Do you believe or do you epoché?

[odysseus]

Immanuel Can
Ah, but we are not computers. If we were, then the input "public concepts" would be processed by each in exactly the same way, and with the same results. Nor, contrary to Foucault, are we "ventriloquized by history" For if we were, then "history" would be only one thing, and the "hand up our backs" would induce us to the same utterances. We must understand Foucault to be hyperbolical there, trying to tell us we are less original than we think: but if we take him to mean that there is no particular person, no individual identity involved in the processing of a concept, then he's not telling the truth.

Foucault wanted to put everybody in "classes," and make them victims of groupthink. He wanted to do this so as to "debunk" their power-authority structures. (His personal reasons for wanting this are quite transparent and well-known.) But this is only a semi-credible idea at best -- not dead wrong for everything, but only partly right -- because "classes" are themselves different, and process things differently. Even Foucault said they did. Otherwise, what was the evil of "group" or "class"? What was there to "debunk"?

I like Foucault because he makes a case for the those abused by the system, and he doesn't like the assumption that things are right and normal and we should just all behave and do our part while those in power punish non compliance without genuine moral authority, or rather, with moral authority that is entangled with the interests of system. He speaks up for the ones who get forgotten in the histories we tell and the great deeds that are done, as in those tales of cowboys and indians: told by cowboys! For years I thought American indians were just evil, as I did homosexuality and other things I assimilated. As for me, I take a keen interest in what keeps people bonded in society and how this establishes norms that make us toe the line by being the line. After all, it wasn't just the men who kept women out of politics and under the thumb of husbands--it was women who believed this. It is called a self fulfilling prophesy when dominance is achieved by the desire of the dominated. Blacks in the antebellum south in the US mostly believed they were in fact inferior. What I like about Foucault is he saw power in complacency. He was right about this.
But as to the being ventriloquized by history, Foucault was a disciple of Heidegger, and this latter's Being and Time defended a concept of the self as an historical dasein. No way around it: why do my sentences rise on a question, possess subject then object structure; why is it that I wave my arms a certain why to make a point, and so on, and so on? I learned these during infancy. I learned it all, the culture, the food, the manner of speaking, the humor. what goes untouched here? As I type, is there truly freedom from the ready to hand utility delivered to my fingers from an age old typing class? Or am I not simply engaged, the doing, without interruption, obeying, if you wil. These ideas in my head are gatherings of language born out of the ages. They have certain possibilities that are employed in speech, and with all my novelty of restructuring them, I am bound to their possibilities which I recollect and produce more often than not, robotically (as it should be! After all, to second guess all we do and declare our freedom from it makes living and breathing impossible. I have my thoughts on this if you would like to go into it).

Sorry for all that. I like Foucault.

I do have an idea as to how to go beyond this and achieve true freedom, but that is for another time. It is Kierkegaard's Repetition and Husserl's epoche and others that saves the day.

But the inter-sectionalists have taken us even one step farther: in dividing up the groups into subgroups, they've created an infinite number of potential collocations of criteria -- with the net result that the individual is back with a vengeance, not this time as a mere member of a "class" or "power group," but as the unique intersection of diverse criteria.

Moreover, when we think about the phenomenal, we must remember that when a concept is processed, no matter how "public" or "historical" that concept may have been in origin, the stimulus for it comes from somewhere outside the individual and the class. It comes from what we might call "the real world," or Kant might have wanted to call "the numinous." But it doesn't come from ME, and it doesn't come from US.

Power group? I get the idea, I think. But it is certainly the resistance we receive from the world that makes novelty possible, that is, that redefines the problem solving events science takes on and creates new possibilities for truth or disclosure. So there we are, in every moment of our lives, deploying recalled bundled ideas to solve iisues of our engagement.

They usually work, almost always

. Our lives are "normal science" just walking down the street, relying on those repeated confirmations of the theories we solved long ago: put this foot forward, watch the balance, and so on. Language is like this, too. Pronunciation used to be a challenge, when we were 2 or so. the world that stands before us is a network of problems solved and confirmation of the results in every moment. Normal science is when it works.

But now, the point you are making, I think, is that because the world puts resistance before our understanding, anomalies rise up. Clearly. And this is where a scientist plies her trade, but the resources she has are entirely recalled. So I agree, real novel thinking is there. And I also agree that in our normal lives, questions arise. Questioning is the piety of thought, says Heidegger. This also has great possibilities for discussion.

One short definition of reality is, "That which pushes back against my will." That's not a bad little definition, in some ways.

Now, finally, in the interpretive event there's not just "the interpretation," standing all alone, outside of all facts. There's the inducement-to-interpret (the facts, events or stimuli from "the world"), the interpreter (the individual person, unique as he or she is), and the interpretation (his or her attempt to recode the experience in language, understand it, and to render it "public" again).

Pushes against one's will: But in this pushing, how does analysis reveal what is outside the interpretative possibilities. I get on the subway, the door doesn't open, the world pushes against my will, now, where is the authentic departure from your resources that would come into play? You examine the door, pull hard, jiggle, find an authority: these are routines established, always already there when you engage subways. Where is the original authorship of these actions. (Caputo's book is, well, all about this!)

It depends what you mean by "truth." Is truth a mere product of the interpretation? Or is truth an approximation to the reality of the stimulus that forms the inducement-to-interpret? The first alternative is implausible, it seems to me.

By truth I mean true propositions. Snow is white, my back aches, e.g.s. Why are these true? What makes them so? Dewey says language was formed out of problem solving events and the words, the sentences simply emerged to communicate and communication had no real correspondence with the world as an empirical scientist would assume. Truth is a social phenomenon and makes no references outside the pragmatic containment of meaningful exchange of ideas. It is a coherence idea, not a correspondence one: truth is agreement with other truths, and the outside resistance is no more than resistance, no metaphysical presences.

I'd be interested in seeing how it would be done, though.

That is the question! I am going to start reading more Husserl. Also, Immanuel Levinas. Do the epoche: the tree there in front of you. Husserl says if you practice dismissing from your thoughts all that would make a knowledge claim on this except the ideas that make the tree a tree (things are constituted by ideas), then you enter into the magical world of phenomenology, though he would use magical. Some say thta when you do something like this, there actually IS something magical going on. The world takes on a transcendental presence. I think like this.

Why, when the head flies off the hammer, does one person laugh, another curse, and a third just pick up a new hammer and go on? Why does Newton see gravity in the apple, but Joe Lunchbucket does not, and neither does Parmenides? Anomalies are recognized by individuals. By others, they are not even noted.

They do not "present themselves" as anomalies. They only are self-presented as events. They are interpreted as anomalies, or as indicative of something, only by those who are in the frame of mind to do it.

Right, I think. they pressent themselves as events, that is, in time. and the hammering is, with every successful blow, a confirmation of the utility of hammering. It works. One can laugh, or some other mood can step in when something is amiss, but as far as the hammering goes, it is a model of our being in the world. this kind of thing underlies all language. It reminds me a a cow's life: cow's don't have language, but they do "think" in the hammer using way: no more grass here,move on. We have this at the core of our understanding, this utility sense of things. Language is not qualitatively different, one could argue. Anyway, Newton and the rest take up the world in a certain way, as do we all. when Newton wasn't thinking physics, he was tying his shoes or assessing his finances. Physics is one of many "regions" of problem solving, and the one is ignored while another rises to "proximity". It doesn't change the way interpretation has bearing on the world.

[odysseus]

A_seagull
Thank you for that. However I think you have a very limited understanding of what philosophy is. You seem to think that philosophy is defined by what has been written about philosophy, surely a naïve view.

Philosophy is much more than that.

You are right, Seagull. Teach me. I need to learn: Philosophy is more than what is written about philosophy? This puzzles me. Help me out?

[Immanuel Can]

What I like about Foucault is he saw power in complacency. He was right about this.

This is what I was referring to when I said that Nietzsche also had a point. This sort of critique is apt.

That Foucault was campaigning for the legitimization of his own extravagant homosexual practices, which eventually killed him, should not blind us to where he was onto something.

...the self as an historical dasein. No way around it: why do my sentences rise on a question, possess subject then object structure; why is it that I wave my arms a certain why to make a point, and so on, and so on? I learned these during infancy.

Well, look at it differently. Ask yourself the question, "WHO learned it?"

You said, "I." Well and good. What is this "I" of which you speak? Is it the same as other "I"s? Is it merely a product of its class or society? Did it arrive as a blank slate, with no inclinations, preferences, tendencies and identity of its own?

Sure there's a way "around" that conclusion. It's the old tension between "nature" and "nurture." Human beings very clearly are not merely products of "nurture," but of their own "nature" as well. And that's not a wild statement: it's pretty much taken as a given in Psychology today.

These ideas in my head are gatherings of language born out of the ages.

And what when you speak two or three languages? What entity chooses which one you will emphasize, or think in, at a given time? There is no one "group" to determine that for you, so you choose for yourself la langue dans laquelle vous preferiez a penser.

Sorry for all that. I like Foucault.

He has something to offer.

Our lives are "normal science" just walking down the street, relying on those repeated confirmations of the theories we solved long ago: put this foot forward, watch the balance, and so on.

Metaphorically, maybe; but literally, no. Science, as a method, would have been discovered at the dawn of time instead of the 17th Century, were it so obvious and natural as that. But coming up with the scientific attitude was actually quite an achievement: so profound, in fact, that it produced the Industrial Revolution.

Normal science is when it works.

Not by Kuhn's account. For him, "normal" science is "conventional belief in the scientific establishment." He contrasts "normal science" to "revolutionary" science.

But now, the point you are making, I think, is that because the world puts resistance before our understanding, anomalies rise up.

That's only one part of it. The equally important next step is that the "resistance" from the world is processed by a particular individual. The particular individual decides whether or not the "resistance event" will be interpreted as an "anomaly," or merely as an "event." He has decisive say in the interpretive act, and is not merely what they call in computers "a dumb terminal" that has to process things only one way.

Equally importantly, though, the "resistance" signals to us that there is some real thing 'out there' that is not merely a product of our own interpretive action. It's the thing that stimulates our interpretive action, even against our own inclining. We may, as Kant said, not have direct and unequivocal understanding of what that thing is, but we know for sure it's there, because if it were not then we'd always have things our way.

One short definition of reality is, "That which pushes back against my will." That's not a bad little definition, in some ways.

Now, finally, in the interpretive event there's not just "the interpretation," standing all alone, outside of all facts. There's the inducement-to-interpret (the facts, events or stimuli from "the world"), the interpreter (the individual person, unique as he or she is), and the interpretation (his or her attempt to recode the experience in language, understand it, and to render it "public" again).

Pushes against one's will: But in this pushing, how does analysis reveal what is outside the interpretative possibilities.

That's a good question. But even if we aren't quite sure of the answer, we're still sure it's the necessary question.

Analysis is part of the interpretive phase of cognition, not itself a part of the stimulus-to -analyze. What makes us choose to analyze some things, and not to analyze others? Probably the answer is our own individual nature. But if that nature gives us equivocal feedback sometimes, and even if we have reason to doubt the aptness of some of our interpretations, that does not imply that our analyses are a) all wrong, or b) not mostly approximately good. They may well be.

I get on the subway, the door doesn't open, the world pushes against my will, now, where is the authentic departure from your resources that would come into play? You examine the door, pull hard, jiggle, find an authority: these are routines established, always already there when you engage subways. Where is the original authorship of these actions.

in the individual. It is the individual that is irritated that the subway door is not opening. And why? Because he has projects that require it should open. The world pushes back, and the individual is irritated. The group isn't. Society isn't. History isn't.

...the sentences simply emerged to communicate and communication had no real correspondence with the world as an empirical scientist would assume.

It depends precisely what they "assumed." They may not have needed to assume 100% correspondence: 99.5% would certainly do. So might 75%, depending on how serious the question was.

Approximate communication would be every bit as good as perfect communication (or correspondence), for most things. The only problem is that it would introduce a margin of error -- and that is exactly what we observe about communication of ideas in the real world: it generally works, but not always, and not perfectly.

What we don't want to do is go to the silly extreme of saying, like some Postmodernists do, "It's all just language games." That's baby and bathwater out the window.

Truth is a social phenomenon and makes no references outside the pragmatic containment of meaningful exchange of ideas.

I'm suggesting this isn't so. Even your word "meaningful" smuggles back in the idea that language can function on probability, not perfection. A thing isn't "meaningful" if it communicates nothing at all even to the one uttering it.

It is a coherence idea, not a correspondence one: truth is agreement with other truths,

No, that can't work. Now we've got a "closed system" of language, one that has no reference to the outside world, no pragmatic utility, and no meaning.

We could invent a system of symbols and rules in which all symbols conformed to the rules we constructed: but it wouldn't do anything in relation to the outside world. It would truly be nothing but a "language game," with the emphasis on "game." It would be unconnected to real life and the stimuli that come at us from 'out there', a mere fantasy-game.

Why, when the head flies off the hammer, does one person laugh, another curse, and a third just pick up a new hammer and go on? Why does Newton see gravity in the apple, but Joe Lunchbucket does not, and neither does Parmenides? Anomalies are recognized by individuals. By others, they are not even noted.

They do not "present themselves" as anomalies. They only are self-presented as events. They are interpreted as anomalies, or as indicative of something, only by those who are in the frame of mind to do it.

Right, I think. they pressent themselves as events, that is, in time. and the hammering is, with every successful blow, a confirmation of the utility of hammering. It works.

Yes. But this "confirmation" is not merely an internal state of the hammerer: it's a stimulus coming in on him, that tells him the wood is being nailed to the wood, the nail is going in straight, and he has not hit his thumb. The "utility" stimulus comes at him from outside, and he recognizes it, and calls it "useful."

...cow's don't have language, but they do "think" in the hammer using way: no more grass here,move on.

This would presume that cows have "language." Maybe they do; but it's got to be very unlike what we have.

Of course, we don't know this is so. Nagel questions it. He asks, "How do we know what it is to be a bat?" and concludes that we simply cannot and do not know. We don't really echolocate, so we can't fashion more than a distant imagining as to what it might be like to navigate like that. There's certainly no easy analogy from bat cognition to human...or from cow to human.

[odysseus]

Immanuel Can
..the self as an historical dasein. No way around it: why do my sentences rise on a question, possess subject then object structure; why is it that I wave my arms a certain why to make a point, and so on, and so on? I learned these during infancy.

Well, look at it differently. Ask yourself the question, "WHO learned it?"

You said, "I." Well and good. What is this "I" of which you speak? Is it the same as other "I"s? Is it merely a product of its class or society? Did it arrive as a blank slate, with no inclinations, preferences, tendencies and identity of its own?

The "dangerous" thesis put out there by post modern thinking is that there IS no I, that is, no transcendental ego,no Kantian TUA, no Cartesian egoic center. These are all fictions. Fine enough for everyday conversation, no doubt, as in I am late for a date and I lost my wallet. But that I of an independent actuality that remains after an exhaustive analysis of the self in a time structured ontology is done is nil. Sartre had to talk about nothingness in order to preserve this Cartesian concept and Husserl could not demonstrate how anything is verifiable that is outside of language and intentional relationships with things. I don't agree that there is nothing remaining; I think there is an I, but my argument is one grounded in ethics, not ontology, or, the ontology of ethics: A world view is not sustainable in a theory that cannot answer the question about human ethics and value. And post modern thinking dismisses the ethics as a faction along with all other claims to an absolute something or other. There are no absolutes that can be confirmed by an inquirer that is bound exclusively to contingent language, and truth statements are language statements. I don't claim to have intimate knowledge of Derrida's thinking, but I do understand Heidegger and others well enough to see this. I ask you about the I, and how will you defend such a thing? You will begin by telling me your side. But telling, as you know Kant was well aware, is all about the logical structure of thought, and thought so logically delimited cannot say anything that thought cannot think. That of which we cannot speak, we have to be silent about, said Wittgenstein. My trouble with this line of reasoning is that Wittgenstein said that in discussing absolutes, in mentioning transcendence and mysticality, he was just trying to tell that of which we cannot speak, just a hermeneutic to direct us away from speaking nonsense by speaking nonsense. I say, if you are compelled to speak about it, it must have a grounding in experience somehow. Anyway...

So, who learned it? Ask rather, did learning occur? The who of it would be only for fast and loose everyday speaking. The I is no more than a locus of proximal thinking, Heidegger would put it, where thoughts gather around in an interpretative body. The actuality that the thoughts are "about" is also dressed in thought, and this is the hermeneutic circle in a nutshell. Tracking down what IS can never leave language. The tracking IS language. Pragmatists think like this, too. Rorty and the old school guys like James and Dewey.

And what when you speak two or three languages? What entity chooses which one you will emphasize, or think in, at a given time? There is no one "group" to determine that for you, so you choose for yourself la langue dans laquelle vous preferiez a penser.

Other languages are not an issue for post modern thinking. I have to read up on Derrida, and I will, but I know Heidegger is the step towards this, and one has to see that there is no access whatever, by this approach, to anything that is to stand apart from the knowing that grasps it. The intentional relation is IN the very idea of a thing, not at all unlike Kant saying concepts without intuitions are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. In saying this, I would hazard, we have the true beginning of hermeneutic enclosure. When Kant talked about freedom, God and the soul, these were postulates only.

Our lives are "normal science" just walking down the street, relying on those repeated confirmations of the theories we solved long ago: put this foot forward, watch the balance, and so on.
Metaphorically, maybe; but literally, no. Science, as a method, would have been discovered at the dawn of time instead of the 17th Century, were it so obvious and natural as that. But coming up with the scientific attitude was actually quite an achievement: so profound, in fact, that it produced the Industrial Revolution.

Are they really so different, or is one the primordial sister of the other? You learn at one not to touch a flame, how? At such a young age, you were not aware of the structure of what you were doing, but it was there all the same: your hand came too close, the heat registered as to be avoided, you withdrew the hand; next time around you see the flame, you recollect, and there is your consummation of "knowing" flame is to be avoided: IF the hand goes close, THEN the discomfort ensues. This matches up with the basic structure of scientific knowledge, the algorithm . Soon the words will add to this and you will symbolically endowed to communicate this. But the learning itself: isn't this what a scientist does: take the nitro, throw it to the floor, witness the explosion--this is the basis for the scientific "theory' that nitro has a certain volatility.
This is not to say empirical science is reducible to only this, but it is this model of inductive reasoning that is at its core. we have been "reasoning" in a primordial way since infancy.

Not by Kuhn's account. For him, "normal" science is "conventional belief in the scientific establishment." He contrasts "normal science" to "revolutionary" science.

But what is a conventional belief grounded in if not what works? Thinking of space bending and gravitational pull together was novel and absurd, until it revealed solutions that "worked" in the predictability of outcomes and in the math (don't ask me how). The predictability of outcomes, that IS the pragmatic grounding of all knowledge. For the most fundamental analysis of S knowing P shows S predicting P in context.

That's only one part of it. The equally important next step is that the "resistance" from the world is processed by a particular individual. The particular individual decides whether or not the "resistance event" will be interpreted as an "anomaly," or merely as an "event." He has decisive say in the interpretive act, and is not merely what they call in computers "a dumb terminal" that has to process things only one way.

Equally importantly, though, the "resistance" signals to us that there is some real thing 'out there' that is not merely a product of our own interpretive action. It's the thing that stimulates our interpretive action, even against our own inclining. We may, as Kant said, not have direct and unequivocal understanding of what that thing is, but we know for sure it's there, because if it were not then we'd always have things our way.

But decisions made by the individual, what are these? How can one put the individual in the driver's seat if it cannot be done to separate the driver from the driving? Driving, if you can stand the metaphor, is what we can observe, and this is reducible to driving techniques, familiarity with equipment and so on. The I behind all this may even be there as a Cartesian "thing" but this would hardly be the one Doing everything. Doing comes from knowing in advance, things come to us as "predelineated" Husserl tells us, pregrasped, prethought; this is how we can engage at all. The spontaneous I never makes an appearance in the midst of all this anticipating and projecting.
Kant and the real "out there" was for him a necessary fiction of reason, and apart from empirical knowing, it has little standing. I will read up on the chapter on noumena again, but I recall Kant saying that noumena, given that there was no actual encounter with "it" had no basis in observation based knoweldge, and that puts it in the margins of justified belief. Not having things our way is speculative as a basis for an ontology.

in the individual. It is the individual that is irritated that the subway door is not opening. And why? Because he has projects that require it should open. The world pushes back, and the individual is irritated. The group isn't. Society isn't. History isn't.

I am inclined to side with you on this one. But the point would be made that before you even got on the subway, you were already prepared to have a subway experience. You knew where people sat, what those hanging straps were for, and how the doors opened and if something was amiss. Society is in the nature of the language that circulates through you head, for its nature is internalized modeling of people discussing, chatting. we carry this social model in our heads and it serves to interpret the relationships with things and people around you. Society put you in the position to get somewhere without delay, say; it put you in an environment where things like that mattered. As to history, well, that IS a big issue. After all, the words that rise to awareness at the moment are quite ancient, and they provide the medium through which you understand things. You can never, the point would be, step beyond the delimitation of your interpretative structures, no matter how personal it gets; it would be like a fish stepping out of water. The forces that push against are never to the understanding Uninterpreted. One would have to not be a person for this.

...the sentences simply emerged to communicate and communication had no real correspondence with the world as an empirical scientist would assume.
It depends precisely what they "assumed." They may not have needed to assume 100% correspondence: 99.5% would certainly do. So might 75%, depending on how serious the question was.

Approximate communication would be every bit as good as perfect communication (or correspondence), for most things. The only problem is that it would introduce a margin of error -- and that is exactly what we observe about communication of ideas in the real world: it generally works, but not always, and not perfectly.

What we don't want to do is go to the silly extreme of saying, like some Postmodernists do, "It's all just language games." That's baby and bathwater out the window.

well, postmodernists do not deny that things happen, they just say, if you are trying to figure out the nature of those things, you will see that you are stuck in an interpretative world and there is no way out. This is why Wittgenstein had to resort to the mention of transcendence (as I see it; it was because that event, that thing is beyond understanding when conceived as the thing itself. It is nonsense to try to talk about it for all you words are bound to facts about the world,and facts are logical constructs. Language games I only have a vague understanding of (his investigations is on my reading list), so I won't speak of it.

I'm suggesting this isn't so. Even your word "meaningful" smuggles back in the idea that language can function on probability, not perfection. A thing isn't "meaningful" if it communicates nothing at all even to the one uttering it.

I'm not clear on this. I meant to say that language, the logical thoughts we have about the world, are pragmatic only, exhaustively (unless you go the Husserlian or Kirkegaardian route, which I do). Even the word Being or actuality or reality are words that are constructed to settle matters of communicating thoughts. Knowledge, the argument goes, is never about "what" but only "how". The what of a knowledge claim is actually revealed as a how. I say the flower is in the pot. But what does this knowlege claim really come to? The term flower, what IS this?
It was conceived in a time framework. Very young, you once encountered a flower, people said the word, pointed and the like, you made the association, and then, in the future, WHEN something like this came along, it was not a mystery but familiar (all knowledge is refied familiarity) as was the word, the sound, and when the sound came up, it was familiar in its association with something like that thing. The thing never entered into your thoughts and it always remained transcendental to the anticipatory knowledge claim. This kind of theorizing is what the pragmatists fpu forward and I see no way around it: it is the language problem solving of associating the sound with the thing and the familiarity of the association in a community of language users thta make the Being of the thing in your understanding. The actuality of the scent, the appearance is inevitable transcendent and unspeakable.

This would presume that cows have "language." Maybe they do; but it's got to be very unlike what we have.

Of course, we don't know this is so. Nagel questions it. He asks, "How do we know what it is to be a bat?" and concludes that we simply cannot and do not know. We don't really echolocate, so we can't fashion more than a distant imagining as to what it might be like to navigate like that. There's certainly no easy analogy from bat cognition to human...or from cow to human.

Well, how do we know each other? What it is to be a person? I am one but is someone else the same? I won't go into this, but as for the bat or cow, any scientist will tell us that they learn like we do, though we can't be what they are. Their knowldge of the world, therefore, at least has this anticipatory nature; they are time creatures. They anticipate, as rats do in a lab. As infants without language, we learned like this. This kind of thing is likely the epistemological basis of our sense of being here, laid out when we as infants crawled around, smelled, grabbed, and so on. Then came words...

[A_Seagull]

A_seagull
Thank you for that. However I think you have a very limited understanding of what philosophy is. You seem to think that philosophy is defined by what has been written about philosophy, surely a naïve view.

Philosophy is much more than that.

You are right, Seagull. Teach me. I need to learn: Philosophy is more than what is written about philosophy? This puzzles me. Help me out?

Philosophy is an exploration of Ideas.

If you think philosophy is defined by what has been written about philosophy.... tell me... when was this state achieved? Last week? 100 years ago? 1000 years ago? 3000 years ago? When?

[odysseus]

A_Seagull
Philosophy is an exploration of Ideas.

If you think philosophy is defined by what has been written about philosophy.... tell me... when was this state achieved? Last week? 100 years ago? 1000 years ago? 3000 years ago? When?

The state I guess you are talking about is the original state of philosophy? The one all the philosophers who write about philosophers are writing about. But they are always talking about some other philosopher, even the most original. Take Kant, of whom I assume you do approve, for not to approve of Kant is a bit like not approving of Newton in physics (though there is Searle who thinks Kantian idealism is very wrong minded. Oh well): he was awakened from his dogmatic slumber reading Hume, the empiricist. And his categories of pure reason are derived from Aristotle. And his is by no means the first rationalist. Plato was; but no, Plato was built out of the presocratics, especially Parmenides and Heraclitus. Heidegger is a bit on your side in this, for he thought that language had a history and a destiny, at least some ideas did. It was our job to find the most primordial, from which we have become alienated, and resurrect them into our lives. To do this we have to move decisively away from the chatter of everydayness toward greater authenticity. I am still working him out.

So philosophers always talk about other philosophers. It is how meaning is made, within the dialectic of competing thinking. Best not to think about the years' distance between us and something originary, that is, what it is the source of other derivative thinking; better to think of how those ancient words can show us something about the present.

Anyway, perhaps you would like to read some Heidegger. We could talk. Or, you could just tell me how little I know about philosophy and be on your way.

[A_Seagull]

A_Seagull
Philosophy is an exploration of Ideas.

If you think philosophy is defined by what has been written about philosophy.... tell me... when was this state achieved? Last week? 100 years ago? 1000 years ago? 3000 years ago? When?

The state I guess you are talking about is the original state of philosophy? The one all the philosophers who write about philosophers are writing about. But they are always talking about some other philosopher, even the most original. Take Kant, of whom I assume you do approve, for not to approve of Kant is a bit like not approving of Newton in physics (though there is Searle who thinks Kantian idealism is very wrong minded. Oh well): he was awakened from his dogmatic slumber reading Hume, the empiricist. And his categories of pure reason are derived from Aristotle. And his is by no means the first rationalist. Plato was; but no, Plato was built out of the presocratics, especially Parmenides and Heraclitus. Heidegger is a bit on your side in this, for he thought that language had a history and a destiny, at least some ideas did. It was our job to find the most primordial, from which we have become alienated, and resurrect them into our lives. To do this we have to move decisively away from the chatter of everydayness toward greater authenticity. I am still working him out.

So philosophers always talk about other philosophers. It is how meaning is made, within the dialectic of competing thinking. Best not to think about the years' distance between us and something originary, that is, what it is the source of other derivative thinking; better to think of how those ancient words can show us something about the present.

Anyway, perhaps you would like to read some Heidegger. We could talk. Or, you could just tell me how little I know about philosophy and be on your way.

Philosophy does not have to be that way. Can you justify your claim that philosophy is all about philosophers? (Science is emphatically not about scientists.. except in the history of science.)

And yes .. I am on my way

[Immanuel Can]

The "dangerous" thesis put out there by post modern thinking is that there IS no I, ...I think there is an I, but my argument is one grounded in ethics, not ontology, or, the ontology of ethics: A world view is not sustainable in a theory that cannot answer the question about human ethics and value.

Well, yes. This is precisely where I would be coming from too, if I understand you aright.

I'm an ethicist, primarily. And the Moral Argument is my angle of approach to these questions...not the only one, of course, but one that is for me, most interesting and compelling.

"Ontology precedes ethics." That's the great insight of "Worldview" theory. You can't say what is "good" unless you first specify what "exists," and thus what is capable of grounding or legitimizing (to use a Habermassian word) such value judgments.

I ask you about the I, ...

My answer is this: "I'm sorry...WHO were you asking?"

And WHO was doing the asking?

If there's no answer to either, then a question is not being asked, and it's not being asked to anyone.

I say, if you are compelled to speak about it, it must have a grounding in experience somehow.

Yes, that's my point. In making the kind of dismissive judgments they do, these guys are insufficiently attentive to their own use of pronouns.

Pragmatists think like this, too. Rorty and the old school guys like James and Dewey.

Question-beggers, all of them.

And what when you speak two or three languages? What entity chooses which one you will emphasize, or think in, at a given time? There is no one "group" to determine that for you, so you choose for yourself la langue dans laquelle vous preferiez a penser.

Other languages are not an issue for post modern thinking.

I think they should be. One can say our thinking is bound by language, and in some ways, it is. But the choice of language itself is not itself a product of language. Neither, arguably, are some other kinds of choice. They are products of the unique disposition of the individual, that annoying "self" concept that keeps popping up with the pronouns.

I have to read up on Derrida, and I will,

Why do you hate yourself so much?

He's not terribly fun to read. He does have something to say, but wading through his language games is exhausting.

...not at all unlike Kant saying concepts without intuitions are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. In saying this, I would hazard, we have the true beginning of hermeneutic enclosure.

Both might be true, and yet not give us any help in knowing why we need concepts in the first place. If they're mere social fictions, mere "terms of the game" within a social system, then we might ask, "Why THAT game?"

In other words, what stimulus from the external world makes one kind of concept useful for a purpose, and another not helpful. From where are these external incentives being generated and influencing the 'game'? Then the enclosure is broken again.

Our lives are "normal science" just walking down the street, relying on those repeated confirmations of the theories we solved long ago: put this foot forward, watch the balance, and so on.
Metaphorically, maybe; but literally, no. Science, as a method, would have been discovered at the dawn of time instead of the 17th Century, were it so obvious and natural as that. But coming up with the scientific attitude was actually quite an achievement: so profound, in fact, that it produced the Industrial Revolution.

Are they really so different, or is one the primordial sister of the other? You learn at one not to touch a flame, how? At such a young age, you were not aware of the structure of what you were doing, but it was there all the same: your hand came too close, the heat registered as to be avoided, you withdrew the hand; next time around you see the flame, you recollect, and there is your consummation of "knowing" flame is to be avoided: IF the hand goes close, THEN the discomfort ensues. This matches up with the basic structure of scientific knowledge, the algorithm . Soon the words will add to this and you will symbolically endowed to communicate this. But the learning itself: isn't this what a scientist does: take the nitro, throw it to the floor, witness the explosion--this is the basis for the scientific "theory' that nitro has a certain volatility.

Yes, I think the difference is significant. And we can see that historically, it certainly was. For the sort of "learning by experience," or "learning by success and failure" that you speak of is not unrelated to the scientific method, but lacks its systematic nature and discipline. And that's a significant problem. By the time Bacon invented the scientific method, science was already bogging down under centuries of Aristotelianism, traditions, legends, guesses, and so on. It was not clear to anyone what should 'count' as real knowledge, and what part was mere tradition; because there was not method specifying the meaningful difference.

Bacon gave us that. And the raw method humans had practiced previously became tightly focused, like the eye of a man looking down a microscope or up a telescope -- certain things were ruled out, so that that other things could be magnified and brought into view more sharply. That's what I mean by science being a "method."

David Bentley Hart has a really brilliant passage on this. I'll have to find it for you.

But what is a conventional belief grounded in if not what works?

It's mere tradition, "grounded" only in what appears to work to particular individuals and cultures.

Think of the practice of bleeding a patient: this was practiced most earnestly as something that "worked." But it didn't, and the patients often died. But every now and then, one would get better, and the 'leeches' would celebrate their successes. No wonder, then that it continued to be medical orthodoxy for centuries: had not someone as brilliant as Aristotle advocated the "bodily humours" theory? Surely nobody would be so bold as to contradict the great Aristotle, no? Therefore, the practice continued.

But decisions made by the individual, what are these? How can one put the individual in the driver's seat if it cannot be done to separate the driver from the driving?

These are actually two different questions. The first is ontological: "what are these?" The second is epistemological: "why don't we know what separates these?" The first can be answered "A real thing," without being undermined by the second. We don't have instant access to knowledge of all that is genuinely real: America existed before Amerigo Vespucci. It's just that it wasn't known.

The spontaneous I never makes an appearance in the midst of all this anticipating and projecting.

This is half right. The "I" is at least partly the subject of nurture, of society, of constructed realities. But it is also the product of nature, not entering this world blank, but as an individual with propensities and capacities of its own. It's the dialectic between these two that produces what we might call "the personality." Concepts are supplied from the social environment, yes: but they are supplied TO the individual, with his own latent preferences, potentials and identity.

So the "I" isn't "spontaneous" in a total sense. But neither is it null, a mere dumb-terminal for downloading of social concepts.

Not having things our way is speculative as a basis for an ontology.

It's not a "basis." It's a powerful indicator.

If there is no "out there" from which stuff comes, and all our concepts are constructed only, then why is "the world" resistant to us at all? It is, then, after all, only another construct of our imagining, another concept with which we work.

in the individual. It is the individual that is irritated that the subway door is not opening. And why? Because he has projects that require it should open. The world pushes back, and the individual is irritated. The group isn't. Society isn't. History isn't.

I am inclined to side with you on this one. But the point would be made that before you even got on the subway, you were already prepared to have a subway experience.

Oh yes, of course.

That's the point. Your anticipation of "the subway experience" was defeated by that irritating "something" that pushes back against you and denies you the anticipated experience. Had you no anticipation, there would be no disappointment. But had you no disappointment, your subway experience wouldn't be in the socially-constructed class of "mere (defeated) anticipations" at all.

You can never, the point would be, step beyond the delimitation of your interpretative structures, no matter how personal it gets; it would be like a fish stepping out of water. The forces that push against are never to the understanding Uninterpreted. One would have to not be a person for this.

Well, it's true that we humans can't "step outside" our concepts. But it's equally true that we'd need no concepts if there were not an "out there" to be engaged. We actually can't escape either.

The folly only comes, I think, when we try to make one or the other the total answer, to the exclusion of its dialectical counterpart.

I say the flower is in the pot. But what does this knowlege claim really come to? The term flower, what IS this?

Well you're right to say the reason we have a problem is because our contact with reality is mediated by concepts. And concepts are only ever approximate. That's why we must not get too upset when they don't work 100% of the time, and must be happy if we get 98%. 98% success would mark, for us, a good and useful concept.

The actuality of the scent, the appearance is inevitable transcendent and unspeakable.

Yes. Only God would have more than a mere "concept" of the flower. Only He would have the actuality. But then, presumably, if He created it in the first place, it would be clear that He must possess the full concept. For what else would be prior to a first cause, that a first cause could "miss"?

Well, how do we know each other?

Maybe the question is not "how," but "how well?"

We do know each other, if by "know" we mean something as modest as "recognize, in somewhat limited measure."

Interestingly, that is the one thing we all grasp for most intently, most desperately -- authentic relationship. We want to "know" another person and "be known" by them in as close an absolute way as we can get. For the thirsty human soul, it seems it can never be enough. (Nobody ever says, "I'm known and loved enough; dial it back, will ya?") Rather, the problem is that we feel that no matter how many people know us, or how intensely they do, we need more than they give. Our souls stay thirsty.

But there's the Living Water for the thirsty soul. God says, "I know you, for I made you. You are known by Me, loved by Me, because I wanted you to be here in the first place. Come into the good of that, and your soul will not thirst anymore." To be known by God, that's to have that need met, because only God can know us beyond mere concepts, all the way to the reality of what we are.

Or, as 1 Corinthians 13:12 speaks, "For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known." It's all in there, you see. Knowledge beyond mere concepts.