So his philosophy is phenomenology? — frank
A link to an article on how Kant and Schopenhauer anticipated Freud’s ideas was posted here some time back. When you think about it, the provenance is fairly obvious. — Wayfarer
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/at/freud.htmBy Weltanschauung, then, I mean an intellectual construction which gives a unified solution of all the problems of our existence in virtue of a comprehensive hypothesis, a construction, therefore, in which no question is left open and in which everything in which we are interested finds a place. It is easy to see that the possession of such a Weltanschauung is one of the ideal wishes of mankind. When one believes in such a thing, one feels secure in life, one knows what one ought to strive after, and how one ought to organise one’s emotions and interests to the best purpose.
If that is what is meant by a Weltanschauung, then the question is an easy one for psychoanalysis to answer. As a specialised science, a branch of psychology – ‘depth-psychology’ or psychology of the unconscious – it is quite unsuited to form a Weltanschauung of its own; it must accept that of science in general. The scientific Weltanschauung is, however, markedly at variance with our definition. The unified nature of the explanation of the universe is, it is true, accepted by science, but only as a programme whose fulfilment is postponed to the future. Otherwise it is distinguished by negative characteristics, by a limitation to what is, at any given time, knowable, and a categorical rejection of certain elements which are alien to it. It asserts that there is no other source of knowledge of the universe but the intellectual manipulation of carefully verified observations, in fact, what is called research, and that no knowledge can be obtained from revelation, intuition or inspiration. It appears that this way of looking at things came very near to receiving general acceptance during the last century or two. It has been reserved for the present century to raise the objection that such a Weltanschauung is both empty and unsatisfying, that it overlooks all the spiritual demands of man, and all the needs of the human mind.
This objection cannot be too strongly repudiated. It cannot be supported for a moment, for the spirit and the mind are the subject of scientific investigation in exactly the same way as any non-human entities. Psycho-analysis has a peculiar right to speak on behalf of the scientific Weltanschauung in this connection, because it cannot be accused of neglecting the part occupied by the mind in the universe. The contribution of psychoanalysis to science consists precisely in having extended research to the region of the mind. Certainly without such a psychology science would be very incomplete. But if we add to science the investigation of the intellectual and emotional functions of men (and animals), we find that nothing has been altered as regards the general position of science, that there are no new sources of knowledge or methods of research. Intuition and inspiration would be such, if they existed; but they can safely be counted as illusions, as fulfilments of wishes. It is easy to see, moreover, that the qualities which, as we have shown, are expected of a Weltanschauung have a purely emotional basis. Science takes account of the fact that the mind of man creates such demands and is ready to trace their source, but it has not the slightest ground for thinking them justified. On the contrary, it does well to distinguish carefully between illusion (the results of emotional demands of that kind) and knowledge.
— Freud
Regarding therapists - if they’re any good they will show you things about yourself you would never otherwise find out, or at least they will greatly expedite it. — Wayfarer
There's a bias against accepting that we're equipped with a kind of faith. Faith has the same relationship to doubt as the eternal has to change. They're a package deal. — frank
As language games and forms of life change, that remains the same. So Witt was discovering an unchanging feature of the mind? — frank
if the opportunity came along, I think I would greatly benefit from Jungian analysis, in particular with respect to ‘integrating the shadow’ — Wayfarer
Re 'the person' - Cultural differentiation is something that occurs over centuries, individual differentiation over lifetimes. The various depictions of psyche as spirit or soul in religious philosophies are supposedly intended to awaken the subject to the eternally-existent essence (the ātman) - which is 'transpersonal'. — Wayfarer
Interesting. Can you expand on this a little? — Tom Storm
https://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/rorty/Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey are in agreement that the notion of knowledge of accurate representation, made possible by special mental processes, and intelligible through a general theory of representation, needs to be abandoned. For all three, the notions of "foundations of knowledge" and of philosophy as revolving around the Cartesian attempt to answer the epistemological skeptic are set aside. Further, they set aside the notion of "the mind" common to Descartes, Locke, and Kant — as a special subject of study, located in inner space, containing elements or processes which make knowledge possible. This is not to say that they have alternative "theories of knowledge" or "philosophies of mind." They set aside epistemology and metaphysics as possible disciplines. I say "set aside" rather than "argue against" because their attitude toward the traditional problematic is like the attitude of seventeenth century philosophers toward the scholastic problematic. They do not devote themselves to discovering false propositions or bad arguments in the works of their predecessors (though they occasionally do that too). Rather, they glimpse the possibility of a form of intellectual life in which the vocabulary of philosophical reflection inherited from the seventeenth century would seem as pointless as the thirteenth-century philosophical vocabulary had seemed to the Enlightenment. To assert the possibility of a post-Kantian culture, one in which there is no all-encompassing discipline which legitimizes or grounds the others, is not necessarily to argue against any particular Kantian doctrine, any more than to glimpse the possibility of a culture in which religion either did not exist, or had no connection with science or politics, was necessarily to argue against Aquinas's claim that God's existence can be proved by natural reason. Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey have brought us into a period of "revolutionary" philosophy (in the sense of Kuhn's "revolutionary" science) by introducing new maps of the terrain (viz., of the whole panorama of human activities) which simply do not include those features which previously seemed to dominate. — link
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_atheism#:~:text=A%202014%20survey%20by%20David,and%2012.6%25%20as%20something%20else.A 2014 survey by David Chalmers and David Bourget on nearly 1,000 professional philosophers from 99 leading departments of philosophy shows that 72.8% considered themselves as atheists, 14.6% considered themselves as theist, and 12.6% as something else. — link
OC2 is relativism. Relativism is the view that truth and knowledge are not absolute or invariable, but dependent upon viewpoint, circumstances or historical conditions. What is true for me might not be true for you; what counts as knowledge from one viewpoint might not do so from another; what is true at one time is false at another. Paragraph 97 arguably shows that the relativism implicit in this aspect of OC is of a classic or standard type. Its presence in OC is entirely consistent with its presence elsewhere in the later writings: one remembers the lions and Chinese of PI. What was left open in those earlier relativistic remarks was the degree of strength of the relativism to which Wittgenstein was committed. OC2 constitutes a claim that the framework within which claims to knowledge and challenges of doubt equally make sense is such that its change can reverse what counted as either. That is classically strong relativism. — AC
65. When language-games change, then there is a change in concepts, and with the concepts the meanings of words change.
95. The propositions describing this world-picture might be part of a kind of mythology ...
97. The mythology may change back into a state of flux, the river-bed of thoughts may shift.
99. And the bank of the river consists partly of hard rock, subject to no alteration or only to an imperceptible one, partly of sand, which now in one place now in another gets washed away, or deposited.
166. The difficulty is to realise the groundlessness of our believing.
256. On the other hand a language-game does change with time.
336. But what men consider reasonable or unreasonable alters. — W
Only a mind can prescribe or value anything. If you think otherwise, provide an example of something that is not itself a mind and that issues a prescription. — Bartricks
transitive verb
1a: to lay down as a guide, direction, or rule of action : ORDAIN
b: to specify with authority — link
https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/advice-for-publicWhat to do to keep yourself and others safe from COVID-19
Maintain at least a 1-metre distance between yourself and others to reduce your risk of infection when they cough, sneeze or speak. Maintain an even greater distance between yourself and others when indoors. The further away, the better.
Make wearing a mask a normal part of being around other people. The appropriate use, storage and cleaning or disposal are essential to make masks as effective as possible.
Here are the basics of how to wear a mask:
Clean your hands before you put your mask on, as well as before and after you take it off, and after you touch it at any time.
Make sure it covers both your nose, mouth and chin.
When you take off a mask, store it in a clean plastic bag, and every day either wash it if it’s a fabric mask, or dispose of a medical mask in a trash bin.
Don’t use masks with valves. — WHO
What's this gap between the system and the foundations? IMV, it's more like the system is the foundation of inherited, shared practices (in this context the ways we use words, the 'way things are done around here.' )OC1 thus states that scepticism gets no purchase because our beliefs inhere in a system (the first component) which rests upon foundations (the second component), which latter non-negotiably constitute the conditions upon which our beliefs have content — AC
But I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false. 105. All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system ... The system is not so much the point of departure, as the element in which our arguments have their life.
I have a world picture. Is it true or false? Above all it is the substratum of all my enquiring and asserting (WR252).
341. The questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges upon which those turn. — W
I don't think W suggests (and I don't personally think) that the 'foundation' is piecewise impervious to doubt. We can question any little piece of the system that we can manage to become aware of. I think @frank was defending this aspect of skepticism, and I agree. Maybe W's view (and a more reasonable view) is something more like Neurath's raft. We can analyze any particular word, suggest new ways of using them, but we can't do this with all words at the same time. Because we depend on living, current conventions to be understood (even by ourselves.) The radical or complete skeptic is a babbling dada poet.OC1 thus states that scepticism gets no purchase because our beliefs inhere in a system (the first component) which rests upon foundations (the second component), which latter non-negotiably constitute the conditions upon which our beliefs have content and which therefore constitute the conditions even for doubting, which, therefore again, cannot take the foundations for their target. The justification for the foundations is thus effected by a "transcendental argument" : restated, it is that foundational beliefs (expressed by what Wittgenstein calls, in senses of 'logical' and 'grammatical' special to OC, logical or grammatical propositions; see e.g. 51, 56-8) are what make the system possible, and it is within the system that claims to knowledge and challenges of doubt are alone intelligible. A clever encapsulation of the transcendental argument is given at 248: 'I have arrived at the rock-bottom of my convictions. And one might almost say that these foundation-walls are carried by the whole house.' — AC
That's cool, a lot of writers on this forum don't like Hegel. — Gregory
Lots of what I also find in Wittgenstein & Heidegger in that.What is “familiarly known” is not properly known, just for the reason that it is “familiar”. When engaged in the process of knowing, it is the commonest form of self-deception, and a deception of other people as well, to assume something to be familiar, and give assent to it on that very account. Knowledge of that sort, with all its talk, never gets from the spot, but has no idea that this is the case. Subject and object, and so on, God, nature, understanding, sensibility, etc., are uncritically presupposed as familiar and something valid, and become fixed points from which to start and to which to return. The process of knowing flits between these secure points, and in consequence goes on merely along the surface. Apprehending and proving consist similarly in seeing whether every one finds what is said corresponding to his idea too, whether it is familiar and seems to him so and so or not.
Analysis of an idea, as it used to be carried out, did in fact consist in nothing else than doing away with its character of familiarity.
— Hegel
But if knowing something presumes believing it to be true, how could knowledge be "definitionally something more than... psychological states"? Knowing is a psychological state. — Banno
Here is the story of the Japanese philosopher of "nothing" during the world war eras: — Gregory
This intro is nice approximation of what I make of Hegel, Feuerbach, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Derrida and others (not claiming to have mastered any of them or even that any of them is masterable or has some exact, final meaning ---to the contrary). These thinkers vary in important ways, but all of them saw through the limitations of a crude ego-centered empiricism. (The Crisis-era Husserl could also be included.) What puts people off a connection between Wittgenstein and Hegel is the rational fear of cryptotheism. I say that because religion also treats this theme, and not always in sophisticated ways. As I read Hegel, he saw that religion had an element that enlightenment lacked, which is a recognition of 'the sociality of reason.' Logic is not some dry, dead neutral thing (excluding mathematical logic.) There's a norm involved, a love directed at an ideal community. (You know, gross hippy stuff.)Starting with An Inquiry Into the Good, Nishida’s early work calls into question two basic presuppositions of most modern epistemology: the assumptions that experience is individual and subjective, and that it leads to knowledge only via a corrective process with input from the mind or other individuals. For Nishida, experience in its original form is not the exercise of individuals equipped with sensory and mental abilities who contact an exterior world; rather it precedes the differentiation into subject experiencing and object experienced, and the individual is formed out of it. — link
We don't need to reject these lines of thought merely because Japan joined Hitler in declaring war on the world, right? — Gregory
87. Suppose I give this explanation: "I take 'Moses' to mean the man, if there was such a man, who led the Israelites out of Egypt, whatever he was called then and whatever he may or may not have done besides."—But similar doubts to those about "Moses" are possible about the words of this explanation (what are you calling "Egypt", whom the "Israelites" etc.?). Nor would these questions come to an end when we got down to words like "red", "dark", "sweet".—"But then how does an explanation help me to understand, if after all it is not the final one? In that case the explanation is never completed; so I still don't understand what he means, and never shall!"—As though an explanation as it were hung in the air unless supported by another one. Whereas an explanation may indeed rest on another one that has been given, but none stands in need of another—unless we require it to prevent a misunderstanding. One might say: an explanation serves to remove or to avert a misunderstanding——one, that is, that would occur but for the explanation; not every one that I can imagine. It may easily look as if every doubt merely revealed an existing gap in the foundations; so that secure understanding is only possible if we first doubt everything that can be doubted, and then remove all these doubts.
The sign-post is in order—if, under normal circumstances, it fulfils its purpose. — PI
But now it may come to look as if there were something like a final analysis of our forms of language, and so a single completely resolved form of every expression. That is, as if our usual forms of expression were, essentially, unanalysed; as if there were something hidden in them that had to be brought to light. When this is done the expression is completely clarified and our problem solved. It can also be put like this: we eliminate misunderstandings by making our expressions more exact; but now it may look as if we were moving towards a particular state, a state of complete exactness; and as if this were the real goal of our investigation. 92.. This finds expression in questions as to the essence of language, of propositions, of thought.—For if we too in these investigations are trying to understand the essence of language—its function, its structure,—yet this is not what those questions have in view. For they see in the essence, not something that already lies open to view and that becomes surveyable by a rearrangement, but something that lies beneath the surface. Something that lies within, which we see when we look into the thing, and which an analysis digs out. 'The essence is hidden from us*: this is the form our problem now assumes. We ask: "What is language?", "What is a proposition?" And the answer to these questions is to be given once for all; and independently of any future experience. — PI
There's a gnostic myth that in heaven all questions are answered. It's our origin and our ultimate destination. — frank
Nothingness nihilates by its presence. The existence of nothingness was discovered by Heidegger when he philosophized his way through anxiety. That is why some find his writings comforting. Discourse on Thinking is particularly good, and I think admitting that nothing is real yet remains nothing is an important step along the philosophical path — Gregory
You've expressed it much better than I could. Thank you. — Luke
But even if it was and could issue a norm, it demonstrably wouldn't be a moral norm as it itself would be subject to moral assessment. — Bartricks
Plus, as well as being demonstrably false, you're not even engaging with the apparent demonstration that moral norms and values are those of God. Again — Bartricks
Which of those premises are you denying? — Bartricks
Like a mental placeholder? — frank
Grayling cites examples of very contingent - mistaken - propositions which appear to have been considered "hinge". But so far as they are hinge propositions, they are not subject to investigation. — Banno
To a rube like me, anyone (and their ilk) who proclaims without satire or ribaldry that "Das Nichts selbst nichtet" (The Nothing itself noths) fundamentally is a buffoonish purveyor of metaphysical nonsense (Witty & Freddy), or pestulant charlatan (i.e. "a sophist" against whom Plato prophylactically opposes philosophy). :mask: — 180 Proof
The first part of OC1is interesting because I agree with it, with respect to the set of components attributed to Wittgenstein in support of it, “...The view I shall call OC1 and which constitutes a version of a foundationalist refutation of scepticism, and therefore a contribution to the theory of knowledge...” — Mww
When a person lets go of a delusion, is it just the wrong beliefs that change? Or does everything change because all beliefs hang together?
Sometimes when I learn something new, it seems like my whole worldview is altered, so maybe it's the latter.
Societies can also become deluded. — frank
If I start to doubt that these words mean what I think they mean, what can I say about that? — unenlightened
OC1: Our beliefs are to be found only within language games, each of which is formed by taking some beliefs as non-negotiable. — Banno
Moral norms and values are not ours: I can't make an act right just by issuing a prescription to do it. Nor can you. Nor can any of us. Same with values. — Bartricks
This is, no doubt, derivative of Schopenhauer's [ 'gnostic' unconsciousness-noumenon-will ] of which 'individuals' are merely masks/maya. — 180 Proof
In the whole world there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads. It has been the solace of my life, it will be the solace of my death. — Sch