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[Hereandnow]

Lagayscienza wrote

I'm still reading Husserl’s Ideas in conjunction with Moran’s Introduction to Phenomenology. And I’ve done a sort of crash course over the last few days on Kant and his idealism. It's hard going but I think I get it.

I'm not yet totally convinced that the a priori/a posteriori split is real. That is, I'm not entirely convinced that all knowledge is not acquired a posteriori, through empirical discovery. I will enlarge later on why I have doubts. However, for now, I will just ask this: If it were true that all knowledge is acquired a posteriori, that is empirically, as a result of our living in the world, rather than by our plugging into some transcendental realm of the ideal, then where would that leave phenomenology? I hope this does not seem like a silly, annoying undergraduate question because I think a clear answer to it will help us understand phenomenology. So, to be clear, I'm not asking whether we it is true or not that there is this a priori/a posteriori split. I'm asking that we put that question aside for now and imagine that all knowledge is acquired empirically. What would that mean for phenomenology?

According to Kant, we are plugged into transcendence. One thing about reading Kant is, afterward, you ready have access to Heidegger and the rest, for they, while not simply expanding on what he said, follow through on the consequences of dealing explicitly with metaphysics. And following through like this leads to only one conclusion, as I see it, and it is something Heidegger would shy away from while not entirely disavow (he did, in his later writings, use terms like "destining" and he even made references to Eckhart and Buddhism), which is, this world that we live and breathe in , IS what metaphysics is all about. There is no way to disentangle this entrenched finitude of our cultural embeddedness, from the metaphysics that we encounter when we bring thought, any thought, to its, call it its determinative foundational indeterminacy, meaning you see this metaphyiscs IN, not behind or above (the abuse of metaphors), as an inherent part of going to the grocery store or mowing the lawn. This sounds a bit like Kierkegaard's Knight of Faith from his Fear and Trembling, which is a strange business and impossible to speak of, and herein lies the reason Wittgentein, much to the chagrin of analytic philosophers and their devotion to positivism, adored him. Existence, not to put too fine a point on it, is entirely heterogeneous to the understanding. They have nothing (?) in common, this sprained ankle of mine and the understanding's report on what sprained ankles are. This dramatic blue sky and what the meteorologist says. Or: the world is not what thought can say, because thought is not existence. It may HAVE existence, so to speak, for it is not nothing at all. But in this, the best thought can do is "point" to what is not thought, this pain in my ankle, and say, look! Note how philosophy brings us to it own end in this, as if to say, I can bring you to this impossible precipice, but there I leave you.
But who cares if one is "left" at the doorstep of eternity? To be at this place where philosophical thought has abandoned you is to be where I call (obviously inspired and even constituted by others) radical indeterminacy. You make any inquiry AT ALL, and follow through to the nature of whatever it is you are asking about, and you face indeterminacy. Even in the asking itself. So who cares, though? Indeterminacy leads the way to a comprehensive undoing of knowledge claims (in this mode of inquiry) but being left rudderless in eternity only matters because of the value dimension of our existence. WE matter, are important, care, I mean, the entire enterprise of beng a person places mattering at this very doorstep of "then nothing" (Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Henry, et al; they all go here. It is not material substance, for this is just a useful but vacuous and mis leading term that makes science into a metaphysics: quantitative entities are what IS, and the more one thinks like this, the more science dominates one's metaphysics--one's implicit metaphysics, for few actually think at all about this) and this caring of ours goes to the nature of value, the actual event of our caring, and here we are light years away from a thesis or a tractatus. We have entered the source of religion, which is the bare feels and actualities of our "being there". Concrete actualities face this radical indeterminacy. Now have the Real, the realest of reals, not scientific abstractions.

But I have wandered pretty far off course. I will leave it all the same. You might find it interesting. So Kant and where this leaves phenomenology: It is important to keep in mind that phenomenology is essentially descriptive, so where this leaves phenomenology is really a question about where does Kant meet the essential descriptive feature of the world? You have to ask, what is empirical knowledge? This is where Kant begins. I observe a car passing by, now give this a Kantian analysis: What do I mean by 'car' and how do I know it is passing and what does it mean to pass by, and so on? Since this is not an empirical inquiry, but a phenomenological inquiry about an empirical judgment, then the discussion is not going to be about cars, where they were made, what the technology is, and the rest. I ti s going to be about what is presupposed by the car being there, understood to be a car. As they say, it is a move by extrapolation: what has to be the case given what is the case before our eyes? Saying there is a car is a knowledge claim, which is I know there is a car (can you imagine saying there is a car without knowing, belief and justification?), so the essential ontology of there being a car there goes to the knowledge claim, and ALL empirical ontologies are knowledge claims, and since a knowledge claim is essential for an ontology, epistemology and ontology are one. This is the way I put it. To say X is essential for Y, means that if you remove X then Y is gone as well. Oxygen is essential for saying what air is; therefore, oxygen is part of what air IS (assuming the familiar empirical analytic). One has to look at the world like this: it IS a body of knowledge claims. The logic of this is not assailable. And it is categorically confirmed whenever one starts asking simple questions, like how does anything out there get in here? I repeat this because it is instantly graspable, not part of some impossibly esoteric argument full of twists and turns of discursivity.

So the empirical claim rests of a foundation of transcendence. How so? This is Kant's point. Look to the form of the knowledge claim inherent in saying mundane things, and you find things ABOUT or IN the car itself (because the car cannot be disentangled from the knowledge claim), that do not issue from empirical observations, namely, the structure of the claim qua claim. This moves to talk about the possiblity of synthetic apriori propositions. Lots of way to approach this, but one here: what is in car that is apriori? How about causality? I know the any and all empirical worldly conditions assume causality, as the car moves, the combustion engine provides the cause for the movement; Ah, but causality is apodictic! This is not about something like gravity (putting Einstein aside for now), say, such that it is easy to imagine objects moving away from the earth. One cannot even imagine a causeless movement. This is intuitive, like logic itself; it IS the logic of movement itself. How is it possible to say anything about the thing s in the world like this car, that is supposed to only belong to the principles of logicality?

This is Kant in a thumbnail. Obviously there are tons more, but this essential idea. A car? How is knowledge possible, so when I see a car, I know it is a car. THere must be a principle of "carness" that allows the particular to be know under a general heading.

Take a look at what William Richardson says on Heidegger and Kant (Richardson was one of the very few Heidegger felt understood him. He said upon upon reading his Phenomenology through Thought, ""Who is this guy? So many have gotten me wrong, but here is someone who has gotten me right-and he's an AMERICAN! How is that possible?"):

The process of human knowledge, then, involves the intimate
correlation of (singular) intuition and (universalizing) thought.
But it is of cardinal importance to realize (and Heidegger insists
upon it) that the primacy in the process of knowing belongs to
intuition: thought plays a subordinate role - it is a means to
intuition.

The "singular" intuition is my seeing the car, at time T, as they say. Right there, in the empirical moment, one encounters the straight giveneness of an affair. The universalizing thought? Well, this comes from the basic analysis: to know it is a car, is to know the general principle of cars, so when I see one I know it is a particular that beongs to a "principle" of carness. That is how I know this is a car and that is a car. There must be some general idea in the judgment.

[Hereandnow]

Lagayscienza wrote

As well as my readings in (and about) Husserl' transcendental-phenomenology, I've been delving into the Oxford Handbook of Skepticism. I've also been looking onto the a priori/a posteriori, the analytic/synthetic and the necessary/contingent distinctions. I’d like to take phenomenology seriously, but the skeptic monkey on my shoulder won’t leave off. It seems to me that these distinctions, the a priori/a posteriori etcetera, are important if I am to understand how/whether/why a transcendental realm of necessary truths could/must exist and how we would have epistemic access to it. Does phenomenology depends on this realm? I'm not sure about Heidegger and the rest who developed their own versions of phenomenology after Husserl but, as far as I can tell, it seems to be required for Husserl. But I may be misunderstanding him with all his talk of essence and spirit. He's so hard to understand! One minute he's objective/scientific the next he's subjective/transcendental/spiritual.

It is not that the transcendental realm of necessary truths exists. What makes the term transcendental applicable is that it issues from something that is not identifiable. Kant is not Plato. What it, or things are in themselves cannot be stated.

If you could cite the places where he refers to essence and spirit I would like to take a look. Kant takes judgments made in ordinary affairs and finds things that should be there in referring to objects. Take Wittgenstein's observation that in physics, an object cannot travel at two different speeds at once or that two colors cannot occupy the same space. This seems rather obvious, but note, these are not derived from experience, as if we observed some regularity in occurrences, for it is logic that tells us these are not possible. He writes:

Just as the only necessity that exists
is logical necessity, so too the only impos
sibility that exists is logical impossibility.
For example, the simultaneous pres
ence of two colours at the same place in
the visual field is impossible, in fact log
ically impossible, since it is ruled out by
the logical structure of colour.
Let us think how this contradiction ap
pears in physics: more or less as follows—
a particle cannot have two velocities at
the same time; that is to say, it cannot be
in two places at the same time; that is to
say, particles that are in different places
at the same time cannot be identical.

He gets this from Kant's Transcendental Aesthetic and his categories. Witt, in this work, was very Kantian, observing that in the world of mundane things and judgment, there are these logical connections and rules. Consider: when you look around the room where you are sitting, you spontaneously engage in knowledge claims inherent in the familiarity of your passing gaze. These claims are IN the knowledge you bring to the objects, evidenced by the outright impossibility, that is, the contradictory nature, of their being false, like an object moving all by itself. Why is the prohibition of "that out there" moving by itself backed by the kind of authority found only in logic? There is no logic "out there". Modus ponens does not hover around the bushes and clouds. I am the source of this. You have got to give Kant his due: the only way to explain this is via the contribution we make in the logical transaction of the perceptual encounter. But what about space and time? These, too, are apriori, that is, they posses the insistence of logic. So much for physics' law of inertia, say, being descriptive of objective affairs. This law is a restating of the law of causality, and causality is apriori (necessary and universally true).

See Kant on synthetic and analytic judgments. The former are day to day empirical thinking, like it is going to rain today or really almost anything you can think of. Accidental or contingent truths, so called, because they are not true by necessity. Logic is driven by necessity, but affairs in the world are not. Analytic truths are tautological.

The way Kant talks about this is in the question, how are synthetic apriori judgments possible, that is, how can a judgment about my lamp and what it does, can do, will do, be bound to laws of logic? My judgment that this lamp cannot move unless acted on is NOT an empirical judgment. It is a logical judgment. Yet it applies to objects that are not me. This is the idea. Kant calls this the ideality of our objective world for space and time are apriori structures of experience, hence transcendental idealism. There is nothing in logic that stops my lamp from turning into a different color or from leaping off the table. It COULD do this and logic wouldn't flinch, so it is, as they say, logically possible for it to do this and an infinite number of possible things. But what it cannot do by necessity, is move by itself.

Once you get into Kant, he can be so interesting. But tell me about where he talks about matters that are confusing. I would be interested to se where this is unclear.

[Lagayascienza]

Thanks for your responses, Hereandnow. It's going to take some time for me to digest Kant’s Critique. I'll let you know if there are parts I just can't fathom. Thanks for the offer. So far, I've found Kant easier to read than Husserl.

A lot of work has been done post-Kant on the a priori/a posteriori, the analytic/synthetic and the necessary/contingent distinctions that I will need to incorporate. Until I finish Kant, Ideas1, Moran, etc, I won’t be in a position to judge phenomenology. What I can say, however, is that nothing has sparked my philosophical interest more than my introduction to Husserl and phenomenology. So thanks for that, too.

[Lagayascienza]

I think I made something of a breakthrough in my study of phenomenology today!

I realized that I've been thinking about it all wrong. I’ve had to almost knock myself on the head to force myself out of the habit of looking at consciousness in the traditional way. I've had to obliterate from my mind (albeit with only fleeting success) the idea of consciousness as happening in the Cartesian theatre whereby consciousness is separate from the things that one becomes conscious of. If I’ve understood it right, according to phenomenology, experiences are intuitively grasped and analyzable in their essence a priori – not as empirical facts. I’ve had to rejig my mind in order to grasp that consciousness does not start happening until it is conscious of something, even if the object intended is only a thought. Consciousness and the object intended are one.

This has not been easy for my old mind, which has been schooled in the analytic/scientific tradition, to grasp. And it is what I’ve struggled with in my reading of phenomenology heretofore. Now I may be able to reject (at least temporarily from time to time) the representational account of knowledge which sees units of knowledge as if they were like objects is a box. All this has been exceedingly difficult for me. But I think I’m getting there at last. I'm about a quarter of the way through Husserl's Ideas 1. I had to leave it for a couple of days to read Moran's Introduction to Phenomenology in order achieve my little breakthrough and now I think I'll be able to get a better handle on Husserl.

And I think that I will now be able to more easily understand what you are saying, Hereandnow and I might even be able, eventually, to understand what a phenomenological account of religion would look like.

Please don't hesitate to tell me if you think I still haven't got it.

[Sculptor1]

Thanks for your responses, Hereandnow. It's going to take some time for me to digest Kant’s Critique. I'll let you know if there are parts I just can't fathom. Thanks for the offer. So far, I've found Kant easier to read than Husserl.

A lot of work has been done post-Kant on the a priori/a posteriori, the analytic/synthetic and the necessary/contingent distinctions that I will need to incorporate. Until I finish Kant, Ideas1, Moran, etc, I won’t be in a position to judge phenomenology. What I can say, however, is that nothing has sparked my philosophical interest more than my introduction to Husserl and phenomenology. So thanks for that, too.

I think Phenomenology a very useful way of unpacking the desolate view that science can provide. Instead of seeing every thing in terms of undelying laws and abstracted ideas of cause and effect, in a sense phenomenology takes a more profound dive into empirical truth. Rather than use human experience as a way to mine it away for its elements, it take the raw ore and accepts that has what people take as real.
In this way it places human experience front and centre in its own terms and it laid the way for existentialism.
Its a general approach that can be applied across the other disiplines. I found it useful in archaeology. Psychological thinking becomes more humanly responsive.

[Lagayascienza]

I think Phenomenology a very useful way of unpacking the desolate view that science can provide. Instead of seeing every thing in terms of undelying laws and abstracted ideas of cause and effect, in a sense phenomenology takes a more profound dive into empirical truth. Rather than use human experience as a way to mine it away for its elements, it take the raw ore and accepts that has what people take as real.
In this way it places human experience front and centre in its own terms and it laid the way for existentialism.
Its a general approach that can be applied across the other disiplines. I found it useful in archaeology. Psychological thinking becomes more humanly responsive.

Yes, I think that's right, Sculpter1. And it's not as if a phenomenological view need get in the way of the quantitative stuff science must do. I now think they can complement/inform each other.

[Sculptor1]

I think I made something of a breakthrough in my study of phenomenology today!

I realized that I've been thinking about it all wrong. I’ve had to almost knock myself on the head to force myself out of the habit of looking at consciousness in the traditional way. I've had to obliterate from my mind (albeit with only fleeting success) the idea of consciousness as happening in the Cartesian theatre whereby consciousness is separate from the things that one becomes conscious of. If I’ve understood it right, according to phenomenology, experiences are intuitively grasped and analyzable in their essence a priori – not as empirical facts. I’ve had to rejig my mind in order to grasp that consciousness does not start happening until it is conscious of something, even if the object intended is only a thought. Consciousness and the object intended are one.

This has not been easy for my old mind, which has been schooled in the analytic/scientific tradition, to grasp. And it is what I’ve struggled with in my reading of phenomenology heretofore.

You are not wrong - but still being too analytical I think.
The nature of what is empirical changes. Human experience is more reactive and anticipates the meanings we have for things. You can think of it in terms of essence and appearance.
Heidegger has this idea of "ready to hand" and "near at hand". The familiar become things we never think about, as they are integrated into our internal world. New and unfailiar things are not "ready to hand" and require understanding. But its not an analysis in a formal sense. We are not evolved to that, we have to learn formal ways of understanding but rarely do. Psychologist can devise ways to exploit this.
The idea of "Black Friday" is a thing we now all understand as the time we think about buying something, but rarely think that such a thing is a pure device to manipulate us. It's about unknown knows. Things we do not realise that we accept uncritically.

Now I may be able to reject (at least temporarily from time to time) the representational account of knowledge which sees units of knowledge as if they were like objects is a box. All this has been exceedingly difficult for me. But I think I’m getting there at last. I'm about a quarter of the way through Husserl's Ideas 1. I had to leave it for a couple of days to read Moran's Introduction to Phenomenology in order achieve my little breakthrough and now I think I'll be able to get a better handle on Husserl.

And I think that I will now be able to more easily understand what you are saying, Hereandnow and I might even be able, eventually, to understand what a phenomenological account of religion would look like.

Please don't hesitate to tell me if you think I still haven't got it.

[Sculptor1]

I think Phenomenology a very useful way of unpacking the desolate view that science can provide. Instead of seeing every thing in terms of undelying laws and abstracted ideas of cause and effect, in a sense phenomenology takes a more profound dive into empirical truth. Rather than use human experience as a way to mine it away for its elements, it take the raw ore and accepts that has what people take as real.
In this way it places human experience front and centre in its own terms and it laid the way for existentialism.
Its a general approach that can be applied across the other disiplines. I found it useful in archaeology. Psychological thinking becomes more humanly responsive.

Yes, I think that's right, Sculpter1. And it's not as if a phenomenological view need get in the way of the quantitative stuff science must do. I now think they can complement/inform each other.

Yes. It's not anti-science. But there is not doubt that science can interpret things is absurd ways.
A biologist might feel compelled to see what I am doing right this second in terms of survial and fittness: maximising so sort of long term life plan.
But people just do stuff all the time. People do not have to be Darwinian machines - maybe I'm just wating time, and typing stuff?

[Lagayascienza]

Yes, or course. As fascinating as they may be, life's not just about physics, chemistry biology...

I don't think philosophizing has anything to do with my fitness as an organism - especially not at my age, LOL. It's just fun. Makes retirement more interesting.

[Hereandnow]

Lagayscienza wrote

Consciousness and the object intended are one.

Exclamation point! But not to forget, I am not my cat, or whatever that object is. I prefer Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently: everything is connected. And you likely know that quantum theory (which is mostly vague to me) is moving closer to this affirmation when it announces that the object is transformed by the perceptual act that encounters it. One could speculate that this will make, one day, the radical move toward a merging of science and phenomenology (the "science " of phenomena, Husserl insists). Will onw day science be able to "objectively observe" with instrumentality that knowledge relationship between us and the world? After all, it is not being said here that we do not have access to objects because we are solipsistically trapped in a world of ideas and phenomena. Rather, this access is affirmed. Phenomenology is simply telling us that in order for this to be possible, we have to conceive of how this is possible. A empirical science's causality is most emphatically not epistemic, something I repeat perhaps tiresomely (but it is far easier and more direct than Kant's questions of synthetic apriority).

So what happens to our foundational knowledge about the world when science has to yield to this priority of phenomenology, and the eidetic structure, the essence, to use Husserl's jargon, that tells us what something IS, this ideational nexus that is shown in the analysis of this consciousness being OF something, when this structure that exists necessarily, because after all, we DO know things, becomes center stage for ontology? Heidegger says this is inherently interpretative and so the foundation of all things before us has its final resting place for ontology in hermeneutics: to speak at all about something is to be in a region of thought that takes up such a thing. I approach a shovel and I know prior to this occasion all about shovels in a manifold of possibilities because I have an education (classroom or otherwise implicit) that revealed to me the way my culture and its language understands shovels, and this culture itself has a history that goes back to Indo-European origins, or, the Greeks! when it comes to philosophy. Both Husserl and Heidegger are Greeks, so to speak, because they erect their views out of a tradition that began with the Greeks and the presocratics (see Heidegger's Parmenides, and others), and Heidegger went to the Greek language for a renewal of metaphysics, to free it from the murky waters of religious and technology. Anyway, the shovel: "shovelness" is complicated; very, considering all the possibilities, the "potentiality of possiblities" as Heidegger put it. But even time and space are no longer Cartesian or even Kantian. When you read Heidegger, if you're like me, it will be a child in a candy shop, especially after Kant and Husserl. The whole notion of things "out there" is turned on its head, but then, returned to their former position (out thereness is no illusion) but profoundly reconstrued.

Take a look at a starry night. According to a Cartesian dualist view, or a material scientist's view, you are starring at the inside of your cranium (yes, science affirms objects in a world outside of the brain; but then, they are also denied this very simple axiom for all their discovery because, again causality does not have an escape route for knowledge). An interesting way to look at it, if you ask me, for I am convinced this is true. There is no question of consciousness' connection to the brain; foolish to deny it, and when I try to understand what our finitude is, this wall of disconnectivity from infinity that intuitively jolts the inquiring, if you will, soul (take such a term figuratively if you like. My thinking, though, is evolving, and I lean toward Kierkegaard more and more), has a palpable presence. Infinity, handled phenomenologically, has actual presence. If Husserl is in the vicinity of being right, then consciousness is not IN the brain, but the brain is IN consciousness, and this is taking weird liberties with the terms that have to be at once retracted and examined: The object is not denied, but the primacy of givenness releases us from the primacy of physicality, for to know and perceive BEGINS with the noematic, not the physical, so calling something physical is taking up the world "as" something (which is where Heidegger draws from Husserl), and this taking up is in the relation, making physicality something that is almost derivative of noema. Husserl thought he was describing actuality of pure givenness, Heidegger thought, I think I said earlier, that Husserl was trying to walk on water: this taking something AS a tree or a cat, stands as an openness to being (see his use of the Greek term alethea, knoweldge as disclosure or unhiddeness) through these beings by way of language.

But see how ethics is left abandoned to interpretation, as well. One must face an analysis of ethics based solely on what is there, in in world. My view is that while we speak through the interpretative medium of language and its historically derived fountain of possibilities, the "stuff" of ethics is the actualities of suffering, joy and all of that value dimension of our existence, and this is palpably THERE, itself prior to ontology! What does that mean, prior to ontology? Ontology is what can be said. If it cannot be said at all, then it simply never appears to us, for to appear is to be understood----a Kantian idea that survives. One is not like an infant in a world of "blooming and buzzing". True spontaneity in perception, is this possible? A big issue: if language is an interpretative medium, can one, IN the medium, acknowledge what is outside of it? This is where ethics leads us, for pain is not an interpretation of pain. Language takes up the world, but the world is not language. It is there, but prior to, that is, presupposed by ontology. It is the presupposition of the presuppositions of science and the everyday world that take inquiry to the impossible beyond.

Reading Caputo's Radical Hermeneutics and his Tears and Prayers of Derrida can make for strange enlightenment. Wittgenstein was right: the world is mystical. The girl's suffering we discussed, radicalizes everything in ways we cannot fathom, for the issue of her suffering is preontological.

A bit over the top, I know.

[Lagayascienza]

Consciousness and the object intended are one.

Exclamation point! But not to forget, I am not my cat, or whatever that object is. I prefer Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently: everything is connected. And you likely know that quantum theory (which is mostly vague to me) is moving closer to this affirmation when it announces that the object is transformed by the perceptual act that encounters it. One could speculate that this will make, one day, the radical move toward a merging of science and phenomenology (the "science " of phenomena, Husserl insists). Will onw day science be able to "objectively observe" with instrumentality that knowledge relationship between us and the world? After all, it is not being said here that we do not have access to objects because we are solipsistically trapped in a world of ideas and phenomena. Rather, this access is affirmed. Phenomenology is simply telling us that in order for this to be possible, we have to conceive of how this is possible. A empirical science's causality is most emphatically not epistemic, something I repeat perhaps tiresomely (but it is far easier and more direct than Kant's questions of synthetic apriority).

I mentioned in another thread how phenomenology, which sees raw, subjective consciousness as a priori, ontological, foundational, might help atheists in their quest for the "spiritual" which need not be monopolised by religion. Or is this stretching a long bow?

So what happens to our foundational knowledge about the world when science has to yield to this priority of phenomenology,

I'm not sure that science has to "yield" to phenomenology. I think they are different ways of apprehending what's "out there". We will always need the quantitative methods of science otherwise it could not progress. I mean, phenomenology is not going to get us to Mars and back. But I do now think that phenomenology is getting at something important.

[Count Lucanor]

Count Lucanor wrote

Epistemology and ontology are branches of philosophy. Phenomenalists want to dismiss ontology in favor of the supremacy of epistemology (a particular part of it concerned with the noetic moment of apprehension), so they’ll say basically that philosophy is all about epistemology. So I took your statement and gave epistemology its proper place.

Look closer: ask, "what is ontology?" Can you, in good faith, say that what it means to be a thing at all can be disentangled from the very cognition that conceives it? I mean, it is pure folly to even suggest such a thing. There is no argument here, and analytic philosophers worth their ink already know this.

But I wonder, who has suggested that ontology can be disentangled from the very cognition that conceives it? What's your point there? I have made statements that promote the view that ontology and epistemology are a unity within philosophy. What I have rejected is the supremacy of epistemology, which makes ontology its subordinate or dismisses it altogether.

Phenomenologists, of course, do not want to dismiss ontology; Heidegger's whole thesis is about just this examination of what the question of ontology really means.

Sure, but Heidegger stands on the shoulders of the idealists that came before him. When he tackles ontology, it already implies the phenomenical approach that started with Kant and was endorsed by Husserl. Heidegger is then more interested in the meaning of being, rather than in being itself. Dasein is the epistemological being, the being that knows "being there".

But to actually be in good faith, one has to first make the move to an absolute simplicity. What is there is causality that makes for an epistemology? How do I know that I am at a rock bottom simplicity here? First, there is the simplicity of the analysis, which is absolutely authoritative: you simply cannot make a naturalistic epistemology work. Try it, sitting there, observing the computer, asking how it actually works. This is why Wittgenstein had to make it central to his Tractatus the transcendence of logic (and the world and value). Second, there is the more elaborate contexts of analysis of even the most famous analytic philosophers, like Quine. I am reading Christopher Hookway's Quine: Language, Experience and Reality, and you know, Quine is a naturalist all the way through, which simply means physics is the bottom line for him in making responsible knowledge claims, and Hookway confesses to recognizing "that the intentional content of my own psychological states is subject to indeterminacy: semantical and intentional phenomena cannot be incorporated within the science of nature." But most obviously, science itself BEGINS with just this semantical phenomena! There is no "outside" of the very semantics that conceives it, "thinks" about it, and so on.

This is pure Husserl's phenomenological reduction, I guess. It pretends to destroy the distinction between object and consciousness of objects, concerned as he is only with "a theory of knowledge", which of course rests heavily on the doctrine that mind structures reality. The great enemy has to be science, to which Husserl directs his critiques in the form of disputes against the underlying psychological assumptions of perception and subsequent logical rationalizations. The problem is: there's more than this in scientific endeavors, so, the "purely philosophical" position that Husserl takes implies total rejection of science, or better said, the implied realism in science. Bhaskar, along with other modern realists, was crystal-clear about the incompatibilty between science and epistemic correlationism: objects must be completely independent of humans for scientific practice to be intelligible. That makes Husserl's position, which still pretends to leave its legitimacy untouched, absurd. The reason for this, obviously, is that he is really after naturalism, because...well, we know where that is going.

No, the question is not a choice between what seems to be over there (the world with objects) or what is over here (the subject). It’s a false dilemma. The question is how can I guarantee from here, from my subjectivity, that what seems to be over there, is actually there.

Hmmm, you can unpack this just as well as I can. Guarantee?? You mean, confirm belief, which goes to justification, it asks about the terms of justification of S knows P. So the "false dilemma" refers to the lemma S and lemma P and you are assuming that to treat them as a proclematic is just false. How is this in any way more than simply saying, well, let's just not look at this because it doesn't make prima facie sense? Look, a brain here and a tree there relation is NOT an unreasonable basis for inquiry. It is glaringly present in its defiance of common sense. "In your face" as they say.

I so sympathize. But you cannot be ad hoc about this, just dismissing something because it is hard to think about. Quine himself had to admit the foundational indeterminacy of our existence, but I really don't think about Quine because he very articulately misses what this means. Like Heidegger or Husserl, great thinkers find themselves transfixed by their own genius.

It's actually the opposite: it is for phenomenologists that things don't make make prima facie sense, so they quit. But a realism supported by science is not prima facie, it goes to justification, right, but it's a lenghty road to get there, besides requiring going back and forth, systematically.

big part of natural sciences finds quantitative relations that comprise deterministic systems. Another part of it, biology, is not satisfied with that, but with the level of complexity that emerges from quantitative relations. Evolution of organisms, ecological systems, human societies, they are not objects of science by purely quantitative measures. But even if they were, how does that eliminate metaphysics from our investigative tools? How does that give any supremacy to epistemology? The part of epistemology that phenomenology cares about doesn’t really get into the structures of our mind, it merely speculates with the possible consequences of mind acting as the sole structurer of reality.

But the idea you are responding to is not about differences between more and less deterministically grounded statements in science. The claim here is more broadly about the very nature of science itself, and this has to do with knowledge claims in general. Science deals with specific disciplines, each with their own language and insights. Phenomenology is just this: a "science" that deals with phenomena as the foundational basis for discussing human existence at the most basic level on inquiry. Just as a biological specialist might understand something like, "the increase in systemic or local amyloid deposition with age can lead to organ dysfunction. The deposited amyloid is a relatively insoluble beta-fibrillar protein with stable structures that need to be broken down"; so a contemporary phenomenologist would understand a post Heideggerian like Derrida in, "This affirmation then determines the non-center otherwise than as loss of the center. And it plays the game without security. For there is a sure freeplay: that which is limited to the substitution of given and existing, present, pieces. In absolute chance, affirmation also surrenders itself to genetic indetermination, to the seminal adventure of the trace."

The point is that once one starts actually reading phenomenology, one begins to see what it is saying. What Derrida is saying in his Structure, Sign and Play is miles away from empirical science, and on the threshold of religion. Now, since this is philosophy, the biologist's jargon is, upon investigation into what is presupposed by its terms and ideas, going to end up, in a phenomenological reduction, facing Derrida. Not just disciplined science, but all thought period! has to deal with Derrida, who is not going address Alzheimer's disease, but the possibility of conceiving of this at all.

But again, undermining science, its very nature itself, including its necessary realism, has the implication that we are simply hallucinating. The phenomenalist workaround for this is simply absurd.

But you keep saying that such connectivity is only an epistemological problem, something about how thinking connects thinking and being, but actually it is also about what is connected and what there actually is that enables such connection, in other words, how being allows thinking.

Well, you sound like Heidegger. You should realize that ontology are essentially the same thing, and this explains why it is impossible to make a claim in ontology without justification. A claim is inherently justificatory. This doesn't mean we can't talk about them separately at all; of course, what it means to think at all is be categorical and world. I go on about this epistemic "distance" between observer and observed because it is the most accessible and irresistible way to make the idea clear because it isn't some long, discursive argument. Straight forward and intuitive it is, that this relation is epistemically impossible. Being, therefore, has to be conceived accordingly.

How being allows thinking. Begs the question: what do you mean by being?

But Heidegger means "being" as a verb, as the experience of being, the meaning of it, not as the thing that actually is. It's all about the notion of not having access, but that's an ontological claim, which as you said, requires justification. When you look at Husserl's and Heidegger's justifications, they are disputable, and they have been disputed.

One simply does not abandon science and moves on to philosophy, or vice versa. When one engages with the relationship between thinking and being, one cannot ignore a discipline that is committed to one stance on that relationship, not without despising it altogether. Science has a philosophical foundation, both ontological and epistemological, so you’re stuck with it when you start getting into the big inquiries. The problem with idealist phenomenology is its strict focus on what it assumes is the only thing we have access to: the correlation, not the terms of it. This gives a distorted view, both of thinking and being.

Causality might be a way humans reconstruct conceptually the key relationships between objects, in that sense it could be considered a way in which reality conforms to mind, but the properties themselves are, if the realism of science is not rejected, mind-independent, objective.

Abandon science? No more than one abandons biology to do computer science. They are just thematically very different. Science asks what is this anomaly in oceanic currents, say; phenomenology asks about what it means to have a thought about a thing at all. Of course, to ask such a thing, one has to look at thoughts and what they are, and this means looking at the contextual nature of thoughts as they address particular issues, so science is not ignored, but recontextualized in a different inquiry, just as to speak as a physicist does is not to dismiss what a car salesperson does. It just looks at what is presupposed when one sells cars, asking about the nature of the material existence of a car or a salesperson in terms of its more basic dynamics. Such questions are presupposed when we talk about what they are in the usual way. Phenomenology (philosophy) asks of the physicist, what is presupposed in your knowledge claims? And THIS leads to discussions about epistemology and ontology. This is why physics has qua physics little to say about philosophy. Apples and oranges.

Yes, that's just the same as dismissing science altogether. Husserl goes directly against science, it's a key philosophical and foundational issue for him, not just another theme. Either apples or oranges, if you go for oranges, apples are out of the picture. They are not "recontextualized" oranges.

Frankly, I don't even know what mind-independent COULD mean. Perhaps you could tell me how this works, but not to forget, the telling itself is not an event that is mind independent.

If it helps, you can think of it as human-independent. Not the telling, which has to be human, but that which is pointed at as actually existing, objectively, as a thing in itself, independently of the human in itself.

I don’t see where is such “reductive attempt”. To say that religion is a social phenomenon implies inserting it on a broader domain, the human domain. That is not a reductive operation, just the reaffirmation of the concrete conditions of existence of religion, from which it cannot be separated. It is a cultural practice, and as such, with all its contingencies, a dimension of the belief system. The concept of religion is, however, one that generalizes the common properties of certain practices in human communities. Undoubtedly, the social always sends us to the actual lives of the humans that constitute it and to the determining factors of their behavior, including biology, psychology and the environment, all of which can be summed up with the label of “the human condition”. So, we don’t move in or out of the social analysis to move in or out of the existential one: they intertwine. There’s a place in the analysis of religion for human suffering, an important one, Marx acknowledges it in his famous statement, but it does not refer to universal, unchanging, non-historical essences, unaffected by social conditions.

Look at it like this: when you think at all, you are being "reductive" which simply means that the totality of what could be said is reduced to what is thematically allowed. You can't talk about plate tectonics and scuba diving at the same time, UNLESS, that is, you choose to do so in which case you would entering a special zone of associated meanings with new boundaries of relevance, but the idea is that when you think of anything in particular you are in an implcit reduction. We do this all the time, constantly, really. The phenomenological reduction is the same thing, so the question is, what is being reduced?

Not exactly the same thing. The phenomenalists are looking for the universal, unchanging, non-historical essences, supposedly deduced from the simple contemplative efforts of idealist philosophy. The real, the concrete, appears as completely accesory, almost a hallucination, a byproduct of
the belief in having access to noumena.

The totality is everything in the potentiality of possibilities, so here, we bracket off what does not belong to the phenomenon qua phenomenon, dismiss what is not the phenomenon, and acknowledge the existential residua. Of course, there is no escaping the totality entirely (a point that goes directly to the essence of religion, but for now....), and this totality is all inherently phenomenological to begin with, for what isn't? What isn't? Our thinking there really are such things as taxes! That is what isn't. Or General Motors, or snow mobiles. Look, we live in a body of complex nomenclature and pragmatics, and we take all this very seriously, but analysis shows that this body of affairs (what Kierkegaard calls inheritance of the race), this culture of dealings with the world, is a construct. Phenomenology seeks the underlying foundation for this which is beyond aporia, or Cartesian doubt.

But if everything is a construct, it is someone's construct, and that construction includes the other beings that appear to construct within that someone's construction. The phenomenological totality shows other human beings as phenomena and as such they don't get justified in their real existence, mere nomenclature that does not justify either to talk about "we" or "they". Phenomenology ends up, just the same as all its philosophical predecessors, in solipsism.

I am claiming religion's essence is twofold: ethics/value/aesthetics---all the same thing, says Wittgenstein. Why? Because they are reducible to value, the broad term encompassing a dimension of our existence that includes the good and bad of experiences and the right and wrong of actions at the basic level of analysis. Value is, if you will, the engine that "runs" ethics and aesthetics. Wittgenstein held that value is transcendental: it is in the givenness of the world, and is a nonsense word (see his Lecture on Ethics) because one cannot speak the world. One cannot speak existence qua existence for it has no contextual Archimedean point to "leverage" meaningful discussion, so to speak. It is, in Kierkegaard's words, it own presupposition. Proof lies in the pudding: examine a painful event you are having. What is the pain? It is like asking what the color yellow is. It is just "there" and this is really the plain spoken way to approach phenomenology.

That's just an example of the search for the universal, unchanging, non-historical essences behind the objects of experience, which is, interestingly, a sort of realism, but an unjustified realism, supported only by a purely contemplative and incoherent philosophical reflection that crashes with its own doctrines. Since those objects are not concrete actualities, but pure constructions of a mind, what would be the point of talking about the social as real, or religion as a real practice of real subjects? It would be the essence of what exactly? What is meant by "our existence"? Isn't it the world too, that which we cannot speak? It is there, sure, but what justifies religion being there that is not included within the justification itself? The essence becomes another construction and you end up with nothing but the construction, without this having any foundation.

Einstein didn’t just get away with unfalsifiable speculations, as phenomenalists do. Things do not “transpose into a mind”, minds are actually brains, which are things, too, so there’s nothing mysterious or mystical about our senses and minds connecting with the world.

A metaphysics needs not to be inferred from science, but it can be supported by science. Materialism is the ontological base of science. Science without materialism becomes nonsense and ontological materialism without science becomes a merely speculative endeavor.

Yes, good Count, but you have to do more than SAY it is unfalsifiable speculation. I mean, first, this is self contradictory. But never mind. Explain this. I won't do all your work for you. Just tell me. No reason to keep this a secret. How does a simple knowledge relationship work according to philosophical materialist assumptions? In good faith! Not just throwing stones.

Knowledge relationships? OK, it's fun. Regardless of the nature or "essence" of the world and that which "knows", I mean, with independence of having a realist or antirealist philosophical stance, it cannot be disputed that there's something that knows, the subject, and something that is known, the objects or contents of our experience. Now, if you want to dispute that, I'm all ears. To say that "there is something", that an object "is there", means that it exists, which could be just the same as saying "the subject has the experience" of that thing that is claimed to be there, without any commitment to a "thing in itself". So, right off the bat, we have the knower, the known and the knowing, all as experience, all as existent, all being there. That's the basic template, which does not clash with a phenomenological approach. Now, we can begin to look at some interesting things that show up within the experience: the known includes the objects that appear exerting influence and determining other objects. It also includes other knowers and other knowing from their part, which also implies that the knower is known back, and that the knowers are, at the same time, the known. All of this constitute what we may call "the world" that the subject experiences. But there's something else: the knowers are not mute, they utter (or at least appear to utter) their knowledge of the knowers, the known and the knowing. The content of these utterances implies that there are other experiences, other knowledge, that is independent of our own and to which we have no access to. Now, there are only two attitudes that the subject can adopt when facing this "world", as it appears configured before his eyes: 1) to assume that this "reality" is entirely structured by his own mind. There's no point in investigating anything of it, because there's no knowable, intelligible world to start with, only the structure of the subject's own mind, the only mind that could exist. Since this reality appears as if talking back to him, as if it were independent, as if there were things outside of his experience, the structure of that mind can only make sense as hallucination, a dream at best. Or 2) To assume that this "reality" has a structure of its own, an intrinsic nature that is not only decodable, interpretable, intelligible, but that also requires the participation of other subjects to figure out how it works, by contributing with the telling of their own knowledge and experiences. This second attitude is the only one that allows for the establishment of philosophy and science, it's the only one that allows the world to be intelligible.

What you call the epistemic problem is merely the attempt to close the door to ontology, but the rejection of ontology on the basis of lacking direct access to being, is an ontological problem, even if it were an epistemological problem, too. When you only had metaphysics, all answers remained speculative, when science came along, it was a whole new game. It was no longer the objects before me, but the ones that I can’t even see. What is my epistemic connectivity with the electron, with magnetic fields or genetic drift? Their “aboutness” is explained and the answer only lies on solving the problem of being.

But what are you calling ontology? No one rejects ontology, which is absurd. What is rejected is a non phenomenological ontology. Never been witnessed, such a thing. It would be like claiming you could step outside of experience and affirm reality non-experientially. What does this mean? The notion of direct access to being? But you already have this, IN the phenomenological presence of the things around you. What separates you is the interpretative error that steps in when you try to speak its presence. This is essentially what Wittgenstein's Tractatus is saying. Phenomenologists, including myself, claim that if one does this, practice this method, the entire horizon of what lies before one undergoes a novel restructuring.

Sure, going back to my previous response, you can take attitude #1: there's nothing but my experience; the experience and knowledge of others cannot be affirmed; the influence that objects exert among each other cannot be affirmed; the intrinsic nature of this reality cannot be affirmed; things around me, including other subjects, cannot be affirmed, except as elements within the structure of my own mind. That is solipsism, but not only that: it closes the door to any investigation (philosophic or scientific) of the intrinsic order of what appears in my experience, since it is false, hallucinatory, by definition. That would be the only meaning to find.

[Hereandnow]

Lagayscienza wrote

I mentioned in another thread how phenomenology, which sees raw, subjective consciousness as a priori, ontological, foundational, might help atheists in their quest for the "spiritual" which need not be monopolised by religion. Or is this stretching a long bow?

I would remove the term atheism altogether. It simply plays off of theism, and this is something that has long been at the center of a lot of contrived logic and bad metaphysics. Religion is a messy word, so it too has to be dismissed, and I would point out that the only reason I use it here is to get at the "essence" of religion, which is no more talking about Jesus' second coming than politics is about Donald Trump. Religion does have a real grounding, a profound one, frankly, and what phenomenology does is allow us to be rid of, to speak loosely, everything about it that is not really there, because philosophy is not arbitrary. It is a disciplined look at the very threshold where basic assumptions that rarely see light, are front and center vis a vis our existence.

Theism and its atheism belong to an ancient narrative and are mostly much ado about nothing, for once these term s are reduced to their phenomenological counterparts, there is left only the unassailable foundational terms of discussion. Something like this is why I am sure phenomenology is where to begin the only "religion" that deserves to survive. Kierkegaard is a nice start (although, he is not what I call "cleared" of old time religion, notoriously, as some critics say, endorsing nonsense). Descartes is perhaps the true father of phenomenology (notwithstanding Heidegger's lengthy refutation in Being and Time).

I'm not sure that science has to "yield" to phenomenology. I think they are different ways of apprehending what's "out there". We will always need the quantitative methods of science otherwise it could not progress. I mean, phenomenology is not going to get us to Mars and back. But I do now think that phenomenology is getting at something important.

I go a few steps further. Just take this idea of science setting its mind to "discovering" through "empirical" observation (for this is what sets science apart from philosophy) the intentional cord of epistemic possibility. A weird idea at the very least, for to first make sense as an idea, one has to make sense of its essential concepts, and 'epistemic' is most emphatically beyond empirical observation, so in order to even begin, epistemology has to be defined in a way that can be used in then conceiving how science might "observe" it. What is it that make science work? One thing is instrumentality that makes invisible things visible, and these are given representational and quantitative values, like sunlight given as a spectrum of wave frequencies and amplitudes. First there was the prism that showed these distinctions. I mean, without something like this to work with, epistemology will remain strictly apriori, that is, philosophical.

Of course, to observe epistemic connectivity like one observes light or water or seismic activity already stands apart from observational possiblities for a fascinating reason: To observe such a thing would be to observe oneself IN the observational perspective. This Wittgenstein's old complaint about logic, which has to be itself IN the judgment that analyzes what logic is! As one observes the epistemic connection, one is IN the modality of that very connectivity. Now, to me this is really interesting, for when I talk about this "threshold" position phenomenology takes us to, I admit that when we observe objectws in the world, we are, some how, some way, NOT confined to subjectivity, not to put too fine a point on it. I really do see my cat, but from a phenomneological pov or "attitude" (Husserl) is isn't my cat any more, for it being a cat, and frightened of dogs and squirrels, and my being five and a half feet away from it, and almost the entire bulk of experiential and logical knowledge I have about this and everything else, is suspended. Yes, the world becomes, if you cultivate this epoch, this "method," within yourself a very different place (Can't think of a better way to spend one's most interesting final days than trying to grasp this extraordinary phenomenological epiphany. But a caveat: the one thing that aggravates analytic philosophers about continental thinking most is the door it opens for existential epiphany, which is essential to Husserl and Heidegger and thematically played out in post H&H thinking, as with my current infatuation, Michel Henry). One wakes up and notices s/he exists! This is Kierkegaard's complain again about Hegel, who, he says, simply forgot that he exists in rationalizing the world.

Anyway, the dilemma is this: Because I do insist that I observe my cat as something over there and not me, it transcends me, which here is simply that it is not me and over there, AND that to account for its immanence, that is its being present in a known and familiar way right before me, it is possible that this cord of intentionality, as Husserl calls it, this knowing, accepting, believing, loving, hating, rejecting, and on and on that constitutes the nexus of intentionality and its epistemology, could "show up" in some way if instrumentality were to reveal it.

Frankly, such thinking is pretty far out there. Pretty spooky idea that one could actually witness, like one witnesses sunlight, the cord of intentionality, or "aboutness" that connects one tp things in the world. It would have to show up first as an empirical anomaly. You know how the East has a strange take on such things, with talk about acupuncture, kundalini, and Gee and there is an ancient practice of Oriental medicine that thrives today which takes all of this very seriously. But here, one leaves philosophy, and perhaps one should. I mentioned earlier that in the end phenomenology's reduction takes us to one place, and that is into pre-phenomenology, the presupposition of the suppositions of phenomenology itself. This is Givneness itself. Recalling that the Buddhist nirvana is not simply a feeling of well being. It is a radical discovery of both enlightenment and liberation.

But then, this does leave philosophy, and again, this is where philosophy takes us. Our existence IS existence, not the names we put in play to talk about it (though the reduction leads to an eidetic presence, the "essence" in the thinking itself), and this existence reaches beyond itself, and to see how this is so, one would first have to follow its course, and since this reaching out is what WE do, this sets the course for a discovery of self.

[Lagayascienza]

Thanks, Hereandnow. I'm still in the early days of my reading in phenomenology and so I must ask you some more questions.

Yes, we can leave theism and atheism out of the picture. But then I worry about this "unassailable foundation". Religion obviously means a lot to a lot of people. But are they not mistaken about its ultimate, underlying reality, it's ultimate truth value? Did Mahommed really ascend to heaven on a winged horse? Did Jesus really come back to bodily life after his Crucifixion? Did God really conjure up the universe in six Days and take a break on the seventh? If we take the quote from Marx about religion being the opium of the people, which I think contains a lot of truth, then can we not ask whether the people need or should want this opium? Is there not something better for them than this sort of opium? Or does all this not matter? And let's say people all came to see religion from a phenomenological POV. How would that change things for them? Yes, we can accept the inerrancy of what is given in consciousness, but then what?

And how would science go about "setting its mind to "discovering" through "empirical" observation the intentional cord of epistemic possibility"? If we are talking about epistemology we are talking about how we find stuff out. But isn't that what science does already in its own way? How might science get in touch with this "existence that reaches beyond itself"? Do you think that to achieve this scientists would first need to become phenomenologists?

Sorry for all the new questions.

I'm taking Husserl very, very slowly in the hope that his prose will suddenly wash over me and provoke some sort of epiphany. I thank you for all your help with him thus far. I think what you said a while back about having to first understand Descartes, Kant, Brentano is right. During my science degree and at law school we really only skimmed the surface of philosophy and my reading subsequently has all been in the Anglo-analytic tradition. But I'm trying to rectify that which is why it is taking so long to get to grips with Husserl. But there's no point in me reading Heidegger et al until I know Husserl. Do you think that's right?

[Hereandnow]

Count Lucanor wrote
But I wonder, who has suggested that ontology can be disentangled from the very cognition that conceives it? What's your point there? I have made statements that promote the view that ontology and epistemology are a unity within philosophy. What I have rejected is the supremacy of epistemology, which makes ontology its subordinate or dismisses it altogether.

Not that it makes it subordinate. It simply sees ontology to be inextricably bound to claims about what is, in the "essence" of ontology, if you will, such that no analysis of what IS at the most basic level (philosophy) can ignore what IS there that constitutes the relation of 'S knows P' between S and P. The "being" of this knowing is one thing Husserl is essentially about. You can't treat S as if it simply a given object like P. Nor is the matter to be taken as a simple flaw or incongruity in standard thinking about objects that exists between S and P, for this assumes there is some basis for describing the incongruity. The point is that one cannot even imagine how the being of my cat can be known in the basic scientific paradigms of what relationships are between objects. I mean, relationships between objects: this is paramount in the way science does business.

This is why we need something that is not confined to scientific paradigms to discuss this.

Sure, but Heidegger stands on the shoulders of the idealists that came before him. When he tackles ontology, it already implies the phenomenical approach that started with Kant and was endorsed by Husserl. Heidegger is then more interested in the meaning of being, rather than in being itself. Dasein is the epistemological being, the being that knows "being there".

Not Kant. Remember that Heidegger's thinking was about human existence not the form of judgments, making him a philosopher of existence. This is why such notions and caring and death and Kierkegaard's concept of anxiety and the nothingness one faces when one is released from existentiell interpretative perspectives are front and center. The whole of dasein is a radical finitude! And the noumenality of transcendence is replaced by a yielding to the world, which he talks about using the term gelassenheit, an "allowing" the world to speak as one withdraws the "will" of one's totality, which means one stops trying to insist on the way the world should be and yields to what is tells us through the possibilities afforded by finitude, which are inherently hermeneutical and historical.

Heidegger's world is very complicated, as he at once constructs his own pov out of the very ones who he critiques so severely. He is no Cartesian, or Kantian, of Husserlian or Kierkegaardian or Nietzschean thinker grounded especially in the Greeks and the pre-Socratics. Rather he takes all of these into an entirely new philosophy. Breathtaking to read, really. It is not the nexus of intentionality that is Husserl's contribution that he elucidates. He does not use the term consciousness, but dasein: our existence thrown into a world in foundational indeterminacy. But to see this one has to go through the standard texts of Kant, Hegel and the rest (there are so many), in order to step out of the narratives of everyday living. No, not epistemology, but an ontology that IS the epistemology. Take Time. Not exactly an epistemological term, but descriptive of the event that unfolds before me in the most basic analysis of our existence when I observe my couch or the fine day outside. What is, in the view of science, a horizon of physical objects (and their massively complex constitutions and quantified values) is put under the apriori analysis: I see the couch, but when I see it, I already know it, that is, it does not surprise me with its being there, but on the contrary, is comfortably acknowledged. Science would dismiss this. Of course, it admits talk about short term and long term memory, neurology, and so forth, but, and this important: all of these accounts in science presuppose the consciousness that conceives them. Phenomenology asks the most basic questions about the structure of this primordial givenness. To talk about, in other words, what memory is, we are already deploying memory; memory is presupposed by this psychology discussion about memory, so is there a way to discuss memory at this level of presuppositions? This requires an apriori investigation, not an empirical one. Apriority here means asking what must be the case to explain what is there in the original everydayness. Kant's method, but taken to its furthest reaches, the whole of our dasein. Husserl, following Brentano, inquires about time and we instantly see that we are miles away from anything science can say. This is not Einstein's time, but what is presupposed by Einstein: internal time (so called by Husserl).

This has to be read to be understood, but it is not trying to say how objects are known, though this is intimately involved, but what they are, and they are in time in the preapprehension of the encounter, and the anticipation that is a unity of the recollection as one does not anticipate without remembering, and ...well, it is a fascinating read. I would just remind that this is a process of extrapolation, analysis of what is the case clearly, like the features of time, its past, present and furture, to what must be the case as a presupposition, not at all alien to science.

This is pure Husserl's phenomenological reduction, I guess. It pretends to destroy the distinction between object and consciousness of objects, concerned as he is only with "a theory of knowledge", which of course rests heavily on the doctrine that mind structures reality. The great enemy has to be science, to which Husserl directs his critiques in the form of disputes against the underlying psychological assumptions of perception and subsequent logical rationalizations. The problem is: there's more than this in scientific endeavors, so, the "purely philosophical" position that Husserl takes implies total rejection of science, or better said, the implied realism in science. Bhaskar, along with other modern realists, was crystal-clear about the incompatibilty between science and epistemic correlationism: objects must be completely independent of humans for scientific practice to be intelligible. That makes Husserl's position, which still pretends to leave its legitimacy untouched, absurd. The reason for this, obviously, is that he is really after naturalism, because...well, we know where that is going.

Well...grrr. Please note that all of this talk about destroying distinctions and attacking science and epistemic correlationism possesses not one iota of analysis. Just vague generalities. What ever happened to: Can you even begin to make sense of science's knowledge claims apart from the perceiver's contribution? I'm listening...

It is not that there is no truth in this above here, but these would be partial truths at best. Phenomenology doesn't deny science. It denies that science is foundational philosophy. I would think this to be crystal clear.

Phenomenlogy simply wants to talk about the presuppositions of science. It wants to discuss the internal temporality of knowledge claims, the apperceptive nature of knowing, the inability to extricate material objects from conscious events, the pragmatic nature knowing contra presence of things, the relationship between universals and particulars and how the latter can at all be affirmed for what it is given how knowledge claims deal in universals, hermeneutical openness vis a vis the scientific paradigms of normal science; and on and on. These things don't interest a scientist, but they are implicit in every claim she makes. This is why we have philosophy.

It's actually the opposite: it is for phenomenologists that things don't make make prima facie sense, so they quit. But a realism supported by science is not prima facie, it goes to justification, right, but it's a lenghty road to get there, besides requiring going back and forth, systematically.

Think of something prima facie here as a kind of default setting of the way we experience and think about the world. The mail comes, dinner's ready, time for school, etc., and in this setting there are assumptions in place about what the world is. There indeed ARE letters, dinners, and of course, particle physicists and and neuroanatomists. Everything in this default setting of our existence, is epistemically defeasible, to use their jargon, which means any given proposition is "defeatable" and not absolute. Of course, you are right to say that science steps apart from this everydayness to make more disciplined discoveries, but it remains mostly true to what Husserl calls the naturlalistic attitude, which is stated clearly in, Quine's, "Philosophically I am bound to Dewey by the naturalism that dominated his last three decades. 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 no place for a prior philosophy." I don't know if I mentioned this earlier, but I do like its conciseness. This is the kind of thing Husserl and others (they are all different and generalizations almost instantly fail) think is wrong minded, for the very reasons I went over above: it goes absolutely nowhere because it stays with the default setting of nature-as-we-know-it, science and ordinary language. Best example I can think of is Dennett's Consciousness Explained, a reduction of philosophical issues, and all issues, really, to brain talk. I would point out that nearly every argument Dennett brings to bear upon phenomenology is a pseudo argument. He tells us that the "ineffability" of hearing a musical sound can be explained, at least in part by a discussion about guitar strings' tonalities sounding together in one way or anpother. Question: does Dennett even once address the questions underscored in, say, Heidegger's Being and time? No. Look, the simple truth is philosophers like this, naturalistic ones< if you will, simply do not want to think about question like that! It is certainyy not that they have some kind of grasp in these ancient philosophical issues; they are simply dismissive because they are utterly committed to the default setting of normal science, as Kuhn put it.

The one thing that boils my noodle about Dennett is that he says outright, mocks deirectly, the objection that physicalism can never touch, come within miles of, the bottom line thoughts and palpable encounters in the world, all the while not giving the slightest care that his own argumentative logic and observations are exactly this! He will not admit that "semantical and intentional phenomena cannot be incorporated within the science of nature" while all along the very essence of the thought that constructs his thesis are semantical and intentional phenomena!!

But, speaking of Kuhn, there is a "revolutionary" step forward one can take. When do revolutions occur in science? When there is an intractable anomaly. What is the intractable anomaly that phenomenology addresses? It is the indisputable phenomenological nature of experience that cannot be witnessed in Dennett's physical reductionist terms. E.g., how does the finding of a brain event of my cat in some objective, measurable way: bridge the epistemic distance between the thought and the cat? Escape the confines of physicality's profound limits in accounting for meaning, intentions, logic and semiotics and its semantics, value and caring; and generally speaking, the phenomenological presuppositions of what anything physical could be? How does it deal with the structures that are inherent IN the observational event?? Rorty said it: the brain is not a mirror, and one has to look deeply into this. IF a physical or naturalist reduction is the final word, then it is literally impossible to have a thought "about" something that is not the thought itself. This IS Rorty's position. Truth is made not discovered. He though Heidegger to be one of the three greatest philosopher's of the 20th century. I certainly don't agree with his nihilism, which he denies, or tries to, but you see, he sides with Quine and Dewey, NOT because he believes science understands the world at the most basic level of analysis (he is a pragmatist), but because he has taken an honest look at the physicalist claims and realized that this world really is contained within such an overwhelming finitude, something that will simply not be outstripped, and this means, for him, the very end of the meaning of the term metaphysics. Odd to think that he is following the analytic strain of Kantianism, which is the impossibility of metaphysics.

But again, undermining science, its very nature itself, including its necessary realism, has the implication that we are simply hallucinating. The phenomenalist workaround for this is simply absurd.

Not hallucinating, simply because phenomenology, being essentially descriptive, of course recognizes the differences between hallucinations and objective actualities. Both are actual! Which is to say, a hallucination is not nothing at all, and its locality within a brain event is still a locality (though brain events themselves are phenomena), but it has certain descriptive features that set it apart from facts about the objective (public) world.

Science is NEVER undermined! Scientific metaphysics, well, that is quite another thing. Again, the only thing anyone has every witnessed is the phenomenon. It is IMPOSSIBLE to witness anything else, for to witness at all is a phenomenological event. Facts like this are hard for the Dennett's of the world to accept, which is why he ignores them. Phenomenologists accept a great deal of what he says when he talks about physics and other sciences, but they simply respond, but you haven't taken the matters of the world to the most basic level.

Truly, I probably don't disagree with ninety nine percent of everything you believe. I simply say to go all the way, one has to deal with phenomenology. Philosophy takes us to the limits of our understanding; this is its point.

But Heidegger means "being" as a verb, as the experience of being, the meaning of it, not as the thing that actually is. It's all about the notion of not having access, but that's an ontological claim, which as you said, requires justification. When you look at Husserl's and Heidegger's justifications, they are disputable, and they have been disputed.

Do tell. Let the analysis itself be your guide, not hearsay. IN order to affirm something that is not an event but is a permanent fixed entity beyond the event of of perceiving, one would have to actually witness such a beyondness to even make sense of the term. What to we say about things that are beyond experience? We call them metaphysical. Yes, scientific foundationalism is just bad metaphysics. Not that it has never been observed; rather, it cannot be observed unless you completely change what we mean by the term 'observe'. Phenomenology makes just this move.

I borrow from Ryle's vocabulary: thinking science to be a philosophically foundational is a "category mistake". Science simply does not deal in the thematic areas that are the principle focus of phenomenology. Those who dispute this are mostly those who don't read phenomenology. Or scientists like Dennett who read but don't understand.

Yes, that's just the same as dismissing science altogether. Husserl goes directly against science, it's a key philosophical and foundational issue for him, not just another theme. Either apples or oranges, if you go for oranges, apples are out of the picture. They are not "recontextualized" oranges.

Dismissing science in the way mentioned above, yes. In no other way, though. Husserl goes directly against science VIS A VIS claims that exceed science's purview. Just that .

If it helps, you can think of it as human-independent. Not the telling, which has to be human, but that which is pointed at as actually existing, objectively, as a thing in itself, independently of the human in itself.

Then you are going to have to deal with our own terms. Human-independent? Obviously there are things that are not me. All that there is to do is describe what is there. No way to disentangle that couch from the perceptual act, so the couch remains over there, apart from me, yet a phenomenon (and we all know the history on this entanglement: is there heaviness in the couch? How about color? Or smell? How do the couch's measurements and the apodicticity of their logicality belong to the couch? And naming, referring to it as a couch, this certainly doesn't belong to the couch, nor do the quantifications of intensities that describe its physical binding...I mean the knowledge that we have, that a scientist has of the object is all intricately bound to the apriority of the in the features of its existence. This is Kant, essentially. You can make a traditional move to calling these features either primary or secondary, the former being in space and time, but really?: time is outside of the perceiver? What about the presupposition of this that deals with internal time of the perceptual event?

How many knowledge claims about the world are possible that are NOT inherent claims about the perceptual apparatus that receives them? None. Obviously we talk as if they are free of such things, but this has been a pragmatic assumption, we talk simply and with general purpose, just as when we talk about shells on the beach we generally don't talk about the sciences about them.

Not exactly the same thing. The phenomenalists are looking for the universal, unchanging, non-historical essences, supposedly deduced from the simple contemplative efforts of idealist philosophy. The real, the concrete, appears as completely accesory, almost a hallucination, a byproduct of
the belief in having access to noumena.

No, this is completely wrong. And in truth, it's so wrong that I see that I cannot even begin to right this. It would take pages. Phenomenology varies in its ideas. Alas, one does have to read enough of it to see how it all works. Universal non changing essences? Husserl but certainly not Heidegger, nor Levinas, nor any post modern, post Heideggerian thinking. Simple contemplative efforts of idealist philosophy? Please note how free of content this is. How could I respond if you don't tell me what you mean by it? Argue something. This is like saying nothing at all. The real and concrete? This is all phenomenology is interested in. Unless you can explain how the real is to be pried loose from the phenomenon.

But if everything is a construct, it is someone's construct, and that construction includes the other beings that appear to construct within that someone's construction. The phenomenological totality shows other human beings as phenomena and as such they don't get justified in their real existence, mere nomenclature that does not justify either to talk about "we" or "they". Phenomenology ends up, just the same as all its philosophical predecessors, in solipsism.

Solipsism occurs, and this is important, only when one weds physicalism with idealism, as if idealism contained experience within the shell of a skull. Please review the many times I explained why this is not the case. Phenomenology clearly acknowledges the exteriority of objects. It simply tells us that these objects cannot be conceived apart from the conceiving. Any attempt to do so would be self refuting. Try it.

That's just an example of the search for the universal, unchanging, non-historical essences behind the objects of experience, which is, interestingly, a sort of realism, but an unjustified realism, supported only by a purely contemplative and incoherent philosophical reflection that crashes with its own doctrines. Since those objects are not concrete actualities, but pure constructions of a mind, what would be the point of talking about the social as real, or religion as a real practice of real subjects? It would be the essence of what exactly? What is meant by "our existence"? Isn't it the world too, that which we cannot speak? It is there, sure, but what justifies religion being there that is not included within the justification itself? The essence becomes another construction and you end up with nothing but the construction, without this having any foundation.

Nonhistorical? you do know that Heidegger's phenomenology is explicitly historical. You do know that hermeneutics is explicitly historical. No, not pure constructions of a mind. This is why you and others find yourselves arguing with yourselves.

Knowledge relationships? OK, it's fun. Regardless of the nature or "essence" of the world and that which "knows", I mean, with independence of having a realist or antirealist philosophical stance, it cannot be disputed that there's something that knows, the subject, and something that is known, the objects or contents of our experience. Now, if you want to dispute that, I'm all ears.

I do take issue with calling the subject a thing. I do a once over on myself and find many things, but no objects. That lamp is an object. Me? I am thinking, feeling, intending, liking, disliking, agreeing, offended, and so on. It is indicative of the way your perspective has been influenced by physicalist reductive thinking. You see how this breeds nonsense.

To say that "there is something", that an object "is there", means that it exists, which could be just the same as saying "the subject has the experience" of that thing that is claimed to be there, without any commitment to a "thing in itself".

Did you just say the object being there is the same thing as the subject having the experience of the thing (putting "thing in itself" talk aside)?

So, right off the bat, we have the knower, the known and the knowing, all as experience, all as existent, all being there. That's the basic template, which does not clash with a phenomenological approach. Now, we can begin to look at some interesting things that show up within the experience: the known includes the objects that appear exerting influence and determining other objects. It also includes other knowers and other knowing from their part, which also implies that the knower is known back, and that the knowers are, at the same time, the known. All of this constitute what we may call "the world" that the subject experiences. But there's something else: the knowers are not mute, they utter (or at least appear to utter) their knowledge of the knowers, the known and the knowing. The content of these utterances implies that there are other experiences, other knowledge, that is independent of our own and to which we have no access to. Now, there are only two attitudes that the subject can adopt when facing this "world", as it appears configured before his eyes: 1) to assume that this "reality" is entirely structured by his own mind. There's no point in investigating anything of it, because there's no knowable, intelligible world to start with, only the structure of the subject's own mind, the only mind that could exist. Since this reality appears as if talking back to him, as if it were independent, as if there were things outside of his experience, the structure of that mind can only make sense as hallucination, a dream at best. Or 2) To assume that this "reality" has a structure of its own, an intrinsic nature that is not only decodable, interpretable, intelligible, but that also requires the participation of other subjects to figure out how it works, by contributing with the telling of their own knowledge and experiences. This second attitude is the only one that allows for the establishment of philosophy and science, it's the only one that allows the world to be intelligible.

Phenomenology subsumes both 1 and 2.