but which tells us nothing about the world in-itself or its meaning.

But Wittgenstein would never put it like this. The world-in-itself? This is Husserl talk. Tractatus-Witt would say this is just nonsense. The world is the totality of facts, not of things; and facts are in "logical space" and logic does not permit talk like world in itself.

So, I have a deep confusion about why philosophy sees this disconnection between logical necessity and physical causation. It seems to me computer science relies on the connection between the two - microprocessors basically comprise chains of logic gates to effect physical outputs. And more broadly, the link between logical necessity and physical causation seems fundamental to science generally, and even to navigating everday life. — Wayfarer

But if you are in Witt's world, causality is going to be understood as a logical concept. An odd idea, if you ask me: Kant on this is apodicticity: I cannot even imagine my cup moving by itself. It is intuitive, not logical; but logic is intuitively received, yes, but it is qualitatively different in the intuition.

Similarly we can translate the approach to the philosophy of law or ethics. — Tobias

But then, God IS ethics, an embodiment of ethical indeterminacy. That is, at the end of inquiry regarding what ethics is about and the search for justice and redemption, we face our own nothingness, the nothingness that shrouds our existence: indeterminacy. So your question about ethics and politics is really about ethics, or metaethics. Take Rawls' thinking on justice: if you're going to go apophatically on this, the call for the most advantaged to address the needs of the least advantaged is essentially an ethical obligation, and so rests with ethics; so then, what is the apophatic indeterminacy of ethics? God, that is, meta-God (delivered from the incidental cultural and political BS).

Not sure if gathering knowledge follows a program. — Haglund

It's forward looking process of programmed responses. If......then..... is essential the structure. This reflects the basic structure of experience itself as it engages the world. What is a coffee cup? It is one of a number of this structures. If I hold it and lift, then the cup will rise, enabling access to the mouth, and so on. There are presumably an infinite number of such "programmed respo0nses," variations of such things, and on and on, in our relationships with the world. What is anything at all? Well, IF......THEN.....What is nitroglycerin? If it is thrwon with a certain velocity.....THEN it will impact in such and such a way.
We are all of us living laboratories, confirming hypotheses and theories about what the world is. The "is" of this is pragmatic.
Of course, this is just a construct. Our actual relationships (???) is pure metaphysics.

Are you claiming belief is a physical object? Explain. — Jackson

Pull back from this, whatever it means. All things that are known to be can be analyzed as known in a knowledge relation. This relation bears analysis. Don't get hung up on object classifications.

This presupposes there is such a method to arrive at knowledge. But is there truly? Wouldn't we be able then to write a computer program, feed it with sensory data, and run the program? — Haglund

I believe that would be the algorithm.

Notice I said, physical. Physical object. — Jackson

All knowledge relations

Philosophy does not require a reference to physical objects in order to discuss an issue. — Jackson

Philosophy discusses the presuppositions of knowledge relationships. No object, then nothing to discuss.

I am not saying philosophy is a science. But consider taht language itself is an application of the "scientific method", the hypothetical deductive method: I see an object, but what is the event of its recognition? It is a temporal event that has a beginning and an anticipation and a "success" in the satisfaction of this anticipation. The cat walks and behaves just like I anticipate her to do, and this happens so seamlessly and spontaneously, I think I am in a direct relationship with the cat, only I am not. The past rises up constantly in the stream of events of experience, and is met with confirmation in things turning out exactly as anticipated, as when you put your foot down on the pavement and having the resistance and forward motion all come to pass as it should. Dewey thought like this, I and think he was in the right ball park.
Of course, this all gets very interesting further on.

I do not think philosophy has anything to do with science. — Jackson

The aim of the Meditations is a complete reforming of
philosophy into a science grounded on an absolute foundation.
That Implies for Descartes a corresponding reformation of all
the sciences, because in his opinion they are only non-selfsufficient members of the one all-inclusive science, and this is philosophy. Only within the systematic unity of philosophy can
they develop Into genuine sciences. (Husserl, Cartesian Meditations)

The history of philosophy shows changes in the issues philosophers take seriously. — Jackson

Granted. But it can be argued that all of the elaborations and elucidations in philosophy are far more determinatively based that literature. The latter is the broad and inclusive world of engagement, the body of which is the body of literature. Philosophy is the aloof observation, closer to science, really, which is why philosophers often place themselves within the same rigor of standards of validation: it is specialized, like science, and has focus.

Having said this, philosophy as an historical discipline is at its end, or it will be, as soon as it completes its housekeeping duties, the "cutting out" of Occam's razor, of the legacy of religion and its language and the "bad metaphysics" that so entangles basic questions. I think Husserl points to the residua that remains once the coast is clear.

Literature is messy, in comparison, like life itself, allowing insights to emerge from the original fabric, but more poignantly. A great philosophical value of literature is that, not only does it not dismiss the affectivity of our lives, it highlights them. Rorty understood this.

Isn’t actually metaphyisics a quest for a system of ideas that is expected to work with absolute perfection? I cannot conceive a metaphysics of something imperfect. — Angelo Cannata

Not perfect systematizing of our affairs, but perfect happiness. The former is an entanglement, and the confusion take place in thinking the logical grid "upon which" the world sits and is divided (thinking of Wittgenstein's Tractatus here; but also Kierkegaard before him) is a model for human perfection. Such is the plight of rationalism). Call nirvana? But really, closer to home, think of Wordsworth and childhood. Was there not once a time when the world was almost perfectly realized? The trouble was, we were infants, we were, if you will, nobody, no reflective agency to realize the significant depths of the what was happening. Language and culture make this happen: in the evolvement of a human being there is that Heideggerian moment of geworfenheit (Kierkegaard called this posting spirit; Husserl's epoche is clearly in this-- I'm sure he had read Kierkegaard. Something of a profound moment, for me, anyway, this existential line that is crossed where all things recede in their implicit knowledge claims that possess everyday affairs, and the world is shrouded in mystery, Heidegger's "wonder" in What Is Metaphysics? But is it the vacuity of nothingness? Or is it a liberation?)
Is Emerson simply passé and naive? Certainly that "transparent eyeball" is an amusing image, but that walking through a bare common, glad to the brink of fear...curious at least. Is religion, essentially, just about systems of organizing our thinking about metaphysics? Or is it revelatory, and deeply profound?

All modes of culture, including the sciences, literature and philosophy, are evolving concepts which move ‘with the times’. This is why historical movements such as the Classical period , Renaissance, Enlightenment, Modernism and the Postmodern are defined by the inseparable interrelations among these cultural modalities. It’s meaning less to say that philosophy always asks the same questions if the sense and meaning of the questions changes with the times , which it does. If philosophy really asked the same questions over and over, it would come up with the same answers. — Joshs

Just two things. One is that lack of signified. The self effaced signified is meaning self deconstructed. That is, deconstruction is self deconstructing, what Meister Eckhart was looking for is his plea to be rid of God, the way to apophatic affirmation. The other is ethics and value. It may be that the spectral analysis of star is bound to context for its meaning, but being in love is not. When we put words to it, certainly, but it HAS an altogether mystifying stand alone presence (knowing full well that my utterances here about this are contextually bound).
Sartre called it the superfluity of existence--this is really about the superfluity of value or affectivity. The philosophically the human situation is grounded in value, not vacuous signifiers. Another word for the lostness of signifiers-in-play is metaphysics (not the ridiculous kind), and this is no less than the palpable presence of affective meaning.

No, it's more systematic than that. Can't you tell? — baker

Just the obvious point that one tells the different between experiences according to their, well, differences. Clear as a bell; so clear one wonders why the question is raised at all. Surely you know the difference between being in love and lasagna. You're grasping at straws. Curious.

Killing oneself in a public place for a political reason is not a sign of a noble attainment. — baker

Do better. It is not the killing oneself that is in question nor the noble attainment. It is the inner state of mine that made such an act possible; to suffer so little, or not at all, inspires the wonder that perhaps there is such a thing as nirvana and its perfect detachment. So then, what IS nirvana? Not simply happy as a child, but removed, distant from engagement, the manifesting of something profound and beautiful. One has to take this kind of think seriously, and no summarily dismiss it. Buddhism is certainly NOT about a "noble attainment" in the usual sense, the term 'noble' being a social and ethical concept.
Again, a bit obvious. Oddest yet: no respect for someone who almost without argument did the most extraordinary thing one could do.

So it is with shooting heroin up your veins. — baker

A little juvenile.

I'm averse to hocus pocus and to shallowness being masqueraded as depth. — baker

And yet you toss around such terms as if you know what they are. Is kriya yoga hocus pocus? Well, my goodness. Sorry to trouble.

If after all this time, you still think that ... then go fuck yourself. — baker

Couldn't help but notice. Hope things improve with whatever is troubling you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is a lovely obituary.

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

I think you have your finger on something here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And you remain mundane, as always.

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

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

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

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

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

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

vacuous quip. — 180 Proof

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

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

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

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

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

Could you please elaborate on that claim. — Agent Smith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"IT"??? This is the problem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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