The story that says we all evolved from a common origin is a realist story. — Janus

From most perspectives, certainly. But Bernardo Kastrup, who is not a realist, believes in evolution and seems to address the apparent irreconcilability. Not that I hold his view, I’m just saying… (Don't ask me to summarise it, very tedious).

I am not concerned about the final, unknowable metaphysical explanation for why and how those things fundamentally exist. They might be material existents or ideas in the mind of God. How could we know for certain? The question is: which explanation seems the more plausible to me or to you. — Janus

Fair. I’m just interested in the role human cognitive apparatus and values play in the construction of our world. How far it goes, I don’t know, but many philosophers think it goes pretty far. I'd like to entertain this notion for a while before I reject it (if that's what I end up doing).

I think we mostly agree.

Hello. I don’t think it is unusual at your age to feel chronic feelings of emptiness and nihilism, regardless of one’s background or fortunes.

I had a similar experience in my late teens and also found that being of use to others and doing things to support the community took my attention off my own experience and broadened my perspective. It took a year or two, but I gradually stopped feeling empty.

While I don’t believe there is any “meaning of life” style answer to human yearnings and existential dread, I do think we are surrounded by multiple meanings, and it becomes hard to avoid finding purpose and sense of solidarity if you engage with others. It’s easy for many of us to become obsessed with our own thought processes, judgements and reflections in a way that is unhealthy, and often having some strategies for getting out of your own head is helpful.

Thanks, I enjoyed the conversation.

I agree. There is a yin of conservative permanence (boundaries and limits) needed for the yang of liberal progression (marked by new boundaries and new limits). And vice versa. Breathing is both in and out.

It’s never been either/or despite what campaigning politicians tell us.

The myopia of liberalism is really the recent (enlightenment) moment of the ancient myopia of prideful human beings; liberalism just made this pride more available to more of the masses. So many today feel entitled to know better than others, to know better than history, so much so we can talk of imposing our enlightened wills through force. We allow ourselves willingly to stay blind (myopic) to any challenges to the holier than thou perches we’ve built for ourselves. Because this used to be the role of the king and the pope and the high classes, we think we are being progressing behaving as tyrannically as only kings used to.

Liberalism taught us that there is no essential difference between a “king” and a commoner, so there is no such thing as an actual “king”, and we are all just citizens. We the people alone consent to our government. This is a good political starting point, so liberalism is a force for good, certainly in politics.

But the west is hollowing its own good ideas of meaning and political application. — Fire Ologist

No substantive comment from me, except to say I found this post of yours especially interesting and it resonated with me.

Isn't that a level of agnosticism? I myself have been since my childhood an agnostic and feel quite happy about it. — ssu

The category is usually called agnostic atheist, since atheism refers to what you believe and agnosticism to what you know. It’s a popular category in the atheist realm. I have never been able to believe in any version of God I have been presented with, so I would say there is no God. But I would never claim to know this. This, of course, can lead to very tedious discussions about what counts as knowledge, the role of certainty, and so on.

But we usually tend to go with the stereotypes or the worst possible examples of some ideology or viewpoint and not accept the fact that a lot of intelligent, knowledgeable and informed people can have totally opposite world views from us. — ssu

Perhaps when it comes to different ideas, we should steelman them; present them in the strongest, most charitable form, before evaluating them. The fundamentalist Christian view of the world is a bit cartoonish and is mostly a variety of American Protestantism, which some consider a heresy.

Or then it's simply these times where the discourse is dominated by the algorithms, — ssu

Probably: the same bifurcated views circle around us ceaselessly. Perhaps our job is to get off the merry-go-round.

I think it's even more general than that. It's basic human nature, — ssu

Many students of religion, including Karen Armstrong, chart the development of modern biblical literalism, particularly the fundamentalist kind, as largely in reaction to modern science and historical-critical approaches to scripture. But no doubt there are additional dimensions to this.

those who don't swerve of from the teachings of their great philosopher, be it the Karl Marx or someone else, will put themselves on the pedestal and proclaim to be better than others. If it happens even in philosophy, you bet it will happen in other human endeavors also. — ssu

You may disagree, but I think that may be something related to, but different from, fundamentalism. Fundamentalism seems to be about how a text is interpreted and the reading that is presented as ‘correct’. What you’re raising, however, seems like an adjacent and perhaps more interesting element: zealotry.

Do you see much fundamentalism where you live? Here in Australia, it flickers in marginal spaces, largely due to the influence of American Protestant culture via social media and online communities. But it’s still a minor force. The default setting here seems to be a general lack of interest in God or religion.

Does it follow that what we perceive reveals nothing about what is "out there"? — Janus

Whether it follows or not may not be the issue. Also, what is meant by “reveals nothing”? And what is meant by “out there”? I’m willing to entertain a constructivist view, though I haven’t spent much time thinking about it.

So, it seems most reasonable to think that we and the other animals perceive both what is possible given our various perceptual systems, and also selectively perceive what is of most significance. — Janus

I don’t think this makes much difference. Animals respond to shapes, movement, shadows, and food sources, patterns trigger responses. But what does this really say about reality itself? We all evolved from a common origin and "materials", so we likely share similar hard wiring, even if it has been organized radically differently over time. I really don't know how much animal comparisons give us.

But I don’t want to pollute this thread with yet another round of the realism debate in philosophy. :wink:

The typical atheist argument is that for example all the creation stories are, to put it mildly, quite far from our scientific understanding, hence everything in religion is quite dubious. The problem then comes when the same question is asked, what then is good and what is bad? The vague reference to humanity or something hides that the problem isn't solved. It still is a subjective issue. — ssu

Atheism is a pretty broad area. Most people are only familiar with the Dawkins/Hitchens approach, which is polemical, mostly non-philosophical, and often childish and petulant.

I am a freethinker and atheist, but my form of atheism is simply that I lack a belief in God. I don’t claim that God doesn’t exist, because I don’t have that knowledge. While some philosophers don’t like this formulation because it differs from the conservative tradition of atheism, which asserts all gods to be false, I think it is a common view among organised atheists these days.

If we can simply say that atheists have a position on the existence of God, we can also say that they are diverse in the other beliefs they hold. As someone who used to have connections to humanist and atheist organisations, I know that many atheists also believe in clairvoyance, UFO abductions, and ghosts. They don’t necessarily rule out all eccentric or supernatural claims.

The idea that God doesn’t exist simply because the stories in holy books are myths is not very strong reasoning. The problem with most obvious forms of atheism is that they only critique the low-hanging fruit of fundamentalism and literalism, which is equally disparaged by many believers, including theologians like David Bentley Hart and Bishop John Shelby Spong. I grew up in the Baptist tradition. I was taught that the Old Testament stories are myths and allegories. I believe this is a well-established tradition in Christianity. Literalism seems to be a reaction to modernity and a retreat into concrete thinking as a bulwark against changing culture.

One area I’m interested in is the idea that certain philosophical approaches (like enactivism and constructivism) argue that the regularities we find in science are not pre-given structures in nature, but patterns that emerge through our investigative practices. On this view, order is not merely discovered but enacted or co-created through the interaction between human observers, their conceptual frameworks, and the world they study.

The reason I find this interesting is that it flips the usual picture of science, so often used as the foundational justification for physicalist and narrowly atheistic accounts and offers a more interesting way to think about scientific knowledge and truth than the idea that they simply exist ‘out there' for us to discover.

You say "fair enough", but I would like to know whether you agree or disagree or are uncertain and why. — Janus

Not sure. I wanted to say something more interesting...

Fair enough. Richard Rorty once said in an interview, something like, “We can talk all about justification, but about truth we can say very little. “ No doubt a contestable and controversial claim.

I may not have done much of a job of articulating this and have tried to be more precise as I go, But philosophy is @Leontiskos interest and so he has more tools at his disposal . He’s probably pretty good at it. I wasn’t trying to offer a conventional relativist position but maybe that’s what I did earlier.

Thanks for your forensic analysis of my summary of anti-foundationalism. I’ll mull over what you wrote. Maybe someone else will chime in with a view on it.

I’m arguing that in anti-foundationalism all justification occurs within our own systems, even for statements about justification itself. You seem to be saying that this implies that truth itself is context-dependent, which is not what I am claiming. Your point is valid but misdirected, my focus is on justification, not the nature of truth.

My wording may well have been sloppy, given this is not an area of expertise, only a matter I’m interested in and trying to articulate. As you said before, I’m also short on style and rhetoric.

The word 'meta' originally meant 'after', but I think it has subsequently come to mean the above. — Clarendon

I thought “meta” referred to self-referential discourse.

I had a reality crisis when I was young where I realized I have no way to determine if what I'm experiencing is real. — frank

Interesting. I had a similar experience when I was 15 or 16.

My current position is that I have no choice but to accept the reality I’m in and that humans are sense-making creatures who use language (and other tools) to manage their environment. It's likely we don’t have the capacity to access a Capital-T Truth, and philosophy is perhaps best avoided, as it tends only to lead to 1) convoluted attempts to justify seemingly impossible beliefs or 2) endless confusion and self-reflexivity. :wink:

Isn't almost everything founded on metaphysics? Science presupposes that there is access to reality and truth about it. Knowledge. Science is founded on metaphysical axioms; realism, causality, rational intelligibility, etc. First principles would generally be the axioms or foundations of your thinking. So realism might be one of these.

A naturalist is just as committed to an unjustifiable metaphysical scheme. — frank

Yes, that's true. Have you come to any metaphysical conclusions yourself?

He was like "meh." Or something like that. — frank

Funny.

You can understand why people find theism attractive in all this, since it seems to effectively provide a grounding that resolves the confusions and tautologies created by anti-foundationalist views.

Thanks. I thought the argument and above statement avoided the relativist fallacy because it doesn’t say “all opinions are equally true” or that truth is random. Instead, it’s saying that whenever we justify something, we do it using the tools and standards we already have: and that’s true even for this statement itself. This makes it self-aware and not self-contradictory. It also leaves room for debate within those frameworks, rather than claiming there’s no way to judge anything. That’s why I thought it was anti-foundationalist, not relativist.

But yes, the issue of self-reflexivity seems to be a real problem. Hilary Lawson, a minor British philosopher, argues that we can’t avoid the problem of self-reflexivity in modern philosophy, our theories and claims inevitably turn back on themselves. His reponse is to say, so what!

Your response is to try to tidy up Y, but the nature of Y is irrelevant to the objection. Again, it is the word "always" that causes you to contradict yourself. If "always" involves "every context" then you are contradicting yourself, regardless of what X and Y are.

(You are attempting to exempt yourself from your own rule, hence the self-contradiction. In effect you are saying, "No one can make claims of this sort, except for me.")

Another way to put it:

1. X is always Y
2. Therefore, every X, in every context, is Y
3. Therefore, the truth of (1) is not context dependent

The person who utters (1) is committed to at least one truth which is not context dependent. — Leontiskos

Here I am assuming I have avoided stating the relativist fallacy. Either I suck at expressing this or I failed to properly “tidy up” Y.

@Joshs is the account of antifoundationalism I sketched earlier too simplistic?

Nothing we justify ever rises above our own ways of justifying and that includes this statement.

Nicely put, I’m not sure what this means for me, however. How do you see this sitting with phenomenology and Thompson’s descriptions of us enacting reality?

Much of philosophy seems to be a desperate scramble for foundational justifications that will 'beat' the other guy’s argument. The best one, of course, being God. If we can say a position we hold is part of God’s nature or the natural order of a designed universe, then we ‘win’ the argument (assuming winning means anything).

Many people would say there’s a difference between holding some axioms as pragmatic foundations and having access to facts or truths which transcend our quotidian lives. I guess for them the difference is between foundations which are provisional and tentative and ultimately evanescent, versus those which are eternal and True. You and I have doubts about the latter.

Yes but the point is that Platonists appeal to a mind-independent order/realm to ground values like goodness, while antifoundationalists hold that we have no access to anything outside our historically situated human practices.

No, they are merely noting that no one has ever produced a context-independent truth claim. And that noting is itself not context-independent because it is made in relation to and within the context of human experience, language and judgement. — Janus

Philosophy is divided into camps - some of which believe humans have access to facts or truths outside of human experience (eg, Platonism) and those who think we don't. How do we ground our knowledge? I don't think we can except though communities of intersubjective agreement.

Thanks. Jesus, it's bloody complicated.

Well, what do you mean by "anti-foundationalism"? Is it just something like, "Truth claims are always context dependent"? If so, then we're right back to the original argument. — Leontiskos

That there is no final or ultimate ground for our knowledge, meaning, or justification. I think that's how philosophers like Rorty, Lawson, or Brandom might have it. And I appreciate that anti-foundationalism is disparaged by many.

Let's not lose sight of the central argument which is this:

But if you are speaking from a single context, and that single context does not encompass all contexts, then you are not permitted to make claims about all contexts. And yet you did.

You contradict yourself because you say something like, "Truth claims are always context dependent." This means, "Every truth claim, in every context, is context dependent." It is a claim that is supposed to be true in every context, and therefore it is not context dependent. If you want to avoid self-contradiction you would have to say something like, "Truth claims are sometimes context dependent." But that's obviously less than what you want to say.
— Leontiskos — Leontiskos

As I understand it, this objection misunderstands the claim. Saying "truth claims are always context-dependent" is a way of describing how claims function within particular social, historical, and conceptual contexts. This description is itself situated and arises from those contexts. I'm, nto sure there's a contradiction in making this statement because it does not claim to exist outside or above context. The objection only seems persuasive if one assumes that all claims must be judged from a perspective beyond any context, but anti-foundationalism does not make that assumption.

From our observations of animal behavior it is undeniable that animals perceive all the same things in the environment as we do, but we can safely infer in (sometimes very) different ways according to the different structures of their sense modalities. — Janus

Indeed although they clearly don’t understand them the way we do, so while they might recognize the same shapes and perhaps risks as us, I’m not sure what that tells us about shared meaning. Thompson is not an idealist as I udnertand him.

But saying “everything comes from social practices and chance factors” doesn’t mean we’reclaiming to stand outside of all that.
— Tom Storm

It would be a bit like the fish saying, "Everything is water." If the fish knew that everything was water then he would not be bound by water. The metaphor about fish and water has to do with the idea that what is literally ubiquitous is unknowable. — Leontiskos

This is getting very meta. :wink:

Doesn't your fish and water objection assume that being immersed in something makes it unknowable? Doesn't Thompson’s view suggest the opposite? That our immersion is what makes understanding possible. We are always situated within social practices and contingent factors, but this situatedness doesn’t block insight, it creates or enables it. (I assume this is basic to phenomenology?) Recognizing that “everything comes from social practices and chance factors” is a reflective awareness that arises through our engagement with world, not from standing outside it. Being “bound by water” does not make the water invisible; it is the medium through which we come to know it. Or something like that?

I'm now getting dizzy with the curlicues of argument.

The broader question to me seems to be, is anti-foundationalism a foundation? Is it a performative contradiction? I suspect it isn’t on the basis that anti-foundationalism is more a lens or a stance toward foundations than a foundation itself. It discourages the search for an ultimate grounding, but offers no ultimate principle to stand on.

I'd be interested to hear your take on this particularly.

Thanks. Nicely articulated. I’m not done yet, but I have a meeting.

if he’s right, that’s great, I like different views to my own even if I can’t get on board.

But saying “everything comes from social practices and chance factors” doesn’t mean we’reclaiming to stand outside of all that. It actually denies that anyone can stand outside it.

Doesn’t this objection get contingency wrong? Calling something “contingent” doesn’t mean you’re looking at it from some perfect, fixed viewpoint. You’re just using the language and ideas that come from within the same messy, changeable world you’re talking about. You don’t need a god-like perspective to say things are contingent.

We now arrive at the question, is antifoundationalism itself a foundation?

Thanks. Do you recall if there was a thread on intuition? I seem to have a memory of this.

Yes, I would say connected. Everything arises from social practices and contingent factors; the possibilities of our experiencing anything, perception, our bodies, and the way we experience the world are all shaped by these conditions. But this is not my area of expertise I think @Joshs is a professional on these matters. My interest/knowledge is limited.

More simply, if you say, "Truth claims are always context-dependent," then you've contradicted yourself, because you are uttering a truth claim that you believe is not context-dependent. This sort of self-contradiction is inevitable for anyone who tries to make reason non-universalizing. — Leontiskos

You make a common enough criticism of Thompson's position (and I guess that of many pragmatists and post-modernists) and it is a good one. All I can say is I don’t see it as a contradiction, because I’m not claiming (nor would Thompson) to step outside all contexts while saying this. I’m saying it from inside my own experience, and the claim includes itself. For me, truth isn’t something we reach from a perfect, universal viewpoint; it’s something we work out from where we stand. So when I say truth claims are context-dependent, I’m also saying this one is too. That doesn’t make it collapse, it just admits that I’m part of the same situation I’m talking about. The supposed contradiction only appears if we assume every truth claim has to speak from nowhere and apply everywhere, and I don’t accept that assumption. I’m trying to identify how truth actually shows up for us in lived life, not to lay down a rule that pretends to escape that life.

My understanding is that Thompson sees reason as emerging from our everyday experience and the ways we engage with the world, not from a detached, universal viewpoint. We develop our thinking through action, conversation, and the practices we inherit. He rejects the notion that this makes him a relativist: being aware that reasoning is 'situated' doesn’t mean all ideas are equally valid or that anything goes. On the contrary, some ways of thinking are better than others, and we can test, refine, and improve our ideas through experience, dialogue, and careful reflection. Thompson would probably acknowledge that reasoning is grounded in context but this doesn’t weaken it, it makes it more honest, responsible, and connected to how we actually understand and navigate the world.

Now I understand well that if a person holds an essentialist view of the world, in which reason accesses certain universal truths, then this view will be unsatisfying. This would be your view?

I’m not a philosopher, and I don’t mind being a creature of my time. Can you explain in simple terms why Thompson might be wrong? I suspect we don’t share certain key axioms, which might make a discussion difficult to navigate.

:up: :up:

I need to listen to those.

I find what I can understand of his perspective very sympathetic to my own intuitions, but that only speaks to my own prejudice. It is hard material to fully comprehend, like most phenomenology. I am happy to lurk on the outer boundaries, occasionally catching an insight.

I always loved the opening title sequence too.

I'd probably share Evan Thompson's view that reason is situated, embodied, enactive and emerges from our lived, affective engagement with the world. Reason is not a detached faculty that can apprehend universal truths on its own; it’s shaped by biology, culture, experience. Truth claims therefore are always embedded in context, practice, and perspective.

Ha! Well, reason is just a tool, the atheists and the theists often assume they can demonstrate the superiority of their metaphysics with reason. They can certainly use it to give a sheen to their prejudices, but to what extent is it merely a post hoc rationalization of affective commitments? But I am not saying we can avoid its use, as this paragraph partly demonstrates.

Ha! We don’t need a structured show for this. It’s probably more about putting cameras in real world hot spots. For a tame example, look at what YouTube makes of Philadelphia.

I think human beings are always ready for barbarism, it’s one of our capacities, along with empathy and compassion. Some of the biggest criminals I have met have been among the most generous. Sentimentality and cruelty go together. Anyway a lot of sci fi stories seem to have taken this plot as a modern day version of the coliseum.

Interesting points. Do you hold a similar view about reason? I fell out of love with reason some years ago.

I think life is more complicated for many people than you do. Which is fine. I'm not going to change your mind, so there is little point in bothering. — Malcolm Parry

Good point. Some people are happy to judge others from the warm fug of ignorance. I’ve certainly done this myself.

I’ve known many career criminals, some bikies and gang members. Many of them, from what I have seen, didn’t have much of a chance from the start. Would I hesitate to shoot one if I had to? Probably not. But that doesn’t remove my feelings of sympathy, even if it’s qualified.

So how do you understand an ideology that says a certain race or group of people must be wiped out for the good of the world? Is this merely a point of view? Does it only become evil when the ideology is put into practice?