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[Atla]

Before talk about "a certain male human psychological experience" (male??)
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And yes this is all distinctly male thinking.
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Just an example for this side-issue btw, from the link you gave me:

Once one has learned to use it, the mouse, in a sense, ‘disappears’ from conscious attention. One acts (‘im-mediately’) through the mouse as an extension of one’s hand as one selects objects, operates menus, navigates pages, and so on. The mouse is, in Heidegger’s terms, ready-to-hand, i.e. it fits (‘seamlessly’) into a meaningful network of actions, purposes and functions. In being part of one’s action, it becomes part of ‘oneself’, ‘one’s body’, part of a domain of ‘ownness’ or ‘mineness’.

And similarly when a man is driving a car, the car sort of becomes part of the man's body, extension, 'oneself'. As far as I know this doesn't happen for women though, when a woman is driving a car, then the car is what the woman is in.

[Gertie]

And yes this is all distinctly male thinking.
...

Just an example for this side-issue btw, from the link you gave me:

Once one has learned to use it, the mouse, in a sense, ‘disappears’ from conscious attention. One acts (‘im-mediately’) through the mouse as an extension of one’s hand as one selects objects, operates menus, navigates pages, and so on. The mouse is, in Heidegger’s terms, ready-to-hand, i.e. it fits (‘seamlessly’) into a meaningful network of actions, purposes and functions. In being part of one’s action, it becomes part of ‘oneself’, ‘one’s body’, part of a domain of ‘ownness’ or ‘mineness’.

And similarly when a man is driving a car, the car sort of becomes part of the man's body, extension, 'oneself'. As far as I know this doesn't happen for women though, when a woman is driving a car, then the car is what the woman is in.

I sometimes wonder if it was an ancestral new mother who first pondered in some way about the nature of self and the other. Imagine having something inexplicably pop out of you, and gradually become an independent person much like you. Freaky ****. Probably the male shaman who got to make up some story about it and what it all means.

[Atla]

Just an example for this side-issue btw, from the link you gave me:


And similarly when a man is driving a car, the car sort of becomes part of the man's body, extension, 'oneself'. As far as I know this doesn't happen for women though, when a woman is driving a car, then the car is what the woman is in.

I sometimes wonder if it was an ancestral new mother who first pondered in some way about the nature of self and the other. Imagine having something inexplicably pop out of you, and gradually become an independent person much like you. Freaky ****. Probably the male shaman who got to make up some story about it and what it all means.

I guess I'd rather doubt that.. the female 'sense of being' seems to be wildly different from the male one. I'd say the male sense of being is sort of a 'strong singular presence', and the female sense of being is sort of a 'weaker plural presence that is somehow both several voices/beings and one being at the same time, without a strong center'. I tried asking women a few times what it's like to be.. well.. being sort of distributed across space, and being.. sort of a coming together of 'several'.. that's pretty unimaginable to a man. Likewise women can't really grasp that men are genuinely singular like that, I think they might be freaked out by it.

Apparently they literally think in parallel threads, parallel windows most of time, like 3-4-5. One of them said that her mind is automatically jumping so fast between them, that this jumping becomes unnoticable, and what remains is the parallelity.

Well anyway thanks to these things, women seem to be closer to nature and less prone to be abstract, they have a weaker sense of distinct self. And mentally healthy women naturally percieve their offspring as a part, extension of themselves (so it's tough when that offspring then grows up and starts to rebel), and they are of course also genetically wired to anticipate something popping out of them.

Also, women have much more interconnected hemispheres. They don't seem to tend to have this 'internal discourse' between the two hemispheres, that men are sometimes prone to, especially when affected by certain mental problems. Maybe this internal discourse is what really kickstarted the sense of self?

Also, well, men's brains are bigger. There is this mysterious phenomenon of raw self-awareness that seems to occur in a few species, and is essential to humanity. Hard to say where it comes from, as it doesn't seem to be connected to any particular brain region, personally I think that it's related to sheer neural numbers are well. I've come to think that on average, men have a somewhat stronger natural self-awareness than women.

Etc. there are a lot more cognitive differences. The Buddha, Kant, Heidegger etc. these guys did in-depth investigations of the workings of the male mind. Doing these invastigation is crucial, but why we would base ontology on the male mind, I don't understand that one.

[Atla]

Also, women have much more interconnected hemispheres. They don't seem to tend to have this 'internal discourse' between the two hemispheres, that men are sometimes prone to, especially when affected by certain mental problems. Maybe this internal discourse is what really kickstarted the sense of self?

Sorry, I couldn't resist typing the below fantasy. Feel free to skip it.

There might be a strange missing piece of the puzzle by the way, when it comes to the birth of the sense of self. Something no philosopher could have guessed, here once again we need the aid of science. Now this is of course highly speculative, but there seems to be growing evidence that around 12000-13000 years ago, our Sun went through a much more violent phase.

Plasma eruptions frequently may have hit the Earth back then, which even forced some people to live underground. Radiation levels may have increased, and maybe one such massive eruption is what ended the Ice Age overnight as well, scorching the Earth.

My current hypothesis here is that these increased radiation levels might have thrust people into semi-psychotic states. And so they had to literally fight a mental war inside, in order to not go insane and die, to remain functional. Psychotic states can also amplify the internal dialogue between the two hemispheres. Those who managed to keep it together (arguably they were more intelligent on average), may have emerged with a much stronger sense of self, due to this struggle, having to keep oneself together. The lingering self-awareness of the Ice Age human got shaped into a 'self', an 'entity'.

That was the 'me', and they looked up the sky and maybe they saw 'others' as well, huge sometimes anthromorphic figures in the sky, like maybe supernatural, godlike beings. There literally might have been huge human-like shapes hanging in the sky, caused by plasma eruptions hitting the atmosphere. Apparently, petroglyphs depicting these shapes were found all over the planet.

So then we got places like Tell Qaramel and Göbekli Tepe, some of the first expressions of the self. Later humanity recessed, going through a great flood and such that lasted for millennia, but the sense of self already may have taken shape by then. Or maybe it even got lost in some places, who knows. When the Harappan and Sumerian civs emerged, they already seemed to have a self.

[Atla]

Also, women have much more interconnected hemispheres. They don't seem to tend to have this 'internal discourse' between the two hemispheres, that men are sometimes prone to, especially when affected by certain mental problems. Maybe this internal discourse is what really kickstarted the sense of self?

Sorry, I couldn't resist typing the below fantasy. Feel free to skip it.

There might be a strange missing piece of the puzzle by the way, when it comes to the birth of the sense of self. Something no philosopher could have guessed, here once again we need the aid of science. Now this is of course highly speculative, but there seems to be growing evidence that around 12000-13000 years ago, our Sun went through a much more violent phase.

Plasma eruptions frequently may have hit the Earth back then, which even forced some people to live underground. Radiation levels may have increased, and maybe one such massive eruption is what ended the Ice Age overnight as well, scorching the Earth.

My current hypothesis here is that these increased radiation levels might have thrust people into semi-psychotic states. And so they had to literally fight a mental war inside, in order to not go insane and die, to remain functional. Psychotic states can also amplify the internal dialogue between the two hemispheres. Those who managed to keep it together (arguably they were more intelligent on average), may have emerged with a much stronger sense of self, due to this struggle, having to keep oneself together. The lingering self-awareness of the Ice Age human got shaped into a 'self', an 'entity'.

That was the 'me', and they looked up the sky and maybe they saw 'others' as well, huge sometimes anthromorphic figures in the sky, like maybe supernatural, godlike beings. There literally might have been huge human-like shapes hanging in the sky, caused by plasma eruptions hitting the atmosphere. Apparently, petroglyphs depicting these shapes were found all over the planet.

So then we got places like Tell Qaramel and Göbekli Tepe, some of the first expressions of the self. Later humanity recessed, going through a great flood and such that lasted for millennia, but the sense of self already may have taken shape by then. Or maybe it even got lost in some places, who knows. When the Harappan and Sumerian civs emerged, they already seemed to have a self.

Later, maybe around the Bronze Age, may have come the last step, when this rather passive self that humans had, coalesced into the autonomous ego, the ego took on a life of its own. The world got turned inside out, and now we were the ego itself, that came into this world.

Then in the East, they relatively quickly figured out that wait a second, that's not actually how things are 'supposed to be', they learned to see through the ego. In the West this never happened though, so even today all of our philosophy and culture is based on the ego, no matter how subtle the issue is. Now even science is telling us that there isn't really any autonomous ego to be found anywhere.

[Terrapin Station]

Yikes re thinking that there's a "male way of thinking" versus a "female way of thinking" that are more different than any two arbitrary males are to each other, or any two arbitrary females are to each other.

[Hereandnow]

Terrapin Station wrote
It's not bizarre-sounding, but very flakey/flightly/unfocused-sounding--like we can't concentrate on something for more than a fleeting moment before we move on to something else. It's kind of stream-of-consciousness, which is only going to be pertinent to the consciousness of the person expressing it.

Unfamiliar ideas thrown out there. I see.

And it doesn't really address the issue I have with it. "Being" isn't something difficult to understand or address. "Being," or "to be," in one of its primary senses is to exist, occur, be present, be instantiated. Any of those terms will do if someone, for some reason, doesn't understand "being" on its own. It's opposed to, say, imagining something to exist, occur, etc. that doesn't actually exist or occur. So what is the big issue there?

You don't see why talk about Being is an issue. This is indeed a problem and there is little I can do to correct it. It a bit like Philosophers come in various kinds. Some are just geeks who love to tinker with logic and arguments. They could have been anything. Rorty talks like this in his part biographical Social Hope saying he was good and logic, could have studied history, and in the end, he abandoned philosophy to teach literature, infamously claiming the field had come to its end. Philosophers like this, brilliant, many of them, are very different from the other kind, those who have an almost religious zeal (or even categorically religious, Kierkegaard, Buber, Levinas, and others) to know what it means to be here. Then there are those who straddle the fence, like Wittgenstein and Heidegger and Husserl.Wittgenstein was very passionate about the human condition, both he and Russell, yet he helped define the epistemic basis for positivism. Being for Wittgenstein is a nonsense term, and the best one can do is follow science.

The ideas I put out here are, obviously, derived from what I've read. After going through quite a bit, I have determined Witt types to be intuitively deficient. Read some of his biographical papers and this guy is deeply concerned about human suffering, but he is so strong in the rigor of thinking, he draws an uncrossable line between sense and nonsense (btw, His Philosophical Investigations I have not read much of. Soon) and in doing so he does not see that there is no line. Philosophy at its best is not line driven but OPEN, a place of many lines, and this is Heidegger. But Heidegger was NOT a transcendentalist. Like W, he keeps a firm eye out on keeping metaphysical thinking at bay. I follow Heidegger much more than I do W because he emphasizes openness, the present and the future. It is the PAST that binds us, though, the history of our culture and language that determines our possibilities.

Among these, I find favor with the Levinasians and Buberians and the rest. Strong of openness, emphasis on the ethical dimension of human existence.

Perhaps you are more like Rorty, who, as I say of Wittgenstein, is just not able to see how Being is more than an intellectual notion, a vacuous puzzle piece. Quine, I read, was a devout Catholic. A profoundly gifted intellectual philosopher...a Catholic??? But he was likely with Wittgenstein: religion and ethics is of dire importance in thinking at the basic level, it looms large as the most conspicuous thing there is (remember, I am speculating reasonably, not saying what he said exactly). One simply cannot talk about it philosophically. Of course, I beg to differ: Many "talk" about it and make sense.

I guess you are what you read. Quine never read Heidegger, nor Heidegger Quine.

There are a bunch of things you mention that we could address, such as "Heidegger wants to take the metaphysics OUT of ontology." The bulk of metaphysics IS ontology. That's primarily what metaphysics IS. So it doesn't make much sense to talk about "taking metaphysics out of ontology." It's like saying "We're going to take chemistry out of the study of molecular interactions."

There is a gleam of insight in this. But read again: All of those traditional default ontologies that have filled history are senseless. Read Heidegger's Introduction: The Necessity, Structure and Priority of the Question of Being. I mean, just read the first pages. It is NOT technical; not yet. He talks about being, the indefinable, universal, the all too familiar but then the furthest from understanding (the more familiar you feel it to be, the further away you are, the problem lying in large part IN the unquestioning familiarity. IF, and I think this of utmost importance, you are going to investigate something, the grounds for the investigation are already at hand. This is what Kant did with reason. Look to what is THERE in the world that makes ontology a meaningful concept to begin with; and do not simply start with given concepts, all of which do nothing but make far flung, unjustifiable claims. Surely you see: Taking the metaphysics out of ontology is like taking the metaphysics out of God: Forget all that fatuous talk about a powerful man in the sky. what is there IN the world that gives rise to the such a thing?; what is there, in the structure of our existence that is inherently religious and is not instantly dismissable (atheism generally attacks theism taken AS this clumsy historical idea, making such atheism just as fatuous). (One the matter of religion, this could be taken up in another thread. It is an issue in and of itself.)

This is Heidegger's project: this term Being is at the heart of philosophy, for all endeavors of thought expire at this one terminus: ontology; it is where language MEETS the end of meaningful language.
Heidegger's answer: a hermeneutic ontology.

If Heidegger was primarily addressing stuff like "Christian metaphysics" being wrapped up with "being," then that's a factor of both his historico-cultural milieu and his unique history (as the son of someone who worked for a church, etc.). "Christian metaphysics" isn't wrapped up with notions of being in general, and that certainly had nothing to do with my historico-cultural milieu or my familial experiences. So if that was part of what he was addressing, he probably should have made this more explicit.

The "historico-cultural milieu" as it is endowed with specific content is incidental. You could have been born in BCE India, with Vedic hymns filling your world. Bad metaphysical thinking per se is what is on the chopping block, and Heidegger happens to be born into Western philosophical culture. (Interesting to note, however, that H did think Buddhism possessed the possibility of a new language that could open up experience.)

[Terrapin Station]

those who have an almost religious zeal (or even categorically religious, Kierkegaard, Buber, Levinas, and others) to know what it means to be here.

"What it means to be here," on my view, is a rather juvenile/pre-analytical-to-nonsensical question. There is no general/universal "meaning" or "purpose" in that sense. Meaning/purpose only exist insofar as an individual thinks about anything in that way. This should be obvious with even the slightest philosophical or scientific exploration of the world.

Perhaps you are more like Rorty, who, as I say of Wittgenstein, is just not able to see how Being is more than an intellectual notion, a vacuous puzzle piece.

If the puzzle is "what it means to be here," then the puzzle is due to a misunderstanding of what things like meaning, purpose, etc. are.

Religion on my view is something that we'll be far better off without, once we can get enough people to see how absolutely silly it is, and ethics is something we do best with once we realize that it's simple ways that people (as individuals, influenced by their cultures) feel/dispositions they have towards interpersonal behavior.

Look to what is THERE in the world that makes ontology a meaningful concept to begin with; and do not simply start with given concepts, all of which do nothing but make far flung, unjustifiable claims.

Meaning and concepts are something that individuals do. They're not something that exists independently of anyone. So the sentence above reflects a serious misunderstanding of these things that's going to lead to a lot of errors in one's philosophizing.

[Terrapin Station]

Oops, that should have read "ethics is something we do best with once we realize that it's simply ways that people (as individuals, influenced by their cultures) feel/dispositions they have towards interpersonal behavior.

[GE Morton]

This is for everyone who has these issues, which is many of our posters with a continental bent (and I should probably make this a separate thread): it could be an issue of reading and thinking a great deal about this stuff, and your mind has a tendency to "race." That could easily lead to rambling writing that seems disconnected to readers.

You'd not want to change anything when writing your first draft, but when reading it back to yourself before posting (which hopefully everyone is doing), you need to take a deep breath, slow down, and remember that people aren't already "in your mind." They may not have read everything you've read. They certainly won't have had the same thoughts about it even if they did read it. They're not going to already know all of the interconnections you're thinking. And you need to be careful when it comes to interconnections, background assumptions, etc. that are second-nature to you--again, other people are not already in your mind, so these things probably won't be second-nature to them.

A good stance to assume is something like "Imagine that I'm addressing reasonably intelligent high school students who have no special background in what I'm talking about. If I put myself in their place while reading back what I wrote, would they be able to understand it and follow me? Am I presenting an argument that would seem plausible to them?" Your audience might have a much more extensive background in the subject matter than this, but it doesn't hurt to assume that they do not.

It's a bit similar to the idea of needing to "show your work" in mathematics class. The teacher already knows how to work out the problem, and they'll often know that you know how to work it out, too, but there's value, including for your own thinking, in setting a requirement to spell out just how you're arriving at the conclusions you're arriving at. That can seem laborious, perhaps, but if you're really saying something that would be worthwhile for other people to read and think about, isn't it worth putting the work in?

Good thoughts there, TP.

[Hereandnow]

Gertie wrote


(Although it seems to me to not to be about explaining human nature, but describing and re-framing it and offering life lessons from what I've seen so far. Or how does it explain the existence of consciousness?).

By my lights, it doesn't explain the existence of consciousness. I do not abide by all Heidegger concludes. I use Heidegger and the rest to keep my thoughts structured and competent, well guided. In the end there is still me and the world and this utterly profound mystery. Heidegger would say, mystery? Absolutely, this mystery, anxiety of being thrown into a world; something is wrong here. He is inspired by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche regarding some grandeur that is lost to us. N thought we are too much degraded by resentment while K thought we are alienated from God. Both thought that there needs to be a cure for this socially constructed alienation, which H defines as "das man", everydayness caught up in the unconscious involvement. Interesting: Buddhists and Hindus (sans the metaphysics) say the same thing. What ails us is this engagement day to day, from which we need to be liberated. What we REALLY are is something else, something better, extraordinary, transcendental (Buddhists differ, as perhaps you know. Mahayana Buddhism is filled with speculative content).

So - you make an ontological state of affairs assumption that there is a world which exists independently of your experience of it. Experience is therefore, amongst other things, a form of representation of that world.

If you want to talk like that, but it would be a retreat from what phenomenology is trying to do. Husserl, e.g., is NOT like Kant: there is a world of "unknown X" that we cannot experience. Same with Heidegger. Just take it as it presents itself; what it is. Here is a candle. The candle, says Husserl, has its basic analysis in terms of an eidetic predicatively formed affair. This IS like Kant saying concepts without inttuitions are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind. The object IS the conceptual/intuitive (sensorily) construction and this is just a descriptive account. There are assumptions of what the things is, but without the concpetual/predicative end of this, without the eidetic dimension, you are not describing what the thing is. What appears before IS idea and intuition, of-a-piece. You can separate them only in the abstract. Talk about sensory intuition as such is nonsense; you are, after all, IN eidetic contexts, or you are simply not thinking at all.

Now, if you have an interest as I do, you might side with Husserl over Heidegger: Husserl believed that in what he calls the phenomenological reduction, a suspension of imposing interpretative thought that is always already there when you open your eyes in the morning, this sort of thing takes a quasi mystical turn: it is the suspension of all ready assumptions, presuppositions that are already in place, what Heidegger later calls "proximal" thinking, as in, the basic furniture of our lived affairs of grocery shopping and quantum physics (to the extent these apply. Deep forested tribes untouched by modernity hardy go shopping in our sense of the term). It is, I think, what a meditating yogic does with great rigor. Husserl says that if you do this, often, it creates a distance between you and, ala Heidegger, Being-in-the-world, and HERE, there is a possible religious ...errr, encountering the world of novel insight. See, if you have a mind, Anthony Steinbach's Phenomenology and Mysticism. Also see Phenomenology and Religion, New Frontiers, an anthology of post Heidegerian thought.

I have these texts pdf if you want them.

A world which you share with other people, and compare notes about. And hence we have the inter-subjective basis of a working model of the world we share. A world where there are inedependently existing things and processes. We can't know about these other things and people from a first-hand pov, but we can agree on limited and flawed descriptions based in our shared observations and reasoning. And we end up with a (flawed and incomplete) scientific, materialist working model of the world.

Agree so far?

Absolutely.

That model contains an evolutionary explanation of why we are the way we are, physically, and why we have certain types of experience. A limited, flawed explanation, which doesn't explain the source of experience (but then neither does phenomenology?). But does give a broad utility-based explanation for things like our caring, social pre-dispositions, our competetive and tribal instincts, why we like choclate and so on.

Absolutely.

So what is your problem with that approach to human nature? Where do you draw the line on explanations which arise in the world we share, and why? Presumably you accept what we call gravity tells us something real about the world, and you accept evolution tells us something real about why our bodies are the way they are - so why draw the line at what evolution tells us about why we are the way we are mentally?

Simple. Empirical scientific thinking is NOT foundational ontology. That "what is" of the world at the level of basic assumptions is not addressed at all. Even if you have an a sound empirical theory about the nature of conscious thought, a neurologist's or a psychologist's, you are still not examining the nature of thought itself. A first step in this direction sees with perfect clarity that such an examination presupposes thought IN the empirical examination. This clear insight is at the heart of a LOT of philosophy. Thought examining thought is, by nature, impossible (Wittgenstein) for you would need yet another systematic symbolic pov/standard to stand apart from the thought perspective that is doing the examining; and this would yet require another to examine it! An infinite regress.

Heidegger sees exactly this, and responds: hermeneutics! Circularity IS what IS at the level of basic assumptions. He is right about this. He has opened the door, however, to possibilities, interpretative possiblities, and this is why I value his philosophy: the world is OPEN at the very foundation of meaning making itself. Scientific paradigms are in abeyance, as are all, even that of phenomenology.

Now I can anticipate your objection: This is exactly what science IS, a theoretical openness, founding paradigms questioned, revolutions in the structure of science itself, and so on. Heidegger says YES! the method of phenomenology is not at all a repudiation of science. But it is not working with THOSE paradigms. It works apriori, what is presupposed by empirical paradigms. It is another order of thought entirely, embracing science, religion, sociology, anthropology, and all the rest under one single paradigm, that of hermeneutics.

In order to see the importance of this, one has to work through the literature.





\

[Hereandnow]

Terrapin Station

"What it means to be here," on my view, is a rather juvenile/pre-analytical-to-nonsensical question. There is no general/universal "meaning" or "purpose" in that sense. Meaning/purpose only exist insofar as an individual thinks about anything in that way. This should be obvious with even the slightest philosophical or scientific exploration of the world.

Then you would not be on Kierkegaard, Buber, Levinas, and others' Xmas list. The obviousness of it, though, is forwarded without examination. I once thought it nonsense as well. But I then read with a desire to understand what they were about, not with prejudice, but with openness. If you go into philosophical matters without openness, you are bound to orthodoxy, dogma, the opposite of philosophy.

I do understand the unwillingness to be open to counterintuitive thinking. But you have to be careful not to end up like that Tea Party lunatic Paul Collins Broun a who said, "evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell." I ask, what IS this man's problem? Part of the answer is simple: he refuses to read with an open mind about the things he so passionately attacks.

If the puzzle is "what it means to be here," then the puzzle is due to a misunderstanding of what things like meaning, purpose, etc. are.

Religion on my view is something that we'll be far better off without, once we can get enough people to see how absolutely silly it is, and ethics is something we do best with once we realize that it's simple ways that people (as individuals, influenced by their cultures) feel/dispositions they have towards interpersonal behavior.

On religion, absolutely! That is, public religions and their idiotic beliefs that cause otherwise sane people to spend their lives trying to make the world conform to the bible, or the koran, or whatever other foolishness. Such religious devotion annihilates any progressive ethical interpretation of the world.

But then there is the existential analysis of human religiosity. An entirely different matter. I would say, pls be careful swinging that bat on this matter, lest you end up like Paul Broun.

As to ethics, this is a thorny issue. to me, our feelings, dispositions beg the question: Feelings about what? Disposition about what? I could be from a culture where belief entanglement includes a confidence that after 50, people should simply walk away, off into he forest to die. This confidence is underwritten by a religion that guarantees the soul's redemption. From another perspective, this rationalizes a kind of systematic homicide (the way caste systems in India have traditionally rationalized treating the Dalit so badly, picking up the Brahmin's feces, e.g.) But all of this leaves out the "given" of ethics, which is the metaethical. If this term makes no sense to you, I refer you to Moores Principia Ethica; see his "non natural property"; also see Mackie's Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong; then Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics. These are the three I choose to make my case.

To talk about this without you reading these, at least, would be me throwing out the unfamiliar again and you understandably don't appreciate this.

Meaning and concepts are something that individuals do. They're not something that exists independently of anyone. So the sentence above reflects a serious misunderstanding of these things that's going to lead to a lot of errors in one's philosophizing.

But you are in Heidegger's world in saying this. Cows and corn fields exist independently of me, they are "not me" in the world. If one wants to understand Being, what IS, one has to take such a thing as "what is the case" as true propositionally, and propositions are expressions in and of language, and are, again, something people DO. Heidegger says this DOING (leaning way back to Heraclitus) has an analytic! To say, X is a physical thing, and this is foundational, is not to say, X is has a nature of DOING built into its ontology. To say such a thing is entirely a different ontology.

Welcome to Heidegger's Being-in-the-World!

[Atla]

Guess science won this round by a landslide..

[Terrapin Station]

Then you would not be on Kierkegaard, Buber, Levinas, and others' Xmas list. The obviousness of it, though, is forwarded without examination. I once thought it nonsense as well. But I then read with a desire to understand what they were about, not with prejudice, but with openness. If you go into philosophical matters without openness, you are bound to orthodoxy, dogma, the opposite of philosophy.

I do understand the unwillingness to be open to counterintuitive thinking. But you have to be careful not to end up like that Tea Party lunatic Paul Collins Broun a who said, "evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell." I ask, what IS this man's problem? Part of the answer is simple: he refuses to read with an open mind about the things he so passionately attacks.

Here's the way I'm open to it: show any good reason to believe that meaning/purpose in the relevant sense could occur outside of something we do, in the sense of a way that we think about things. Show any good reason to believe that meaning/purpose exist external to us (or that any real abstract exists--that is, any abstract as an existent external to us/to a way that we, as individuals, think).

As to ethics, this is a thorny issue. to me, our feelings, dispositions beg the question: Feelings about what? Disposition about what?

Again, about interpersonal behavior that we consider to be more significant than etiquette. In other words, how humans behave towards each other, the actions they take towards each other, etc.

I could be from a culture where belief entanglement includes a confidence that after 50, people should simply walk away, off into he forest to die. This confidence is underwritten by a religion that guarantees the soul's redemption. From another perspective, this rationalizes a kind of systematic homicide (the way caste systems in India have traditionally rationalized treating the Dalit so badly, picking up the Brahmin's feces, e.g.) But all of this leaves out the "given" of ethics, which is the metaethical. If this term makes no sense to you, I refer you to Moores Principia Ethica; see his "non natural property"; also see Mackie's Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong; then Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics. These are the three I choose to make my case.

Moral stances are subjective. They can vary not only from culture to culture but from individual to individual. There are no (objectively) correct or incorrect, true or false, etc. moral stances. Moral stances are ways that people feel about behavior--whether they feel that it's acceptable behavior to engage in systemic homicide, etc. There are no correct/incorrect answers there. There are just different ways that different people feel about such things.

To talk about this without you reading these, at least, would be me throwing out the unfamiliar again and you understandably don't appreciate this.

I've read all of that stuff. I've read Heidegger, too, for that matter. I just don't have a very positive opinion of Heidegger. I have an extensive academic background in philosophy, and I even taught a bit.

[GE Morton]

I've read through most of this thread, but the following couple of paragraphs raise most of the points for which I have questions/comments (I also tried to read Hussserl decades ago, and dismissed it at the time as fatuous gibberish).

If you want to talk like that, but it would be a retreat from what phenomenology is trying to do.

What phenomenology is trying to do, as far as I can see, is discover and characterize the ding an sich, Kant's noumena, which he argues (convincingly, to my mind) is impossible. Is that a fair characterization of the aim of phenomenology? If it is, then phenomenology is a fool's errand.

Husserl, e.g., is NOT like Kant: there is a world of "unknown X" that we cannot experience.

Not clear there whether you're attributing that view to Kant or Husserl, but that is precisely Kant's claim . . . correction --- Kant does not CLAIM there is an external world forever out of our reach, but that there is one is an assumption we can't do without.

Same with Heidegger. Just take it as it presents itself; what it is. Here is a candle. The candle, says Husserl, has its basic analysis in terms of an eidetic predicatively formed affair. This IS like Kant saying concepts without inttuitions are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind. The object IS the conceptual/intuitive (sensorily) construction and this is just a descriptive account. There are assumptions of what the things is, but without the concpetual/predicative end of this, without the eidetic dimension, you are not describing what the thing is. What appears before IS idea and intuition, of-a-piece. You can separate them only in the abstract. Talk about sensory intuition as such is nonsense; you are, after all, IN eidetic contexts, or you are simply not thinking at all.

Are you using "intuitions" in Kant's sense? Here is a decent summary of that sense:

http://www.askphilosophers.org/question ... perception).

What you are calling an eidetic perception or dimension looks to me to be identical with Kant's sensory intuitions. If you see some difference, can you articulate it? When those intuitions are combined with concepts (the "unity of apperception") we know as much about the thing before us as we will ever know. Asking what the thing "really" is, which assumes that there is something more to be learned or understood about the thing is an idle question, the fool's errand mentioned above.

Now, if you have an interest as I do, you might side with Husserl over Heidegger: Husserl believed that in what he calls the phenomenological reduction, a suspension of imposing interpretative thought that is always already there when you open your eyes in the morning, this sort of thing takes a quasi mystical turn: it is the suspension of all ready assumptions, presuppositions that are already in place . . .

A mystical turn indeed. There can be no suspension "of all ready assumptions." You may be able to recognize and suspend some particular assumption, but only by relying upon other assumptions. The only way to suspend all assumptions is to lapse into unconsciousness, or die. Typically those alternative assumptions involve some sort of non-cognitive mysticism.

Simple. Empirical scientific thinking is NOT foundational ontology. That "what is" of the world at the level of basic assumptions is not addressed at all.

It is addressed to the extent that it is rationally, cogently, testably addressible. A proffered ontology which does not rest on empirical evidence and testable theories is mysticism, with no explanatory power or practical application.

Even if you have an a sound empirical theory about the nature of conscious thought, a neurologist's or a psychologist's, you are still not examining the nature of thought itself. A first step in this direction sees with perfect clarity that such an examination presupposes thought IN the empirical examination. This clear insight is at the heart of a LOT of philosophy. Thought examining thought is, by nature, impossible (Wittgenstein) for you would need yet another systematic symbolic pov/standard to stand apart from the thought perspective that is doing the examining; and this would yet require another to examine it! An infinite regress.

I agree. But you don't seem to appreciate the implications of that, i.e., that those empirical observations and theories about thought are the best we can ever do. (Which does not rule out replacing current theory with a better one).