Can you explain to me why Heidegger viewed Nietzsche as the last metaphysician? How does one read Nietzsche this way?

Do 'properly basic beliefs' or 'basic beliefs' mean anything in contemporary philosophy? I'm assuming they come out of a foundationalist epistemology? Personally, I would tend to lump them into a kind of 'brute fact'' argument of the kind Russell mentions when talking about the universe... 'it's there and that's all.."

Problematically there are religious thinkers who would say god is a basic or properly basic belief - I guess it's the 'foundation' from which all other beliefs are built up from. In your view is it possible to not hold any such axioms as a foundational starting point? Personally, I don't see how we can argue that god has the same epistemic status as the universe. The latter is hard to doubt, but the former, it seems to me, can only be arrived at though intellectual calisthenics...

We cannot doubt everything, because doubting requires a background against which the doubt is formulated — Banno

And perversely such doubting has become a form of certainty.

Dumb question but is Heidegger an important figure in philosophy?

The decentralization of knowledge is a paradigmatic moment history will remember. — NOS4A2

That's an interesting phrase - is that your own formulation?

To summarize: you only know something when you have perceived it undoubtably through your senses. — Bret Bernhoft

The issue with this is that people perceive things with certainty through their senses all the time and yet are mistaken in their conclusions. Given this, I am skeptical that we can readily identify how we can tell when someone knows something this way. Something else needs to be present.

But one has to acknowledge that experiences of God are overwhelmingly important to their subject and seem to be self-certifying. However, it also seems pretty clear that not all such experiences are actually from God, and that validation of them by others should depend on what comes from them in everyday life. — Ludwig V

Yes. Can we point to a single verified example of someone having an experience directly from god? I know you are not saying this, but I don't see how a person's own feelings of certainty can assist us with this.

So you see Trump as a kind of necessary disruptor and as such a harbinger of change? What legacy do you envision?

:up: Interesting observations about the engineering process.

That's why Lao Tzu means so much to me. — T Clark

I'm always envious of people who have models or texts they admire and are guided by. I've never really had that. I enjoy essay writers, but mainly because of their capacity to use language, not so much as a guide or inspiration.

Nice. Thanks again.

I think a key issue of our time is that we no longer know who should be in charge and we no longer draw easily from reassuring metanarratives. Many of us have retreated into 'lifestyle' or identity politics as a source of meaning. Foundationally many seem to be without a place to stand - a kind of paralysis of relativism. Now, some people might see this as good or as a necessary stage towards some better, more nuanced reconstruction of culture and society.

Richard Rorty argued that cultural politics has replaced reformist politics, meaning that multiple groups are now engaged in their own preoccupations about rights while the larger concerns of class, like housing, employment, healthcare no longer engage broadly as they should. Personally the primary thing I am aware of is that society seems so atomized and divided that substantive reform seems ever harder to achieve. Which probably suits powerful interest groups pretty well.

I use personal introspection as one of the sources of my knowledge. — T Clark

Can you outline what you have in mind here? Do you mean using experience to make assessments and decisions?

I don't think we ever really try to achieve certainty in our knowledge. — T Clark

Does this depend on the area? Surely certainty is important to logic, math and in your game - engineering? I have never understood math of any kind so for me it is like an arcane type of mysticism. :wink:

On the conservative side, there are those who read him in close proximity to Kierkegaard , Levinas and Wittgenstein. Some associate him with critical theory types like Adorno, and then there are the poststructuralist readings which I favor ( Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida). — Joshs

Thank you. That's what I was wondering. My understanding is that Dreyfus' reading is now considered somewhat limited, is that your view? Would you class him as a conservative?

As an aside, is there any particular reason to use poststructuralist over postmodern? Is it the role of language based theory over the broader philosophical exigencies (of the latter)?

Out of interest, and briefly, how do you personally describe a figure like Trump? From your perspective, what kind of President was he and what did he represent?

Is post modernism a critical aspect in obtaining a better reading of Heidegger?

Thank you.

There are counterexamples. I am certain, for instance, that this post is in English, and my certainty is not a theory that I could revise if further evidence came along.

I'd just say that if we counted something as knowledge and later it turned out to be false, then we were wrong, that it wasn't knowledge, and we have now corrected ourselves. — Banno

I get you. I believe I recall you saying that you found the approach of fallibilism problematic. Although from my perspective it seems we often have no choice but to operate in much this way holding tentative accounts of 'the world' which are based on the best available evidence or reasoning, but are subject to revision over time. I question how useful the word knowledge is much of the time.

Would it not be the case that as we go about our business we generally do struggle to achieve knowledge of the sort you describe (the certainty that this sentence is in English)? We seem to spend most of our lives in belief-land - some more than others.

We find people who say they have knowledge of god though direct experience - how would you describe this type of claim? A belief? To call it a false belief would imply that we already have decided that knowledge of god is not legitimate. Or it begs the question that we can tell if someone has knowledge of god.

Thoughts?

In 1969 Stanley Rosen published "Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay". It can be described as Plato against Heidegger. Rosen said:

Nihilism is the concept of reason separated from the concept of the good. — Fooloso4

It's a nice quote but I'm not sure I fully get it. Can you expand?

How you decide to believe that Cream was formed in 1966 is over to you - you were there, your friend told you, you read about it on the back of an LP, you recall it from somewhere but are not sure where... — Banno

Do you use the term justification for this process?

First i think there are two questions that sometimes get conflated; the first is, what does "...is true" mean? The second, how do we tell if some sentence is true? — Banno

Got it.

"P" is true if and only if P. so "The kettle is boiling" is true iff and only if the kettle is boiling. It seems to me that this account brings together the coherence, correspondence and redundancy of truth, ideas to which philosophers keep returning. — Banno

Does this privilege forms of truth involving empirically verifiable matters? How do we deal with issues such as, for instance, the band Cream was formed in 1966?

This is where the distinction between what is true and what is thought to be true comes into play. Whereas truth is monadic, being about some sentence, belief is dyadic, being about both some sentence and a believer. That is, the kettle is either boiling or not is about the kettle, while that one believes the kettle is boiling is about both the believer and the kettle. This is of importance because idealism and anti-realism work by denying this distinction between truth and belief. For them something is true only if it is believed (or perceived, or whatever) to be true. — Banno

I'll need to mull over this.

I hope it is clear that I do not think there can be what I've called an "algorithmic" account of truth, and hence of either what we should believe or of what we can know. — Banno

I think this is clear.

"How do we identify truth?" becomes a normative, even an ethical question, being much the same as "What ought we believe?". It is about our place in a community, especially a language community. So despite my rejecting the antirealist move against there being true statements independent of the attitude we adopt towards them, I do think that what we say is true or false is to a large extent bound to the way we are embedded in a society. I agree more or less with their conclusion, but not with their argument. — Banno

Jeez, there's a lot bound up in all this. But you wouldn't subscribe to a 'intersubjective community of agreement' style account of truth that has 'truth' shift about in a relativistic manner across different world views and value systems as per post modernism, right?

OF course, I might be wrong. — Banno

Ha! Well if it gets back to anyone, you said it..

Thanks for this.

I think it's pretty fashionable to be pessimistic about the notion of social improvement. If progress means to move forward or onward to more advanced conditions (less suffering, more opportunity) then I believe there is progress. The fact that there may also be disadvantages or a shadow side attached to some instances of progress does not mean progress in false. It just means there are also drawbacks. And some countries are more progressive than others. And some people are better positioned to benefit from progress. But I would, for instance, definitely prefer to be born a woman in the West now, than in 1923. The safety of childbirth, the life choices and education options available, shit on what was on offer then.

Much of these discussions depend upon what you consider progress to look like in practice. I personally don't consider progress to be part of a utopian model of reality, where humans are on journey to a specific end point of social perfection. I'm more of a progress minimalist. :wink:

Philosophy is, generally speaking, a lot harder than it perhaps seems. — Banno

This is an important point for me. What you write about knowledge is thought provoking and reminds me that I am an outsider to philosophy.

Presumably, a perfect definition would give an account of these three species of knowledge. — Banno

Would you say that knowledge then is similar to truth in that it is not a property which looks the same in each example? (sorry for the clumsy wording)

And it's not hard to see problems with defining knowledge as "useful information". We all know stuff that is not useful, unless one is going to specify utility in such broad terms that anything is useful—at which point being useful becomes moot. And there is useful information that is false - Newtonian physics, for example. — Banno

Indeed. I generally hold to the 'is useful for certain purposes' and while some would possibly call this a type of pragmatism, I consider it more of a lazy, 'common sense' construal of knowledge that is certainly fraught for reasons you describe.

Given these variables in our understanding of knowledge, if you had to provide a brief working description of knowledge, is there one you could contrive on the fly or a basic account you could recommend?

The following three questions probably best represent why I entered this site in the first place

How do we identify truth?
What is knowledge?
Are there moral facts?

What should not be overlooked is how much of what the snake said is the truth: — Fooloso4

The snake is the hero in this story.

:up:

:lol:

When all concerned know ahead of time it is a futile exercise and an utter waste of time. — boagie

I've met many atheists who used to be fundamentalist Muslims and Christians. People do respond to arguments and do find their way out of religion. It takes time and exposure to free-thought, but it happens. Atheist organisations are packed with former literalist religious folk who gradually deconverted from Christianity or Islam after exposure to new ideas. So much so that the international organisation Recovering from Religion is dedicated to supporting people to reassess their worldview and recover from facile faiths.

:ok:

The problem with an allegorical interpretation is that it can mean anything given a clever enough interpretation. — Art48

The problem with scripture is interpretation full stop - allegorical or literalist. Just look at the confusions amongst Christians about matters of doctrine and subjects like abortion, capital punishment, gay rights, witchcraft, women's rights, euthanasia, etc. The faithful can't agree on anything and they all think they have god's word sorted.

I just stopped believing the Christian story, and once I had a little bit of distance, it became obvious that the holy book is just a collection of stories. — Vera Mont

I understand. Many Christians reject the Bible stories as engaging fictions but still mange to believe in god. The great American model for this was the best selling Episcopalian Bishop John Shelby Spong. Literal interpretations of the Bible are fairly recent. The book is often understood as allegorical. Certainly that's what I was taught in the Baptist tradition here in Australia.

Whether the Bible has anything to offer us has very little impact on whether there is a god I would have thought, but I get it.

Seems to me that Hoffman's recent work might be an edifice built on top of Searle's 'the bad argument.'

I'll have more to say when I finish Hoffman. — Banno

I'm looking forward to this.

. There is currently no empirical evidence for the non-existence of a deity. — gevgala

The burden of proof on is on anyone who makes an extraordinary positive claim. There's no empirical evidence for the non-existence of Bigfoot or fairies either.

While neither theists nor atheists can provide conclusive empirical evidence for their positions, — gevgala

Atheists like myself don't make claims about the non-existence of god. Our claim is that we have no good reason to accept the proposition - the arguments and evidence being unconvincing.

Bruce taught me short story writing back in the 1980's.

The question should really be: why should life HAVE a meaning to a hairless ape? — invicta

I would argue that the question might also be why should life NOT have meaning to people? Humans seem to be machines for making meaning - drawing connections and telling stories. Hence, culture, art, entertainment, religion, literature, philosophy, science, etc, etc. We can't help ourselves. It's our thing. Some of us like our stories to be metanarratives - foundational and transcendent. Some of us are happy with tentative accounts, subject to constant revision.

"a person who disbelieves or lacks belief in the existence of God or gods"
BECAUSE, there is no evidence. — universeness

My atheism has slightly different foundations - I don't argue there is no evidence. There's plenty of evidence (personal experience, the existence of the universe, consciousness, scripture, etc) it's just that this evidence is incomplete and or unconvincing (to most atheists) and can be readily argued against.

those who refuse to believe without evidence. — boagie

I don't like 'refuse to believe' this sounds like an act of choice and something a Christian or Muslim would say about atheism as a willful denial of truth.

An atheist is unconvinced there is a god. They don't find any of the arguments made on behalf of theism to be convincing. A hard atheist might make a positive claim and say there is no god. While I think this claim is accurate, I personally don't make claims about knowledge I don't believe I have.

I suspect that underpinning a lot of atheism is a lack of sensus divinitatis (to use Calvin's words) and, perhaps, an aesthetic view wherein a god figure adds no meaning to the picture they hold of the world. This might be because the notion of a god seems incoherent.

I don't really consider evil to be a human attribute. Perhaps disfunction is a better word and it removes the quasi-religious nonsense. For me if there is an 'evil' it is nature. The reality of predator and prey and all the requisite savageries and cruelties which are the hallmark of the lives of most living creatures - built right into the model of survival and which cannot be overcome. But this is only evil if it was designed this way by some monomaniac god who also kindly threw in cancer, MS and psoriasis, and wonky appendixes and a myriad of other design flaws and fuck ups for no apparent reason. If god were a car manufacturer he'd be shut down and the subject of some spectacular litigation.

Nicely put.

Is Universal Mind merely another name for God? Not necessarily. Universal Mind need not be all-knowing, as in knowing the future. Or all-good. Or all-powerful; maybe there are some things Universal Mind just cannot do. — Art48

The character of Universal Mind or Mind at Large (Kastrup) is different to god/s, in as much as it might be less personal and not be metacognitive and, perhaps, more of a blind and instinctive will, as per Schopenhauer. In other words, not an entity one has a relationship with.

But Universal Mind still plays a god-like role in granting us a foundational guarantee of a shared reality and object permanence (even if these are the product of mentation). If, says Kastrup, your car is still in the garage after you have parked and walked off, it is because Mind at Large holds our shared reality together - K maintains we are like 'dissociated alters' of the one great mind.

Whether you believe this will probably come down to personal taste and how poetic your imagination might be.

After all, would anyone posit that it would be bad for things to get better? — Banno

News Limited? Catastrophe is their daily bread. But I get your point.

The kids who took it as a given that things would get worse had little motivation to try to make things better. It will be the kids who think things can improve who make a positive difference to what happens. So the myth of progress is methodological.

There is an obvious parallel here to virtue ethics, in that it's folk who think they can improve on their actions as are the ones who work to improve themselves. Those who think they cannot improve their standing will not make an effort. — Banno

I am reminded of a couplet Goethe wrote to a young Schopenhauer.

Willst du dich des Lebens freuen, So musst der Welt du Werth verleihen.

"If you wish to draw pleasure out of life, You must attach value to the world."

Or as a friend of mine used to say - "Pessimism is a self-fulfilling prophesy."

I love it.

Ok. I guess we can make all sorts of claims about gods being the necessary grounding for reason or morality or whatever it might be (these arguments are common in Muslim and Christian presuppositional apologetics), but unless it can be demonstrated, it is just a claim amongst the many made by some believers.