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[Hereandnow]

Lagayscienza wrote
Hereandnow, can I ask how a phenomenological investigation of religion would differ from an investigation of religion by modern science? If such investigations would not be similar in their methods, would they both still be valid attempts to understand the reality of religion? Are there different ways of understanding religion? This strikes me as an important question if we are to arrive at an understanding the phenomenon of religion.

Would it be true to say that an understanding of religion by science and by phenomenology would yield different results? Or would you deny that science can have anything to say about religion?

Science doesn't talk about its own presuppositions. There is physics in knitting, but the latter really says nothing at all about physics and doesn't belong in a conversational setting like this. Note how science is silent on metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, and anything they do say is vacuous.

Phenomenology begins with the presuppositions of physics.

Here is the way Husserl begins his introductory remarks for his Ideas I:

Pure Phenomenology, to which we are here seeking the way, whose unique position in regard to all other sciences we wish to make clear, and to set forth as the most fundamental region of philosophy, is an essentially new science, which in virtue of its own governing peculiarity lies far removed from our ordinary thinking, and has not until our own day therefore shown an impulse to develop..... to reach the phenomenological standpoint, and through reflexion to fix its distinctive character, and that also of the natural viewpoints, in a scientific way, this is the first and by no means easy task which we must carry out in full, if we would gain the ground of phenomenology and grasp its distinctive nature scientifically.......


Here is a taste of how phenomenological thinking begins to proceed:

I can let my attention wander from the writing-table I have just seen and observed, through the unseen portions of the room behind my back to the verandah, into the garden, to the children in the summer-house, and so forth, to all the objects concerning which I precisely “know” that they are there and yonder in my immediate co-perceived surroundings—a knowledge which has nothing of conceptual thinking in it, and first changes into clear intuiting with the bestowing of attention, and even then only partially and for the most part very imperfectly.

If you have ever come across Proust's Search of Time Lost, you may find something similar, for he is considered a phenomenological writer. Notice that attention is on the immediacy of the perceptual environment, the givenness, if you will, of the things around one. A bit further on, and this is a notable passage from Ideas I:


What is actually perceived, and what is more or less clearly co-present and determinate (to some extent at least), is partly pervaded, partly girt about with a dimly apprehended depth or fringe of indeterminate reality. I can pierce it with rays from the illuminating focus of attention with varying success. Determining representations, dim at first, then livelier, fetch me something out, a chain of such recollections takes shape, the circle of determinacy extends ever farther, and eventually so far that the connexion with the actual field of perception as the immediate environment is established. But in general the issue is a different one : an empty mist of dim indeterminacy gets studded over with intuitive possibilities or presumptions, and only the “form” of the world as “world” is foretokened. Moreover, the zone of indeterminacy is infinite. The misty horizon that can never be completely outlined remains necessarily there. As it is with the world in its ordered being as a spatial present —the aspect I have so far been considering—so likewise is it with the world in respect to its ordered being in the succession of time. This world now present to me, and in every waking ‘now’ obviously so, has its temporal horizon, infinite in both directions, its known and unknown, its intimately alive and its unalive past and future. Moving freely within the moment of experience which brings what is present into my intuitional grasp, I can follow up these connexions of the reality which immediately surrounds me. I can shift my standpoint in space and time, look this way and that, turn temporally forwards and backwards; I can provide for myself constantly new and more or less clear and meaningful perceptions and representations, and images also more or less clear, in which I make intuitable to myself whatever can possibly exist really or supposedly in the steadfast order of space and time. In this way, when consciously awake, I find myself at all times, and without my ever being able to change this, set in relation to a world which, through its constant changes, remains one and ever the same. It is continually “present” for me, and I myself am a member of it. Therefore this world is not there for me as a mere world of facts and affairs, but, with the same immediacy, as a world of values, a world of goods, a practical world. Without further effort on my part I find the things before me furnished not only with the qualities that befit their positive nature, but with value-characters such as beautiful or ugly, agreeable or disagreeable, pleasant or unpleasant, and so forth. Things in their immediacy stand there as objects to be used, the “table” with its “books”, the “glass to drink from”, the “vase”, the “piano”, and so forth. These values and practicalities, they too belong to the constitution of the “actually present” objects....


A bit lengthy, but it I think one has to see how this kind of thinking begins to take up the world. See how I underlined that last sentence: the pragmatics, the feelings, the aesthetics, all seen by science as irrelevant, now take up their rightful place in the analysis of existence. One is not applying evolving historical paradigms that comprise the foundation of discovery. Rather, one begins at the beginning: in the structures of the world as it is encountered. Space is not defined through an Einsteinian mathematical equation, for prior to arriving at something like this, one has to first BE in a world that always already there from which science makes its measurements and comparisons and various quantifications. The familiar sciences presuppose the bear givenness of a world. Phenomenology wants to "observe" just this world, the presupposed space and time and structure of what we talk about and engage every day. The above sounds a little too loosely conceived to be a "science" but this is because it is merely an intro. Husserl is looking for a "method that promises to lead to genuine knowing."

It helps to read Kant first, for Kant's Copernican Revolution, as he calls it, puts perception itself IN the object that is known and this is a fundamental step, for ontology and epistemology are bound to the same essence, that is, they are the same thing: to know X is part and parcel of X itself. Recent talk in quantum mechanics has made similar statements, that is, about when the perceptual apparatus reaches out to grasp an object, what is produced is a synthesis. But all one has to do is ask that fateful question about this basic epistemology and the jig is up: I, as a perceiver, am not a "mirror" of a world. Speaking in plain physicalist terms, a brain is about as opaque as a thing can be. Thus, this coffee cup's most basic analysis simply cannot be the way physicists talk about it.

[Hereandnow]

Sy Borg wrote

You are right, I have some objections. What you refer to as "philosophy" is continental philosophy, seemingly disregarding the analytical school. Whatever, I try not to separate science and philosophy because I think each field is part of a single larger concern - humans trying to understand what is going on with reality.

"If religion's metaphysics careless construct of primitive minds at the end of their rope ... the matter would be closed" is a straw man. There's nothing "primitive" about a mind that has doesn't know about germ theory and sees illness as evil spirits. It's just education.

Speaking of education, if possible, I'd like to take you up on your offer to go into apiori synthetic judgements and its relationship with metaphysics. Cheers.

Yes, I pretty much dismiss the analytic approach to philosophy. Never found it enlightening because they seem to live by Quine's naturalism. Quine wrote, "With Dewey I hold that knowledge, mind, and meaning are part of the same world that they have to do with, and that they are to be studied in the same empirical spirit that animates natural science." There is on this absolutely no impulse to take on the frontiers of our existence, which is philosophy's proper place. Here is a bit of Quine from "From Stimulus to Science"; naturalism:

the rational reconstruction of the individual’s and/or the race’s actual acquisition of a responsible
theory of the external world. It would address the question how we, physical denizens of the
physical world, can have projected our scientific theory of that whole world from our meager
contacts with it: from the mere impact of rays and particles on our surfaces and a few odds and
ends such as the strain of walking uphill.

This kind of thinking is generally shared among analytic types. What is wrong with it is that it fails to acknowledge that this consciousness from which the question of our existence issues, IS existence, and insights into this existence carry the full breadth and depth of what we experience. That is, a human existence is not an object, over there, next to the fence post. This kind of thinking is patently absurd, and all one has to do is examine what it is that constitutes a human existence, me, for example, and see there is nothing of an object in any of this desiring, needing, anticipating and remembering, questioning, affirming, and so on. This is where human existence lies. And what is further wrong with analytic thinking is, a: it dismisses metaphysics; and b: it dismisses epistemology, or might as well dismiss it, because it is clueless. I have read through the Gettier problems and possible solutions, for example, and was appalled to find such complete disregard for any responsible rendering of "P" in S knows P. No I don't give these brilliant (for there is no doubt of their ability to think well) fools (for there is no doubt as to their outrageous ability to miss the point. Here is Quine's bottom line:

the terms that play a leading role in a good conceptual apparatus are terms that promise to play a
leading role in causal explanation; and causal explanation is polarized. Causal explanations of
psychology are to be sought in physiology, of physiology in biology, of biology in chemistry,
and of chemistry in physics—in the elementary physical states.


Note that Quine must know that there is nothing epistemic in the principle of causality! He goes with this because he thinks causality is the only wheel that rolls...but it doesn't roll at all, not one inch does causality get an object into the knowing mind of a perceiver.

So no, I don't give analytic thinking the time of day. I've read enough and I am thoroughly convinced it is nigh useless.

Anyway, sure, how do you want to proceed with Kant?

[Lagayascienza]

Quine... thinks causality is the only wheel that rolls...but it doesn't roll at all, not one inch does causality get an object into the knowing mind of a perceiver.

I don't understand the objection to analytical ways of thinking. And if causality is a wheel that "doesn't roll at all", how do we explain the success of science?

[Count Lucanor]

Count Lucanor wrote
The essence in existence, how the world is constituted and how do I know there's a cup on the table. All of this points to figuring out things by mere contemplation, in the relation between the observer and what is observed. The project fails from the start. Only when the cup, the table and their surrounding objects enter dynamic relations, we begin to understand them. Our naked eye is, however, very incompetent in capturing all these relations and we can't never get the entire picture. The world is a puzzle of moving, dynamic parts, of which we build theoretical models. Intertwined with cultural practices, these models become narratives. That's the basis of myth and religion: ways of solving the puzzle that owe much more to imagination and fantasy, our most basic skills at hand, than to systematized tools for inquiry and discovery, which require more complex social conditions. That's just the basis, the essence if you want. How it develops historically is another issue.

The question begged in this; when the eye does encounter a piece of the puzzle, as I am right now encountering my cat, how does one give a good faith analysis to this? I agree that their are aspects in a given perceptual event unattended, and some for now unattendable (yet to be fathomed at all).
But here I ask, what is their in the full breadth of discovery IN the this essential relation between your "observer and what is observed"? The focus now on the phenomenological structure that is the knowledge nexus between me and the cat. Once this is laid out, then of course, one can speak of other matters. But this is first.

Again, what seems to be first, what is right before my eyes, is deceiving. If there's one essential relation between the observer and what's observed, it might be that one. Reality is an intricate, complex network of relations, while the observer is almost blind.

[Sy Borg]

Sy Borg wrote

You are right, I have some objections. What you refer to as "philosophy" is continental philosophy, seemingly disregarding the analytical school. Whatever, I try not to separate science and philosophy because I think each field is part of a single larger concern - humans trying to understand what is going on with reality.

"If religion's metaphysics careless construct of primitive minds at the end of their rope ... the matter would be closed" is a straw man. There's nothing "primitive" about a mind that has doesn't know about germ theory and sees illness as evil spirits. It's just education.

Speaking of education, if possible, I'd like to take you up on your offer to go into apiori synthetic judgements and its relationship with metaphysics. Cheers.

Yes, I pretty much dismiss the analytic approach to philosophy. Never found it enlightening because they seem to live by Quine's naturalism. Quine wrote, "With Dewey I hold that knowledge, mind, and meaning are part of the same world that they have to do with, and that they are to be studied in the same empirical spirit that animates natural science." There is on this absolutely no impulse to take on the frontiers of our existence, which is philosophy's proper place. Here is a bit of Quine from "From Stimulus to Science"; naturalism:

the rational reconstruction of the individual’s and/or the race’s actual acquisition of a responsible theory of the external world. It would address the question how we, physical denizens of the physical world, can have projected our scientific theory of that whole world from our meager contacts with it: from the mere impact of rays and particles on our surfaces and a few odds and ends such as the strain of walking uphill.

This kind of thinking is generally shared among analytic types. What is wrong with it is that it fails to acknowledge that this consciousness from which the question of our existence issues, IS existence, and insights into this existence carry the full breadth and depth of what we experience. That is, a human existence is not an object, over there, next to the fence post. This kind of thinking is patently absurd, and all one has to do is examine what it is that constitutes a human existence, me, for example, and see there is nothing of an object in any of this desiring, needing, anticipating and remembering, questioning, affirming, and so on. This is where human existence lies. And what is further wrong with analytic thinking is, a: it dismisses metaphysics; and b: it dismisses epistemology, or might as well dismiss it, because it is clueless. I have read through the Gettier problems and possible solutions, for example, and was appalled to find such complete disregard for any responsible rendering of "P" in S knows P. No I don't give these brilliant (for there is no doubt of their ability to think well) fools (for there is no doubt as to their outrageous ability to miss the point. Here is Quine's bottom line:

the terms that play a leading role in a good conceptual apparatus are terms that promise to play a
leading role in causal explanation; and causal explanation is polarized. Causal explanations of
psychology are to be sought in physiology, of physiology in biology, of biology in chemistry,
and of chemistry in physics—in the elementary physical states.


Note that Quine must know that there is nothing epistemic in the principle of causality! He goes with this because he thinks causality is the only wheel that rolls...but it doesn't roll at all, not one inch does causality get an object into the knowing mind of a perceiver.

So no, I don't give analytic thinking the time of day. I've read enough and I am thoroughly convinced it is nigh useless.

Anyway, sure, how do you want to proceed with Kant?

Science hardly dismisses epistemology. Rather, it constantly grapples with the vagaries of perception and the issues of insidious bias.

I would also say that science has a close relationship with metaphysics, which plays a role in hypotheses and it is the job of researchers to test and hopefully prove or disprove.

It seems to me that you are discarding a useful tool because you prefer a different tool. Why not use both?

[Pattern-chaser]

The question of self-identification is key. Do you see yourself as a lone individual, a member of a family, a nation or region, a church / political group, a corporation, maybe like Hatrman's marines in Full Metal Jacket?

'But always remember this: Marines die. That's what we're here for. But the Marine Corps lives forever'.

Ooo, I like that — an interesting way to offer a useful and valuable insight.

I have little to say against this. All true. But it is point of view conceived out of the psychology of our deficit, to put it generally, and if religion's metaphysics were a careless construct of primitive minds at the end of their rope (we speak here of the church and it theology and neo platonic ideas), the matter would be closed. But then, is metaphysics simply an empty concept?

Speaking of education, if possible, I'd like to take you up on your offer to go into a priori synthetic judgements and its relationship with metaphysics. Cheers.

Yes, and I'd also like to ask if Hereandnow thinks that metaphysics is concerned only with religion?

[Hereandnow]

Count Lucanor wrote
Again, what seems to be first, what is right before my eyes, is deceiving. If there's one essential relation between the observer and what's observed, it might be that one. Reality is an intricate, complex network of relations, while the observer is almost blind.

Hmmm But what are you getting at? "That one" that is right before my eyes? Intriguing. Care to elaborate?

[Hereandnow]

Sy Borg wrote
Science hardly dismisses epistemology. Rather, it constantly grapples with the vagaries of perception and the issues of insidious bias.

I would also say that science has a close relationship with metaphysics, which plays a role in hypotheses and it is the job of researchers to test and hopefully prove or disprove.

It seems to me that you are discarding a useful tool because you prefer a different tool. Why not use both?

I do use both, but mostly in a negative way do I find analytic thinking useful. Take one of my favorite books, John Mackie's Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. This book denies what I affirm, but in doing so, it enlightened me as to how what I do affirm would be argued. It deepened my own thinking, so I am grateful to Mackie for that, but Mackie had it all wrong about the nature of ethics. Same with those absurd Gettier problems. Put it this way: analytic philosophy tends to lean hard on logical and meaning, how one can make sense of a term given what the term can mean in a field of play. It adjusts ambiguities and tries to iron them out, so analytic arguments tend to be about other arguments and the way terms are making sense. This is why we associate logical positivism with it, emphasis being on clarity of meaning. Continental philosophy is about the world, which is why the term existentialism is associated with it. My objection: philosophy is supposed to be about the world and analytic thinking ends up being an empty spinning of wheels, and in this, it is a huge distraction to true philosophical enterprise, which is to open meaning at the threshold of metaphysics. Philosophy will one day take over religion.

Philosophy without metaphysics is like, if you will, clothing that isn't to be actually worn, or some such metaphor. Philosophy should be encountering the world's actualities and expanding understanding, not simply talking about how to trim down or inflate obscurities. But I will grant you, it can be useful. Rorty straddles the fence and pragmatism is aligned with Heidegger, and I learned something solid from its hypothetical deductive descrittption of epistemology. I mean there are things helpful. Mackie, again, comes to mind.

Tell you what, you give me a paper you think is particularly meaningful, and I will read it and argue why don't go that way.

[Hereandnow]

Pattern-chaser wrote
Yes, and I'd also like to ask if Hereandnow thinks that metaphysics is concerned only with religion?

Only one way to address this, which is to go more deeply into an analysis of both. What is metaphysics? It is the foundational indeterminacy of our existence. But this doesn't really ring a bell with most because the term 'indeterminacy' in this context is not clear. Nor is 'foundational'.

If I ask you how you know something is the case, and begin the childish assault on everything you say, the endless, well, how do you know that?, one can ask how it is possible for those questions to even exist. One finds in this the indeterminacy of language's ability to speak the world with undeniable authority as the possibility of questions are always there, underlying what can be said about any given assertion. I say the snow is white, someone can say, what do you mean by snow? Notice how this would go. There is nothing that escapes this, and it tells us that meanings are bound up in this endless referencing, or "deference to" some other defining terms. But what happened to the world, the things that are there that are not language at all?

This is the beginning of understanding metaphysics. Religion stands on this same ground, but its concerns turn to the affectivity of our existence. I have tried to make this clear on other occasions btu I think Michel Henry makes the case in his paper called The Power of Revelation of Affectivity According to Heidegger. The discussion turns to the subject of fear in the context of existential anxiety, which is something, well, a bit difficlut to come to grips with. Anyway, this will likely sound a bit weird. He writes:

The discovery of fear is inauthentic, it takes place
according to the mode of Verfalien. By this we must understand that
fear guards against a being which it fears and not against its origin,
namely, against the world as such

Authenticity is the weird part. Forget about Verfalien. In an exchange with poster named value, I tried to make this idea clear: take Ahab's white whale from Moby Dick. Ahab pounds his fist on the table and screams: it is not the whale he strikes out at, but what is behind the whale, the transcendental source of the whale's evil (as it took Ahab's leg)! This is the kind of thing Henry has in mind, this unnamed and impossible existence, call it Kantian noumena of evil's source. If you are at all familiar with Kant, forget his rationalism and pure forms, for what is on the "other side" of our affairs is also the transcendental source of our horrors and blisses.

I won't elaborate further, but I think religion's metaphysics is to be discover right there in the nothing that responds to, not just our outrage at being thrown into an existence like this, full of sound and fury, if you will, but in the metaPHYSICS of the suffering. Suffering is not an opinion or an attitude, nor is happiness. These have an "origin" in the "world as such" as Henry puts it. Our ethics IS ethics, you can say. This is called moral realism in analytic circles.

[Lagayascienza]

I, too, found Mackie's book, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, very useful. But for the opposite, positive, reason. His error theory is, I think, the truth about ethics. A synthesis of Mackie's philosophical explanation, and insights from evolutionary psychology, provide a solution to the metaethical problem. This synthesis doesn't tell us what is right or wrong because nothing can do that except our own evolved, subjective, moral sensibilities. However, what this synthesis does do is explain where morality came from and what we are doing when we moralize. Although many refuse to accept it, this synthesis of evolutionary science and analytic philosophy provides us with truth about morality insofar as we are able to discern it. Not the final truth, because scientific answers are always provisional, but the best understanding we have thus far. I wonder whether a synthesis of philosophical reasoning and the empirical approach of science could together provide a best explanation religion? What I like about analytic philosophy and science is their ability to demystify.

[Hereandnow]

Lagayscienza wrote
Quine... thinks causality is the only wheel that rolls...but it doesn't roll at all, not one inch does causality get an object into the knowing mind of a perceiver.

I don't understand the objection to analytical ways of thinking. And if causality is a wheel that "doesn't roll at all", how do we explain the success of science?

Science rolls just fine, but this doesn't mean it is about this magical connectivity. It is about what works. Put it like this: there are no propositions "out there" and physics is essentially a body of rigorously constructed prepositions that express not what something IS in terms of its existence independent of the act of knowing, but what happens when an agency of perception encounters it, draws up systems that solve problems that are grounded in the conditions that emerge in the interface. Science is great at anticipating outcomes, and this is in everything we experience. walking down the street, for example, is a scientific undertaking: each step taken "confirms a theory" about sidewalks, the resistance they provide to the step, the successful negotiation of landing the foot, and so on. Impossible diss science.

But science is not philosophy. They are apples and oranges, as philosophy deals with what science presupposes, a world of the structures of antecedent givenness, which is odd sounding until gotten into, it and its themes of inquiry. These themes are not science's themes. Science doesn't ask, e.g., is the nature of the relation between perceivers and their objects like Kant did. Science doesn't take ethics and aesthetics seriously because it can't, for these are no observable. But all in all, science doesn't look to its own presuppositions. That is what divides the two.

[Sy Borg]

Sy Borg wrote
Science hardly dismisses epistemology. Rather, it constantly grapples with the vagaries of perception and the issues of insidious bias.

I would also say that science has a close relationship with metaphysics, which plays a role in hypotheses and it is the job of researchers to test and hopefully prove or disprove.

It seems to me that you are discarding a useful tool because you prefer a different tool. Why not use both?

I do use both, but mostly in a negative way do I find analytic thinking useful. Take one of my favorite books, John Mackie's Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. This book denies what I affirm, but in doing so, it enlightened me as to how what I do affirm would be argued. It deepened my own thinking, so I am grateful to Mackie for that, but Mackie had it all wrong about the nature of ethics. Same with those absurd Gettier problems. Put it this way: analytic philosophy tends to lean hard on logical and meaning, how one can make sense of a term given what the term can mean in a field of play. It adjusts ambiguities and tries to iron them out, so analytic arguments tend to be about other arguments and the way terms are making sense. This is why we associate logical positivism with it, emphasis being on clarity of meaning. Continental philosophy is about the world, which is why the term existentialism is associated with it. My objection: philosophy is supposed to be about the world and analytic thinking ends up being an empty spinning of wheels, and in this, it is a huge distraction to true philosophical enterprise, which is to open meaning at the threshold of metaphysics. Philosophy will one day take over religion.

Philosophy without metaphysics is like, if you will, clothing that isn't to be actually worn, or some such metaphor. Philosophy should be encountering the world's actualities and expanding understanding, not simply talking about how to trim down or inflate obscurities. But I will grant you, it can be useful. Rorty straddles the fence and pragmatism is aligned with Heidegger, and I learned something solid from its hypothetical deductive descritption of epistemology. I mean there are things helpful. Mackie, again, comes to mind.

Tell you what, you give me a paper you think is particularly meaningful, and I will read it and argue why don't go that way.

I arrived at philosophy via science, so I'd recommend Dawkins's The Selfish Gene, especially the chapters on game theory, eg. Memes : the new replicators and Nice guys finish first. The information is now somewhat dated due to later discoveries (esp. in epigenetics), but the dynamics are fascinating and enlightening.

I enjoy logical positivism but I would not be on a philosophy forum if I was a rank materialist. Unlike many, I do not discount metaphysics, eg. the possibility that our perceptions of actual space and time are skewed, of that other dimensions of reality exist etc. Still, like Lagaya, I enjoy science's capacity to clarify. One of the most enduring criticisms of the continental school is its tendency to be nebulous and impenetrable. As with quantum physics, I'm not sure too many have a handle on it.

One of my main concerns with all schools of philosophy, though, is the tendency to ask existential questions that can be answered by evolutionary biology or geobiology. It seems to me that examining the human condition without reference to the animal condition will result in rootless models.

Of course, all roots of knowledge are limited. That's what religion is about - the need for a solid foundation on which to build a life. Even science, no matter how deeply it has delved, runs out of explanations at the Big Bang, abiogenesis, the hard problem of consciousness, and so on. Apriori components - guesses - are unavoidable, and they will be biased, based on a simian sensory system.

In general, though, it seems to me that theists (and Continentals?) posit that it's turtles all the way down, while positivists posit that the turtles only emerged later on.

Theists will ask where the turtles came from and how turtles can just appear, if not already present in some form. Positivists will answer that turtles came from less-complex somewhat turtle-like entities.

Theists will ask why turtles should exist at all and positivists will say "not my brief".

[Count Lucanor]

Count Lucanor wrote
Again, what seems to be first, what is right before my eyes, is deceiving. If there's one essential relation between the observer and what's observed, it might be that one. Reality is an intricate, complex network of relations, while the observer is almost blind.

Hmmm But what are you getting at? "That one" that is right before my eyes? Intriguing. Care to elaborate?

I’m getting at exactly the point I already made. What you call the most important, the essential relation, that between the observer and the observed as it appears at first glance, is the least reliable one, thus it is not essential to comprehend. What’s behind this appearance, and most precisely, what it is hiding and we need to disclose, that’s what is more important. Mere contemplation and abstract theoretical reflection without actually getting our hands into the problem, doesn’t work. Praxis is the key. Religion, philosophy and science belong to that category of praxis.

[Lagayascienza]

Hereandnow, I’m interested in and want to learn more about phenomenology and the insights it can provide. I find it difficult to get a feel for it from SEP and other sources. Please consider the following:


There is an apparently ancient vessel, a bowl, before me. I have never seen this vessel or one like it before. I have a subjective first-person experience of this vessel. That is the given. No words, just a subjective, first-person experience of the vessel. Then what? Is there anything else I can know about this vessel and how would I go about finding out? How does a phenomenologist approach this question? How would an analytical philosopher approach this question? Following their different methods, would what they learn about the vessel be any different?

Now take the phenomenon of religion. In attempting to explain what this phenomenon, religion, is, how would the phenomenological and analytical approaches to the question differ? Would what they can learn be any different?

[Hereandnow]

Lagayscienza wrote
I, too, found Mackie's book, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, very useful. But for the opposite, positive, reason. His error theory is, I think, the truth about ethics. A synthesis of Mackie's philosophical explanation, and insights from evolutionary psychology, provide a solution to the metaethical problem. This synthesis doesn't tell us what is right or wrong because nothing can do that except our own evolved, subjective, moral sensibilities. However, what this synthesis does do is explain where morality came from and what we are doing when we moralize. Although many refuse to accept it, this synthesis of evolutionary science and analytic philosophy provides us with truth about morality insofar as we are able to discern it. Not the final truth, because scientific answers are always provisional, but the best understanding we have thus far. I wonder whether a synthesis of philosophical reasoning and the empirical approach of science could together provide a best explanation religion? What I like about analytic philosophy and science is their ability to demystify.

I would not use the term demystify, but prefer demythologize, implying an undoing of a lot of story telling that historically has substituted for responsible inquiry. But demystification suggests a dogmatic attitude, one that settles for nothing short of clarity in the fixation of belief, and this kind of thing is exactly what i find so troubling about the analytic approach, for the world we face in the bare intuitive presence of things does not bare the mark logical clarity. It is alogical in nature. Metaphysics is mostly negatively approached, apophatically, by setting aside the myths of the imagination, but also setting aside the bulk of convictions that have no relevance in disclosure, and this goes for all of those intricate arguments of Strawson, Putnam, Searle, Quine, and all the rest; not that they are not giving us well constructed theses, but that they are crowding thinking with these theses when what is needed is what Heidegger called gelassenheit, an openness to the world that is not controlled by rigorously insistent thought that wants to assimilate and "totalize" to use Levinas' term, everything, which means to reduce the world to the familiar terms of sense making. This way to go trivializes the world, and this is an important point to make, so I give bold print. It is the basis for Kierkegaard's saying, essentially, that the presumption of models of belief grounded exclusively in clarity simply replaces one myth with another. In the matter of religion and the discovery of its essence, it is the very definition of dogmatism, as I see it.