someone else’s answers to that? — praxis

You certainly should not be. I take this question to be truly primordial, issuing form the the world, if you will, not the church. The church invents "answers" with its robes and solemn initiation rites, etc. Beneath all this is the question that is buried, It is a terrible impossible question the more it is pondered, something we loose a sense of while staring at our cell phones. Not to be cynical of modern life, which a like. But it is very, very weird, not to put too fine a point on it, to pull away from it and reclaim that original territory of wonder and terror.

A.k.a. hypoxia. — baker

Ahhh. But what is hypoxia? It is not a deficit of oxygen outside of the physiologist's lexicon. And there IS an outside of this.

No. Evolution is happening now. As long as environments with organisms change, there will be selective pressures to adapt in some way to those changes. For things to happen by accident implies that there was a goal or purpose in things being a certain way that somehow wasn't - as if the universe has a goal or purpose as existing without the existence of opposable thumbs, yet it still happened anyway. It also implies that you know how the universe was suppose to be (without the existence of opposable thumbs) yet they exist despite how you know it was suppose to be. Nothing happens by accident. What happens now is dependent on what has happened before. — Harry Hindu

It sounds like you are saying that by calling something accidental we imply the nonaccidental, and the nonaccidental is just presumptuous assumption the calling it accidental is supposed avoid. By calling something structureless, we assume structure in the calling.

But this is true, of course. The term accidental is defined in a contextual embeddedness, and it plays off other terms for its meaning. You speak from a position outside of this?

It's not clear that actual religious people think that way about religion. They are not relativists and doubters like that.

It's Easter time. The local Catholic parish sends out a monthly newsletter to everyone living here, including the non-Catholics. "This is the time of celebration, of the victory of life over death", "Christ has risen", and so on reads the newsletter.

To suggest that the people who wrote this newsletter believe that they are dealing with something merely constructed about the radical unknown??? — baker

I think you are right about that. But then, a newspaper deliverer does think of herself as, say, a pawn in the grand capitalist game. There is "living in" without pause or question, then there is stepping away into a broader context, and giving an account.

Religion is the broadest possible context, which is without form itself, brought down to earth, if you will, through the rituals and the candles, and the spooky dark church interiors (which I like), and so on. But ask aunt Betty who sits in a pew on Sunday, and she will tell you about Jesus and redemption, or the like.

Now that humankind has appeared on the scene we can begin to evolve more consciously. Certainly this can be done on the individual level: this forum is evidence of a will to psychical evolution. It may be a Morlock-Eloiesque evolution, but it always is. We found an okay body so now we can start to upgrade our brains and imaginations, wordskills and emotional life. On to homo misteriosus. — ZzzoneiroCosm

But then, one can put aside this kind of thing altogether, not dismissing it, just affirming it likely true in one way or another, then ask another question: This "evolutionary plateau" in which we find ourselves, what is this? What is the foundational description of it? This is phenomenological. The basic givenness of the world. Here, I would add, one discovers that all theory, certainly including that of evolution, is constructed out of the matrix of thinking afforded by this very givenness. In other words, evolution is a construct of the very thoughts that are supposed to explain things, itself included. The question is begged.

Actually, Buddhism of all schools stridently rejects the charge that it is nihilistic. It is a charge that was frequently made by its Brahmin opponents and was also characteristic of the early European intepretations of Buddhism. It's not 'annihilation of the world' but a clear insight into clinging to the apparent reality of sensations and concepts as inherently real. It's a subtle skill, and exceedinly hard to master - I don't claim to have mastered it in the least.

The point I tried to make, which I'm afraid has not come across, are the convergences between that characteristically Buddhist discipline of 'choiceless awareness' of the contents of consciousness and the idea of 'bracketing' that is found in phenomenology. That has been the subject of considerable commentary i.e. in the 'embodied cognition' movement. — Wayfarer

But nihilism can be taken both epistemologically as well as ethically. When I say annihilation of the world, I refer to language and culture that constitute what makes our existence what it is, It is not like the common thinking that all there is, is unity and particularity is just an illusion. I consider this to be, well, bad metaphysics. Annihilation is a temporal concept: I sit quietly doing nothing and in this I rush of thoughts and feelings fall away. I call the world these thoughts and feelings, speaking generally. The self as a constructed historical entity falls away, is forgotten, if you will.

I do think those "sensations and concepts" are inherently real. But they are interpretatively missing the mark, and the mark is invisible, so any kind of Hegelian, is you will, convergence is impossible to conceive. Presently I think we acknowledge it in "indeterminacy", which is the way I see metaphysics as a concept. As a lived experience, it is wonder and grief thrown upon the abyss from which all things come. But re. the reality of sensations and concepts, generally speaking: this has to be given existence as a presence. Important to see that, to put it all too simply, perhaps, they exist but they are wrong, or merely interpretative or indeterminate. The rub: the term 'reality' too is wrong, or indeterminate; that is, when I say a concept is real, I am simply saying there is something there.

Final definitions? All things are hermeneutically in play. Annihilation to me is saying, look, when we terminate thought and attachments, an extraordinary stillness emerges that intimates something the usual engagements obscure and distract from. Many want to describe these engagements indifferent ways, and they are, many of them right. But the intimation cares nothing for this. It simply beckons with profound irresistible presence, and when one actually follows, s/he annihilates the world.

Finally, the idea of bracketing: As I see it, this is a momentous kind of thing to do. Why others don't see it this way I will never know. I read Rudolf Otto's Idea of the Holy and I am instantly interested, while others are repulsed. I can't go into why this is.

There are non-religious approaches to that end. I think the utility is in binding tribes, which can offer well-being, but if well-being were essential then I think religions would be better at the task. There is no reason they couldn’t be better at it. — praxis

But religions have that dimension of the radical unknown, the metaphysics. I can think of many ways cultures take of the world and systems of thought as a utility, true, but religion is a "utility" or perhaps a complex heuristic (a provisional dealing with) that has as its object no object at all, and the constructed object, its rites and symbols, are these weird, threshold institutions that deal with this foundational position of our indeterminacy in all things. This is why philosophers like Quine and Wittgenstein would not dismiss religion. It's a metaphysical necessity, because the world is, beneath all of our affairs, indeterminate, especially indeterminate in value and ethics (Oh why are we born to suffer and die? is not an vacuous metaphysics).

There are more things than there are words! The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao! The named are things that are critical to our well-being and I mean those things that are both harmful and/or beneficial; that which is neither, our minds ignore for a good reason in my humble opinion viz. to nip information overload in the bud. We've evolved to sense only mates, prey and predators and anything else that gets caught in this sensory net, being the right size in a manner of speaking. — Agent Smith

Perfectly right. I never argue with what is supported by observation and logic, and if religion were the kind of thing that could be handled in this way, I would defer to readily.
But it's not. Evolution and its ideas and theories taken as a given. We have to understand that evolution is not a theory about what is. It is a theory about how it got here and has nothing to say about the qualitative conditions of our existence. That the hand has an opposable thumb is entirely an "accident". There is no "principle of evolution" in the world moving things forward.

According to the instruction manual, Right View (twelve link chain of dependent origination, karma, rebirth, etc.) is doggedly claimed to be essential to liberation. — praxis

Right view is a method, and has to do with what is not liberation. As I see it, the matter is simple, but the language we fit to it, and the contextualization of it in our habits to schematize and endlessly "understand" what it leads to distortions.

It is hard to conceive that language itself is a utility. The four noble truths, Hindu metaphysics, and all we can think of is a just there as a "method" of grasping the world, a utility that serves one end: the security of well being. So what is well being? One can only discover this, and if the Hindus are right, and I am sure they have to be, then well being is off the charts.

Language is delimiting, pulls things down to its own terms. Finitude itself, it could be argued, is language.

I think however there are some very useful pearls of insights in Descartes and Cudworth (who is unknown) that really set the stage for a kind of special "power" in our souls, in which with our "cognoscitive" powers we are able to take stimulations (not objects) and enliven them.

Once this is cleared up a bit, I think one could proceed down the lines of "reduction" or Tallis "episteogony" and much else that follows. But before checking consciousness, I think there are some obscure factors in play, which allow the mind to have the capacities it does. — Manuel

On postmodern thought, it tends to be ignored because it is so damn mysterious and apart from normal thinking. But I think philosophy makes it clear that this is where questions lead. Analytic philosophers essentially say, oh well, nothing we can do, might as well talk about things we can talk about, which always leads massive question begging about everything they say. Continental ideas move forward into the "threshold". As for Derrida:

As I see it, one needs to take the matter all the way to Derrida, which is not a happy thought for people, because he is deliberately obscure. But what makes him so important is his arguments that show that language is, in its nature, not metaphysically groundable at all. Rorty like Derrida for this. One cannot ever escape the "regionalism" of a language use, is the way I think of it, borrowing from Heidegger who borrowed from Husserl, and this means that when I say, there is my cat, the term cat is not AT ALL a definite designation. It is a kind of context of terms, all related to cats that are not the term cat but "gather" in cat regional thought and relevance and out of this emerges, there is my cat, which is itself certainly definite enough in the usage, but the philosophical analysis yields no definiteness at all. It is, as I think of it, a diffuse meaning, spread out in a web of interference, no single referent of which is itself singular.

This is, I think close, and right. Caputo examines Derrida's thinking in terms of apophatic theology/philosophy: It puts language as, as I see this, a self annihilating position. Deconstruction is self deconstructing as the deconstructive analysis has no exceptions. This is Derrida's version of hermeneutics: radical. Language, to put it in a familiar way, never "touches" the world, for reference is impossible in the familiar way this is thought of. Reference is a "spread out" in language "regions" in which the difference of the interplay expresses as singularity in speech and thought and writing.

So, our language is not in an analogical relation to God's, if God is conceived as being anything at all, because all of our terms are in their nature, at the level of basic analysis, diffuse and in regional "play". And we are, as Caputo cites Eckhart, finally "free of God", that is, God the concept, the idolatry of know ing. Apophatically liberated.

Never tried that. Sounds like a bold approach. "Air hunger" - that's got to focus the mind — ZzzoneiroCosm

It is the ultimate control, watching air hunger rise, then calming it down, but it insists, but there are moments when the massive energy of thought and feeling fall away.

Actually, if you think about it, this 'using the concept of spirit only figuratively' is not a million miles from Aquinas' analogical language. — Wayfarer

As I see it, one needs to take the matter all the way to Derrida, which is not a happy thought for people, because he is deliberately obscure. But what makes him so important is his arguments that show that language is, in its nature, not metaphysically groundable at all. Rorty like Derrida for this. One cannot never escape the "regionalism" of a language use, is the way I think of it, borrowing from Heidegger who borrowed form Husserl, and this means that when I say, there is my cat, the term cat is not AT ALL a definite designation. It is a kind of context of terms, all related to cats that are not the term cat but "gather" in cat regional thought and relevance and out of this emerges, there is my cat, which is itself certainly definite enough in the usage, but the philosophical analysis yields no definiteness at all. It is, as I think of it, a diffuse meaning, spread out in a web of interference, no single referent of which is itself singular.

This is, I think close, and right. Caputo examines Derrida's thinking in terms of apophatic theology/philosophy: It puts language as, as I see this, a self annihilating position. Deconstruction is self deconstructing as the deconstructive analysis has no exceptions. This is Derrida's version of hermeneutics: radical. Language, to put it in a familiar way, never "touches" the world, for reference is impossible in the familiar way this is thought of. Reference is a "spread out" in language "regions" in which the difference of the interplay expresses as singularity in speech and thought and writing.

So, our language is not in an analogical relation to God's, if God is conceived as being anything at all, because all of our terms are in their nature, at the level of basic analysis, diffuse and in regional "play". And we are, as Caputo cites Eckhart, finally "free of God", that is, God the concept, the idolatry of know ing. Apophatically liberated.

:clap: Hence the links that have been discerned between Pyrrho (ancient Skepticism), and Buddhism, which has emerged in the last couple of decades (e.g. see Everard Flintoff 'Pyrrho and India'). From this you can discern a 'family resemblance' between Husserl's ‘epoché’ and the Buddhist ‘śūnyatā, between the Skeptic 'ataraxia' (tranquility) and the Buddhist 'nirodha' (cessation) which connotes 'suspension of judgement'. e.g. from an OP on 'emptiness — Wayfarer

I have read, and pondered, the Prajnaparamita, and, of course, one can easily see why thinking like this is all but absent from our culture and thinking. It calls for the annihilation of the world, if taken to its conclusion. And clearly, I'm not talking about the physicist's world. "There is no world, only worlds," and whatever that which is the ground of all things may "be" it certainly does not good to call it substance or energyat the level of basic questions. These terms are fine for science, and we all use them all the time. As I see it, śūnyatā is the term that, while it cannot be explained positively, it can be gotten to around the back door, so to speak. I've listened to lectures and read a scattering of commentaries about this, and the best I can think of to indirectly account for it is Husserl and his ilk. For Buddhism is a "way of liberation" at its core, not a metaphysics, which, as I see it, is its great virtue.

I cannot well access scholarly work in Buddhism or Hinduism; I'm too embedded in other things. But then, I do believe all roads lead to śūnyatā. To me, this is an annihilation of the world and time. Time is the doing of things and the interest that motivates this, the anticipation, the assumed goal and its cultural generative sources issuing forth the doing and the doing of thinking and feeling. This is Kierkegaard (minus the Christian obsession). This is K's analysis of the concept of original sin, this cultural transfixity.

These ideas about time, the world and annihilation are radical, and I know have no place in the thoughts of normal thinking.

A second difficulty is that Buddhism's aims were soteriological (i.e. concerned with salvation or liberation), but in our minds such philosophies must necessarily depend on the acceptance of dogma (which is what we equate with 'faith'). So here we're presented with something that seems paradoxically like a 'skeptical faith'. — Wayfarer

Yes, I should have read down for this. Soteriological, eh? Never heard of this term, but I guess I knew there had to one for this. I should have read Suzuki, but instead, I stuck with Allan Watts for the popular read.
On dogma, K's book's full title is Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin. Not well received by the church. He was a true threshold personality, though. Couldn't actually become a knight of faith himself, such is the trouble with having a genius mind--too entertaining.

I've been an avid student of meditation for over 20 years: the obsession settled into a placid daily practice. And I have to say - after twenty years' experience - I don't see meditation as offering a link to nothingness. (I played around with notions of nothingness for a long time....) I see it as the ability to sustain near-sleep and near-dream states while maintaining full to partial conscious awareness. — ZzzoneiroCosm

I practice stopping my breath. Genuinely interesting, for air hunger comes along and is very insistent. And I have to ignore this, tame it, and there is, beneath the breath, if you will, an extraordinary sense of the presence of, well, presence. I can see that our thoughts and attachments are not abstractions, but real energic forces. A thought is not an abstraction. It requires energy to think, that is, a production of interest, and it "covers" the world up. And what it covers, and this is where it gets impossibly weird, is the Real world, which we never see in our everydayness.
Yes, doable. But certainly not everyone's cup of tea.

But those figures you mentioned are good, I just really dislike postmodernism. That's where I draw the line. — Manuel

But then, there is that very mysterious phenomenological reduction. People take this as best they can, and even Husserl was surprised by the effect it had on students, making ”protestants out of catholics and catholics out of protestants.” The reduction is an essential part of philosophical insight, I would argue.

..and this cannot be done; hence the approach taken here will not work. — Banno

What does it mean that it cannot be done? It is not a breaking of logical rules, and one cannot really argue against it. It is not an argument. It is a reductive method of discovery and a description of what unfolds. It takes, well, curiosity, motivation to explore the claim that intuitive insight can be made clearer.

Secondly, by the time of the Investigations it is clear that whatever categories we might posit are arbitrary in that we might posit quite different categories if it suited our purpose. They are not about how the world is but about what we do in the world - we ought not look for their meanign but for their use. — Banno

But the important point is that logical restraints have no hold on content. Atomic propositions being empirical or not begs the question: what is it for something to be empirical at all? What is logical restraint, anyway? The term "logic" is abstracted from judgment. The conditional structure is abstracted from time (if....then...is a forward looking concept). The point is, all categorical thinking is interpretative, and certainly not prohibitive of what can be present in the world. All of the glory of the divine presence could appear before us, and reason would not blink (said Hume). Reason is an empty vessel and what is empirical is about content.
As to the Investigations, I see no help in the matter of the concept of religion. It is not a question of language and how it works. It is about value and ethics, that is, metavalue and its correlative, metaethics. Religion is about the Good, as Witt said. The point I would make is that this has extraordinary implications.

I still don’t follow. Concepts are interdependent and are meaningless in isolation. — praxis

Exactly! But that fire on your finger, is THAT a concept? It certainly can be taken up AS a concept, but it most certainly is not a concept, and therefore is stands before one as the world, and not an interpretation of the world, a concept.

That ought be an "or"? That metaphysical speculation is vacuous is not just an assertion, but is demonstrated. Pointing out that Heidegger or Husserl indulged does nothing but display their emptiness. — Banno

It is demonstrated on the premise that knowing the world is either an empirical knowing or an analytic knowing (putting aside Quine's attack on analyticity). But these are false categories. Look at it like this: there is nothing at all that is prohibitive of content in neither Wittgenstein nor Kant. These ideas of sensory intuition or states of affairs are, at the very basic level, arbitrary. What IS it for something to be empirical? This is an open concept. Kant's noumena is everywhere in all things. The phenomenon is, if you will, noumenally saturated. It simply can be no other way, for that would require a metaphysical restriction, which is nonsense.

I'm interested in the link between Husserl and "meditation yoga." Can you say more about this? — ZzzoneiroCosm

Keep in mind, these are my thoughts about Husserl and others. I'm not just recalling text.

What is the phenomenological reduction? It is a suspension of the natural way we relate to the world, the everydayness, the science, and the implicit default interpretations that are always there in a given moment of conscious existence, in the effort to discover the "things themselves". This is not the Kantian thing in itself, impossibly remote, but is the intuited world that, if you follow Husserl, stands there before one as "pure phenomena". His is a "method" of achieving intuitive purity, the true philosophical calling.

It is, or it can be, a very strange business, even mystical. A normal way living is just these assumptions always in play. It is the basis for the familiarity we have with the world: it's language, thought, judgment that rules one's sense of normalcy, and these are not things that are simply there, like we think of plain objects being stable and inert. We conceive of the world in time, and this is a very important thing to get straight if one wants to understand anything existential philosophers have to say. Not that we live in time, as a physicist would put it. We ARE time. Time is the foundation of our existence. So Husserl's reduction, this turning away from normal naturalistic default understanding of the world, is a turning away from the temporal dynamic that constitutes our lived lives. Not ALL of what constitutes our lived lives, obviously, for that would turn one into James' infantile "blooming and buzzing". But it is an explicit cancelling of what is not there before one as a direct intuition of the world. For me, it is rediscovery of something profound, and I won't put too fine a point on that.

So what does this have to do with meditation? The reduction is a radical suspension of knowledge claims that, if you will, usually run our lives, and if successful, the reduction is a kind of lifting of a foggy illusion of the presumption of knowing. (If this reminds you of the Pseudo-Dionysius' Cloud of Unknowing, it does so with me as well. Think also of Meister Eckhart--God, deliver me from God!). But the goal is to bring one to a pure apprehension of the world at the intuitive level, and this is exactly what meditation is all about, if you ask me, only meditation is the reduction radicalized to its limit: the annihilation of the world. To sit and "reduce" the moment to nothing at all.

This is not something that sits well with philosophy, of course. But then, what is philosophy if not the personal encounter, intimate and palpable. If not this, then Rorty was right: might as well teach literature. But he was wrong.

I don’t follow. Torture weekend is not as bad, in the mind of the torturer, relative to torture millennium in both quality and quantity, assuming the torturer feels that torture is bad to begin with. — praxis

Put aside attitudes, dispositions and judgment in the mind of anyone. It is an argument about the presence of suffering as such. The utility illustration is only meant show that comparative utility has no bearing at all on the actuality.

Look at it like this: the color yellow is, I would argue along with almost anyone else, as such is "almost" without meaning. Certainly we are forced to admit that there is a difference between language and contexts and the ways these establish the possibility of making "sense", on the one hand, and the bare phenomenon, on the other. But the bare phenomenon taken AS "yellow" is already contextualized among possible sentential and logical forms, and so, to identify yellow as being yellow is always already a contingent matter. But consider an instance of pain. The same holds as for yellow (the qualia of yellow, if you like), but pain has, after analysis has cancelled out all contingencies, a residuum, which is, I argue, the essence of ethics: the metaethical good, bad.

If it is preferred, the matter here is about the qualia of pain and bliss (etc.), embedded, as all things, in contexts of contingency. Reduce the color yellow to its bare phenomenal presence and you have something radically different from a reduction of pain to its presence, which is evidenced by, say, that intensity you experience when your arm is twisted or ankle sprained.

I don’t think either of them did that though. More that they were scrupulous about the use of conceptual language for what is beyond its scope.

The distant cause of these problems was the loss of the use of analogical language and symbolic imagery. That in turn goes back to Duns Scotus ‘univocity of being’. It was that which foreclosed the possibility of there being expressions conveying different modes or levels of being.

(But I’m not going to be able to develop on that right now as it’s not the kind of dialogue that lends itself to tapping out characters on an iphone in a car park. But see this post.) — Wayfarer

Not more scrupulous; emphatic. These philosophers drew a very distinct line not to be crossed, and left very little room to vaguery or intimations.

But this loss of analogical language is intriguing, in that it suggests that what it means to "fall" away from something foundational and profound (Heidegger talks like this, and Kierkegaard, but with a Christian bent) in our existence lies with a turn toward the categorical thinking brought on by secularism. "Analogical" relations? What are these? Seamless living in the world? My cat is like this. But then, so was the Buddha. It is the Question that intrudes in this natural complacency.

Wittgenstein did not put an end to metaphysics, so much as showed that it is better done in action than in philosophical speculation. — Banno

Just to add, and this is where he got it wrong, in the same way Kant got it wrong: it is not impossible of vacuously speculative to discuss metaphysics. This is way of positivism. Heidegger thought it is through poetry that we can give form to the "wonder" of the world, but this limits the possibility of revelatory description. to approach this kind of thing, Husserl's phenomenological reduction provides the method, which is not qualitatively different from meditation yoga.

I'd go back a few more years, to Moore's Principia, to trace the notion of the good. Moore identifies it, but I think fails to justify it. I suspect Wittgenstein to have been influenced by Moore in this regard. It would be interesting to take Wittgenstein's treatment of Moore's "here is a hand" and apply it to Moore's Good. There are interesting parallels.

But yes, I agree with Wittgenstein. Where are we going? — Banno

Sorry if this gets tedious for you. Part one, in brief: Moore went on about the good being a non natural property, and back then, they say, most philosopher's took this for granted. Times do change. But look closely. Contingent goods are easy, for they are everywhere in good violins and bad (not good) spectacles. Contingency is about explaining the good of something (or bad) with conditions that make a particular thing good or bad, and the world is made of contingent propositions; in Wittgenstein's "facts" or "states of affairs", in that great books of facts in his Lecture on Ethics, there is no value in the world, just as he says in the Tractatus. What he means is, as you say, Moore's "good".

I find this "good' and "bad" the only route I can think of to ground God, and the argument goes to the contingent and the absolute. There are no anthropomorphisms here, no straw person arguments that try to make metaphysics out of a human personality. We deal with actualities. There is a reason Wittgenstein took value seriously, just to swat it down as without meaning (just as Kant did with metaphysics): he denies value having value because such a thing is beyond speech, beyond the logical grid of possible meaningful propositions. But he did say in Culture and Value, "What is Good is Divine too. That, strangely enough, sums up my ethics."

And on this he was right. Take a contingent good, as in, this is a good knife. Contingency is about context. It is a good knife because it is sharp, balanced, comfortable, and so on. But this is, of course, not an absolute claim about the knife's goodness, and contexts are accidentals. The knife could be for Macbeth. Then all the goodness of the sharpness is gone; in fact, a sharp knife for Macbeth is a bad knife. This is a critical juncture in the argument. Contingency demands the possibility of a denial of the goodness or badness. Good pianos, running shoes can always be second guessed, by setting the goodness of the thing in a good-denying context, by "relativizing" the good in a different way. The good can always be reset in some alternative language game, if you will, in which it is not good.

But all of this contingency of explaining things in the world assumes there is nothing that is truly absolute, which was Wittgenstein's point--nothing "in the world," for the world is a logical place, and value has no logical identity. What does this mean? Moore's non natural property: put a flame to your finger and hold it there a few moments to get the point. Reduce the event by suspending all facts that might be descriptively present, like damaged flesh, c-fibers firing in the brain, and so on. Once all facts are removed, there is in this a residuum that is non factual (if you follow Witt, who follows Hume; debatable, though). It is the value. The argument here rests solely with this. This value AS SUCH cannot be second guessed, unlike the knife's sharpness-as-goodness that can be turned around instantly, this experience of the badness of the pain taken outside of any contextretains is badness. Impossible with contingencies in the world. There is no such meaning to a knife good in its sharpness free of context.

Value is absolute. Not value here or there, but the presence of value as such is absolute. Try an argument from utility: the philosopher's evil demon is up to no good, and insists you torture one child for the weekend, or a thousand other children will be tortured for a thousand years a far greater intensity. Utility says go for the weekend, but note: this decision does not diminish one whit the badness of the weekend affair. Clearly, and this is the point, there is NOTHING that can diminish this, which tells us we are in the presence of an absolute. There is no way possible, it is apodictically impossible, to relativize this badness away.

God is part two. But I have little confidence that you find part one compelling, so far. No one does at this point. It takes convincing, but keep in mind this is Wittgenstein's argument, essentially. The "bad" of the flame, the torture. or, speaking generally, suffering, is entirely without logical status for Witt because it cannot be be observed, and set against something else for a contingent bearing. All bads and good come to this. They are is "stand alone" no matter how they are caste and recaste.

I don't agree. Not that I think Quine or Kripke are too interesting, but contemporary continental philosophy is pretty bland to me.

Chomsky is excellent. I think people often read into some superficial notions of "scientism", which I think is a mistake.

But Kant is fantastic. Schopenhauer maybe better. — Manuel

But if you like Kant, then you'll adore Heidegger. And Husserl. And Fink; here is an intro:

instead of soaring up over the world "speculatively," we, in a
truly "Copernican revolution," have broken through the confinement of the natural
attitude, as the horizon of all our human possibilities for acting and theorizing,
and have thrust forward into the dimension of origin for all being, into the constitutive source of the world, into the sphere of transcendental subjectivity

Fink, Husserl's colleague and disciple, follows on the heels of Kant in his Sixth Cartesian Meditation. Haven't had the time to look carefully into Schopenhauer. Soon.

Yet as Wittgenstein himself protested again and again in the Tractatus, the propositions of natural science “have nothing to do with philosophy” (6.53); “Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences” (4.111); “It is not problems of natural science which have to be solved” (6.4312); “even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all”

A brilliant passage. But Witt, like Kant, in denying metaphysics any meaning, opened the door for positivism. You know, the only wheel that rolls. Positivistic approaches ignore anything that cannot be defined and justified clearly. An emasculation of "truth'!

see my notes under "Moral considerations" in In praise of Atheism for a discussion of Abraham. The Knight of Faith is immoral. — Banno

I read it. So I wonder if you would be willing to engage the issue. Let's say I understand all of the arguments, because I do, frankly. None of these capture's the essence of God. As with all ideas, its true nature is revealed only when the "material" basis of its meaning is discovered, and God the idea has a lot of baggage. The first question is this: What is the good? Two answers. There is good in the contingent way, like a good couch or a good knife. And there is the Good. This latter is the meta-good, and the concept in play is meta-value. It begins with Wittgenstein's Tractatus:

In the world everything
is as it is, and everything happens as it
does happen: in it no value exists—and if
it did exist, it would have no value.
If there is any value that does have
value, it must lie outside the whole sphere
of what happens and is the case

If you prefer not to go into this, I'm fine with that. But on the other hand, it IS the only way to approach the issue of God, of this I am sure.

Anyway, the issue begins with value. Do you agree with Wittgenstein?

How about.....derivative of the intuitive and cognitive foundation that belongs to us. If not, yours works. — Mww

I agree with both. I lean towards yours.

You're venturing into territory I'm at present not interested in. Not that it's wrong, it's just not my cup of tea. Let's just say I'm not in the mood. Thanks for sharing though. Good luck. — Agent Smith

No problem. It's my little obsession. If ever you do find the mood for this, you might want to check out Simon Critchley's Little, Almost Nothing. He explores the impact of ethical nihilism. :up:

Should we give up and just live our lives as best as we can or should we keep banging our heads against this now bloody wall that has claimed many, many victims? — Agent Smith

I ask, what is there, in the world, that makes us reach out and scream WTF? I think about concrete and steal raining down of Ukrainians, and there you are huddled together then in a moment, you arm is gone and there's screaming everywhere. Or the black plague. Can't even imagine the horrors of it. Not to get dramatic, but on the other hand, to, just for a moment, to get very dramatic, just so I know and I'm not just pretending to know by moving on directly into language and interpretation. How quickly we reduce the world to an abstraction, and everything then toes the line, and we're safe again.

As I see it, religion is found here, in the not turning away. Humans created a great deal that causes misery, but they didn't invent misery itself. This puts these affairs in the hands of the world and our throwness into it. It makes our struggles exceed the localized descriptions of circumstances that want to put it all into narrative. But narratives, and this is an important point in my thinking, cannot contain this.

Then things get metaphysical. Redemption is a metaphysical necessity.

-No you are confusing Philosophy of science(the study of how the methods of systematized epistemology work and the quality of the end product), with the rules of logic and principles science and philosophy must follow in order to achieve their goals, credible knowledge and valuable wisdom.
Those are two completely different things. — Nickolasgaspar

The issue I take has to do with your "same naturalistic principles". Philosophy is not naturalistic, if I take your meaning. the method? Well, I can only think of two. The most general is the scientific method, and this is in the nature of thought and experience itself.
The other method is that of pursuing presuppositions in accepted ideas. This is philosophy. But then, I do see that ALL inquiry in science is like this, and this is perhaps what you are saying. It is one thing to accept the "normal science", which is the same as my accepting my cat, all expectations confirmed over and over. It is another to ask questions about this: the question is common to all desire to know.
I obviously don't take issue with logic. That would be impossible. It is the thematic nature of the inquiry. Philosophy has a different mission, one that looks to presuppositional foundations of knowledge claims AS knowledge claims. Science is not interested in this; only in the specific knowledge claims of its field of interests.

That doesn't let her of the hook. Philosophers still need to take in to account the established knowledge and use it as their starting point, they also need to avoid unfounded principles (supernaturalism, idealism etc) in their interpretations and they need to check and include need data and feedbacks.
Their questions are different because their goals are different. Both ask questions about how the world works but Philosophy have an additional set of questions that include meaning and value.
Science stops before meaning and value because its job to produce knowledge. Philosophy has to take that knowledge from science and inform its frameworks on value and meaning.
This is how Philosophy can ensure that their frameworks convey wisdom. — Nickolasgaspar

Ah, but here you go astray. Take a second (or, a first?) look at idealism, or, as it is later taken up, phenomenology. Science has a wide readership and it produces great cell phones, but as a foundation for philosophy, it has little to say, and what it does have to say amounts to speculative science, merely. You are never going to get this tart to your dessert plate:all one can ever witness is the phenomenon. Wittgenstein knew this. Dennett knows this, they all know this.

-Why he should ever have done that? The first are phenomena studied by physics while the later is a biological phenomenon studied by Neuroscience. I didn't know Einstein had a second degree in Neuroscience!
If you are referring to Modern Philosophy talking about consciousness being fundamental(whatever that means), well some philosophers do talk about it, but that doesn't make a Philosophical idea.
That is pseudo philosophy because Cosmology and Neuroscience haven't been epistemically unified....yet at least.
We don't have observations that point to any links between those different phenomena. — Nickolasgaspar

The point about Einstein is that his was an empirical theory about motion, distance measurements, etc. An apriori theory of time and space is very different. It tries to describe the conditions in place that make such observations even possible. A bit like checking out what a telescope does prior to processing the data it gives us. Experience is not a mirror of nature, to borrow a phrase. How could it be this? Have you seen a brain?

I caught that "whatever that means." You need to get out more, I mean, read something else other than what Neil Tyson DeGrasse tells you to read. Me, I've taken lots of science, and I do understand it quite well. But I have also read lots of phenomenology. The latter is philosophy. An entirely different order of analysis.

Of course it can.I empirically can observe your thoughts, knowledge and beliefs.
We even have a technology that we can read complex conscious thoughts without the need from an individual to communicate them!...By just reading fMRI scans (2017).
https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/news/news-stories/2017/june/brain-decoding-complex-thoughts.html
Maybe you meant something else? — Nickolasgaspar

You jest, no? Seriously, is this what you think? If a child is drowning and the event produces ripples in the water, then by an examination of the ripples, I know what the child's drowning is all about?? What do you think an MRI is?

But when I say one cannot observe empirically the act of believing or knowing I mean to say that even in one's interior observations, where the belief arises and one can step back and one can step back and acknowledge this in an act of reflection, the knowing the belief is there is still bound to the indeterminacy of belief itself. It is like what Wittgenstein said about logic: it only "shows" itself, but one can never know what it is because it takes logic to observe at all, and this begs the question in the worst way. Belief cannot catch, slip in through the back door, as Hegel put it, sight of what it is to believe.

But even if were we unable to empirically investigate subjective states and we couldn't produce medicinal solutions for states like pain and depression and anxieties and child disorders, or diagnostics linked to pathology and physiology of brains, surgery protocols etc etc etc, the question would be,if a systematic,objective approach and method cannot touch this phenomenon..what can and how can we be sure for the objective takes of that "unknown" alternative method? — Nickolasgaspar

The question goes to what the knowing of anything is. You would have to show how anything out there gets in here (pointing to my head). Do this, and I will convert instantly to your side of this matter.

Well this is what we do in all aspects of our investigation. We make objective observations and we try to demonstrate Strong correlations between Causal mechanism and Effect by Describing and Verifying the Sufficient and Necessity role of that Link.
Of course all this is achieved by Objective Observations. All those observations are behind the thousands of papers found in Neurosciencenews.com describing how the brain achieve every different state and function.
I don't really understand where did you hear about the "impossibility" to observe and describe the causal role of brain functions to our Mind properties and how they allow us to have testable predictions and technical applications.
Do you also think the same for the "unobservable" process of Digestion, or Mitosis or Photosynthesis?? — Nickolasgaspar

Well, there is a lot of language in this, and it is all from science. You need, if you want to understand philosophy, to look elsewhere, other than a body of thinking that is self confirming. This would bring in questions. A physiologist reads about, witnesses the digestive system, say, microscopically as well, and with all the detail. Ask this scientist, how do you separate what you witness from the phenomena produced in your brain such that your thinking and intuitive impressions are not REALLY just about the hard wired problem solving mechanisms that deal with the affairs in general? How do you separate your knowing about what is before you from the conditions of knowing?

No one I have ever read has any issue with science. At all! They simply say that science is not the place to go if you want to talk about philosophical issues. It is not foundational, but is derivative of the intuitions we call the world. Look out on a starry night and what do you see? Why is there this finitude that prevents penetration into eternity? Isn't that the inside of your cranium you're experiencing? This is my question for materialists on this matter. Phenomenology has its own manner of thinking.

-OF course science has an essential role in all of them. Why do you think our morality has involved?
Where did Philosophy got its feedback? How do we know our place on the world(Common Ancestry, DNA, No biological Human races, not the center of the universe etc).
Science has informed us how to tell which of our superstitious beliefs are real and which existential claims are irrational to be believed because we don't have objective evidence.
You seem to ignore the role of science in Philosophy.
You can not have the one without the other.
Sure philosophy might help us define concepts and evaluate meaning and value, but without knowledge those would be empty evaluations. Philosophy is the intellectual endeavor of coming up with wise claims about our world. AGAIN without knowledge NO CLAIM can be considered as wise. — Nickolasgaspar

Philosophy observes the world of observations. It does not go beyond this, but into it. It is not that there are no reasonable knowledge claims in science, but rather that such claims themselves bear analysis. Look at it like Dewey or Rorty do: There is a volcano. An event. And my perception of the volcano is an event. I am "here" and the volcano is "there". Do I know there is a volcano? Of course. What does it mean to know, that is this relation that exists between me and that over there? Now wait....that is a different kind of question entirely. I have to remove my geologist's smock. This is an epistemic relation, not a causal one.
You should be able to see that this is a problem. For philosophy, it was THE problem for more than a hundred years, until many just decided to forget it. It will NEVER be resolved is empirical science. You can think as you please, ignore it as you please, but every philosopher knows this.

-That is a common misconception. BiG Bang cosmology was metaphysics before it was verified objectively and become science.
Continental drifting was metaphysic before it became a scientific theory.
EVERY single scientific hypothesis is philosophy before it is verified or rejected.
String theory is metaphysics.
Again Science is the second most important step in any philosophical inquiry.
Philosophy goes some steps further and tries to address Ethical and aesthetic and political questions, but that is impossible task without Epistemology and Knowledge.

So we should stop trying to separate those two and we should acknowledge as pseudo philosophy the inquiries that ignore scientific knowledge and Naturalistic principles...period.

The important distinction to be done is only between Epistemology and Metaphysics.
We should never mix those two and we should all be informed on what frameworks are in one group and what in the other. — Nickolasgaspar

The "pseudo" part of all this is just someone's desire to stick with familiar thinking because thinking outside of this is uncomfortable. A bit like putting one's head in the sand. to see things clearly, you have to learn to live with the world as it is: it is indeterminate not just historically (the Big Bang, and so on); it is indeterminate structurally! The trouble is, I don't think you know what this even means.

Well said in the first, my sentiments also, in the second. Although, the beginning might be in Descartes, Kant then being the standard by which all others in the class, are measured. — Mww

For me, after I read Kant, I felt I understood the foundations of philosophical issues. It occurred to me that there is simply no way AT ALL to escape some form of idealism. This is not to say at all I agree with the CPR. But I had never really understood that science was derivative, as Leo Strauss put it. Every empirical knowledge claim in this world is derivative of the intuitive and cognitive foundation that is set before us.

It is not the empirical analysis of things that we first encounter in the world. It is meaning, and analysis follows on this.

Why would you think that "it is something else"? Have you read/seen the Mahabharata? I recommend it, with subtitles of course. Opens up a new window on god(s). — Agent Smith

But religion is not about "god(s)" and the Mahabharata is extremely long and and where something symbolic and enlightening may be there (Hinduism in its basic concepts apart from the story telling are differently considered here), the narratives and the metaphysics tell me nothing at all, nearly, about the nature of religion.
For me, the way is clear: The essence of religion is discovered in a suspension of all that is merely incidental, the particulars of the given system of religious beliefs and practices that are of a cultural nature, and vary in content. I ask, what is it in the world that religion responds to that is not political and controlling, nor merely organizational or anything else. After all, remove, say, the politics, and religion remains. Remove the empirical science and religion remains, and what does not remain is the bulk of historical struggles of the entangled world.

But that is exactly what Kierkegaard says Abraham did. Despite all else telling him not to sacrifice Isaac, he follows through on his certainty - "standing before the world with the presumption of knowing".

Faith is believing despite the evidence. — Banno

But as you know with all serious thinkers, all ideas are presented in context. the ordinary, churchy faith of the many is something Kierkegaard rejected from the very core of his being. We are talking here about existential faith: an affirmation that has no content. It is a personal movement toward a qualitatively different kind of faith born out of wonder and realized in a "positing of spirit", to use his jargon, against all certainties of the world.

So it really is not about believing in the usual sense at all. Belief needs an object, and the church, Christendom (Kierkegaard's favorite pejorative) is ready to provide one, in the the ritual, the symbols and so on; K's faith is a radical departure from all this.

Oh, sure. So what is the more...?

Can you tell me? If not, don't ask me to tell you wheat the "greater" is in science. Let's just agree to a revert silence. — Banno

A revert silence? Look, it is your position that the scientist is comparable to the, say, religious disciple, and the comparative trappings of belief, test tubes to tabernacle, if you will, is your doing. If you make a claim like this (though I do suspect you are being evasively vague) then you have to follow through You talked about a subservience to a higher being and the rituals of the laboratory. If you don't like my interpretation, then by all means, disabuse me on this.

What?

The knight of faith does not doubt his understanding of god. He "standing before the world with the presumption of certainty." — Banno

The presumption of certainty in the denial of mundane certainties. Faith, the faith of Abraham that surpasses the principles of common morality and affirms in the qualitative leap beyond, is also a negation of the world's laws, culture, religious comforts. Mundane faith K denied most passionately.

Seems to me that there is a failure here to acknowledge the piety of the scientist, their subservience to a greater being. Take care not to be indulging in special pleading. — Banno

Okay, I take it back. "Greater being" is an interesting choice of words. If there is no "greatest" Being, then all that remains are the demigods of mundane living. Unless you think that the term mundane is unduly deflationary given the grandeur of science. Then I would ask what you mean by great, for in this lies something beyond the science as science, just as there is more to the hymnals, solemn music, symbols, etc., of practiced religion. Then question then clearly goes to this sense of greatness or grandeur, as I would put it. And this grandeur is not specific to the science at hand. It is not born out of the math and the data. Rather, it comes upon one in a moment of exaltation, which is just a synonym for grandeur, really, and there are others, but importantly it is a rising importance of something that really transcends the occasion itself.

I suggest that in this one really has touched upon the religious, and if this feeling of grandeur that has no object is given its analytic due, it is not unlike what I said about indeterminacy. It is a finite affirmation, and since all that is affirmed is indeterminate, it is a metaphysical affirmation. The one premise that is always unseen is that indeterminacy puts all of our affairs beyond the boundaries we set for them.

And if the argument is that it is not the case that all things are indeterminate in their final analysis, then it would be patently wrong. Simply because indeterminacy is self affirming, easily testable.