Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Philosophy Club

[Hereandnow]

" color yellow, speaking is aboutness" should be " color yellow; speaking is aboutness'

[Hereandnow]

Atla wrote
The more I read about Heidegger, the less I get it. He thinks that philosophy is merely about our individual experience of being and what follows from it, and that's it? By itself, I wouldn't even file that under philosophy.

There is a single philosopher who changed the way things were done for a hundred years, and more. A hundred years this philosopher was either at the very center of philosophical thought, or somehow responsible for whatever was being discussed. If you read him seriously, with the intention to understand, then and only then can you take existentialism seriously, hence the reason why no one here relates at all to phenomenology.

They have not done a formal study of Immanuel Kant. I have only done a rather slipshod study, but I have read the Critique of Pure Reason cover to cover and read essays. You would, to be frank, need to do this to understand phenomenology. It is an acquired understanding, and my attempt was to make this prima facie motivating to read about this philosophy, but alas, it requires Kant to be taken seriously. Existentialism both is made possible by Kant, but is an opposition to his rationalism.

I am about done with posting for a while. My plan is to sit down with Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit for the next several months. I know this is what it takes, that this is the ticket price to get access to his world and this is just the way it is. I'll have to read essays (many online) as I go; I will have to reread, and reread again; it will require reading through impossible parts, but I know they will be clearer later. It always works like this.

If you don't have this kind of interest to drive you to understand the Kierkegaard, Hegel, Husserl, Sartre, Heidegger, and others, then you won't ever get them. All I can say is when you understand Heidegger (and I speak, of course, as an amateur philosopher) he will radically change your philosophical thinking, and your thinking about the world.

[Hereandnow]

Terrapin Station wrote
My impression of Heidegger is that it's important to understand that:

(a) supposedly the first philosophy book he read as a kid, and it had a big impact on him, was Franz Brentano's On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle
and
(b) he was a student of Husserl and initially was very strongly influenced by him

I think the Brentano book led to him thinking "I'm going to sort out the 'correct sense of 'being'' once and for all," where he was shooting for something more pragmatic, but he had a very convoluted way of going about that, and his eventual break from Husserl's influence came by way of rejecting what he saw as some of the idealistic implications of Husserl's phenomenological method . . . and then he conflated the two into one project.

THAT is your impression of Heidegger???? What about presence at hand? His thoughts on instrumentality and ready to hand? His comments of Kant's transcendental aesthetic, and space and time? What about his thoughts on geworfenheit, das man, Time, freedom and human existence, and truth and alethea, logos, existential anxiety, ontic and ontological modes of being-in-the-world, and on and on???

Not to nag, but to even have an impression of Heidegger you would have raise that which would actually GIVE an impression.

[Hereandnow]

Excuse me, cupcake, but Wittgenstein (post-Tractatus, anyway) and Rorty are two of my favorite philosophers. I’ve actually read every book Rorty wrote at least twice (excepting the one or two that were strictly about politics). They have profoundly shaped my views.

Burden of proof is on you: find me any respected Western philosopher who has ever said that science can solve “all questions”.

We both know you never will, so why did you make up something so completely ridiculous?

Excuse me, pussycat, but there is absolutely no evidence whatever in your conversation of any of this. If you have an idea in mind, then put is put there. Credentials? You're giving me credentials?

Argue your case, bring in ideas, tell me what you think.

Look sweetheart, honey bunch, punkin: review what you actually do. You complain. You don't think, philosophize, you complain. That's easy!
Lay it out for me sweety. Give me YOUR philosophy, your "profoundly shaped views"?

[GE Morton]

There is a single philosopher who changed the way things were done for a hundred years, and more. A hundred years this philosopher was either at the very center of philosophical thought, or somehow responsible for whatever was being discussed.

I assume you're speaking of Kant.

If you read him seriously, with the intention to understand, then and only then can you take existentialism seriously, hence the reason why no one here relates at all to phenomenology.

Failure to have read and understand Kant is hardly the reason most (non-continental) Western philosophers don't take phenomenology seriously. Nearly all of them have read Kant, and understood him, despite disagreements as to the soundness or implications of some of his arguments. They don't take phenomenology seriously because it is laden with undefined terms and non-cognitive propositions, and thus conveys no knowledge (I take knowledge to be information that enables someone to do something).

Serious philosophy, like science, is at bottom pragmatic --- it aims to improve our understanding of ourselves and the universe in which we find ourselves, so that we can better deal with the challenges it throws at us and make our stay in it more enjoyable. Whereas science aims to uncover and characterize features of the natural world and their relationships to one another, philosophers seek to clarify and strengthen the conceptual framework into which that information is fitted. Philosophical sidetracks which don't contribute to that aim attract little interest.

Phenomenologists seem to be spellbound with awe at the "miracle," and absurdity, of human existence --- the absurdity arising from the incongruous presence of creatures who demand understanding, who are driven to seek it, in a universe forever beyond their understanding. All thoughtful persons are awed by that primal fact. But they are not spellbound by it, and they don't imagine that retreating to a pre-conceptual, neonatal state and obsessing over it will somehow allow them to penetrate that impossibility and deliver them enlightenment, any more than stripping naked and gazing for hours at one's reflection in a mirror will reveal a whole lot of information about the workings of one's body.

I am about done with posting for a while.

Does that mean I shouldn't bother replying to your last reply to me?

If you don't have this kind of interest to drive you to understand the Kierkegaard, Hegel, Husserl, Sartre, Heidegger, and others, then you won't ever get them.

If that is true it is the only subject matter of which it is. For any other the key points and theses can be summarized succinctly and capture the gist well enough to induce readers to pursue them further. The only person who might undertake a months long reading program without some prior inkling of the contents and practical value thereof would be someone with no other demands on his time --- perhaps a prisoner locked in a cell with nothing but a sleeping mat and a stack of phenomenology books.

[Hereandnow]

GE Morton wrote
Failure to have read and understand Kant is hardly the reason most (non-continental) Western philosophers don't take phenomenology seriously. Nearly all of them have read Kant, and understood him, despite disagreements as to the soundness or implications of some of his arguments. They don't take phenomenology seriously because it is laden with undefined terms and non-cognitive propositions, and thus conveys no knowledge (I take knowledge to be information that enables someone to do something).

Professional philosophers?? Obviously. Read the post more carefully. But it's true, a person that doesn't have a kind of "Copernican Revolution" is not going to understand how this change in perspective works.

Serious philosophy, like science, is at bottom pragmatic --- it aims to improve our understanding of ourselves and the universe in which we find ourselves, so that we can better deal with the challenges it throws at us and make our stay in it more enjoyable. Whereas science aims to uncover and characterize features of the natural world and their relationships to one another, philosophers seek to clarify and strengthen the conceptual framework into which that information is fitted. Philosophical sidetracks which don't contribute to that aim attract little interest.

Serious philosophy is pragmatic? Or is it pragmatism? There is a difference. The latter is close to Heidegger, actually.

Phenomenologists seem to be spellbound with awe at the "miracle," and absurdity, of human existence --- the absurdity arising from the incongruous presence of creatures who demand understanding, who are driven to seek it, in a universe forever beyond their understanding. All thoughtful persons are awed by that primal fact. But they are not spellbound by it, and they don't imagine that retreating to a pre-conceptual, neonatal state and obsessing over it will somehow allow them to penetrate that impossibility and deliver them enlightenment, any more than stripping naked and gazing for hours at one's reflection in a mirror will reveal a whole lot of information about the workings of one's body.

Well, at least you write in paragraphs, even if you do speak imperfectly about what these philosophers think. What phenomenologists did you have in mind?
You might consider that the reason you have so little appreciation for such thinking is that relative to empirical science, you have had precious little exposure to it. This is true for everyone, for science begins in grammar school, phenomenology begins, well, it doesn't, really, for anyone, nearly. This si why I say it is an acquired understanding: one has to explicitly acquire it. Also, the trouble with analytic professional philosophers is that they don't read it either. Kant is somethign of a core requirement for a phd in the history of philosophy, but read (I have it on PDF) Robert Hanna's Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy for a nice account of how he is treated with contempt after Russell. They don't think about Kant at all. They are into Frege, Strawson, Grice, Davidson, and so on. I have read papers they've written, and some I find useful. But mostly they simply tinker in very rigorous ways with the analysis of ideas. They mostly go nowhere. Phenomenologists are the only ones who know how to take the world up AS the world. Michel Henry's on The Power of Affectivity in Heidegger, for example. This brief work puts focus on the affectivity built into dasein's self realization, to put it one way. You can read this, put it down, then you will find yourself puzzling the experienced world in very intriguing ways, not simply working our an argument, the end of which is just ot publish. I know these people and their conception of philosophy is the very reason why it is free fall.

If that is true it is the only subject matter of which it is. For any other the key points and theses can be summarized succinctly and capture the gist well enough to induce readers to pursue them further. The only person who might undertake a months long reading program without some prior inkling of the contents and practical value thereof would be someone with no other demands on his time --- perhaps a prisoner locked in a cell with nothing but a sleeping mat and a stack of phenomenology books.

Not sure what there is to object to here. Who is talking about key points? "Can ...capture ...to induce": why yes, that's what I said, one can, but one has to be motivated. ???

[Atla]

Atla wrote
The more I read about Heidegger, the less I get it. He thinks that philosophy is merely about our individual experience of being and what follows from it, and that's it? By itself, I wouldn't even file that under philosophy.

There is a single philosopher who changed the way things were done for a hundred years, and more. A hundred years this philosopher was either at the very center of philosophical thought, or somehow responsible for whatever was being discussed. If you read him seriously, with the intention to understand, then and only then can you take existentialism seriously, hence the reason why no one here relates at all to phenomenology.

They have not done a formal study of Immanuel Kant. I have only done a rather slipshod study, but I have read the Critique of Pure Reason cover to cover and read essays. You would, to be frank, need to do this to understand phenomenology. It is an acquired understanding, and my attempt was to make this prima facie motivating to read about this philosophy, but alas, it requires Kant to be taken seriously. Existentialism both is made possible by Kant, but is an opposition to his rationalism.

I am about done with posting for a while. My plan is to sit down with Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit for the next several months. I know this is what it takes, that this is the ticket price to get access to his world and this is just the way it is. I'll have to read essays (many online) as I go; I will have to reread, and reread again; it will require reading through impossible parts, but I know they will be clearer later. It always works like this.

If you don't have this kind of interest to drive you to understand the Kierkegaard, Hegel, Husserl, Sartre, Heidegger, and others, then you won't ever get them. All I can say is when you understand Heidegger (and I speak, of course, as an amateur philosopher) he will radically change your philosophical thinking, and your thinking about the world.

You know what, maybe you are just full of yourself, maybe not deliberately, but you definitely seem to be fooling yourself. You keep telling me to read this and that and how they will change my thinking of the world. Well maybe you are the one lacking context.

I'm a nondualist, everything I have seen so far during these last few years on philosophy boards indicates that I've already gone beyond Kant and his followers a decade ago. There is a certain depth, a certain insight they never reached. And also I know quite a lot about human psychology, and about how many different forms the human sense of being can take, especially when it comes to gender differences. I can't even take it seriously, when these philosophers believe that THEIR rather typical-for-them, rather specific sense of being is THE sense of being. Talk about getting lost in your own mind, and being full of yourself. That's not even philosophy to me, philosophy is about the big questions.

[Terrapin Station]

Terrapin Station wrote
My impression of Heidegger is that it's important to understand that:

(a) supposedly the first philosophy book he read as a kid, and it had a big impact on him, was Franz Brentano's On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle
and
(b) he was a student of Husserl and initially was very strongly influenced by him

I think the Brentano book led to him thinking "I'm going to sort out the 'correct sense of 'being'' once and for all," where he was shooting for something more pragmatic, but he had a very convoluted way of going about that, and his eventual break from Husserl's influence came by way of rejecting what he saw as some of the idealistic implications of Husserl's phenomenological method . . . and then he conflated the two into one project.

THAT is your impression of Heidegger???? What about presence at hand? His thoughts on instrumentality and ready to hand? His comments of Kant's transcendental aesthetic, and space and time? What about his thoughts on geworfenheit, das man, Time, freedom and human existence, and truth and alethea, logos, existential anxiety, ontic and ontological modes of being-in-the-world, and on and on???

Not to nag, but to even have an impression of Heidegger you would have raise that which would actually GIVE an impression.

Well that's certainly an odd way to read my post.

Isn't it obvious that I'm talking about motivations, a la personal historical catalysts, for his overall "project", and that I'm not saying what I'm mentioning is exhaustive in even that? And again, from an angle of trying to understand what he was on about and why, with his odd obsession with "being" as a concept; his odd notion that there's something perplexing about it that needs to be sorted out, and over the course of a book that was supposed to be three times as long as the already-bloated Being and Time no less. A book full of "speaking in tongues" neologisms and tortured prose like "Nothing itself nothings" and "sense is that onto which projection projects, in terms of which something becomes intelligible as something." My aim obviously wasn't to give an outline of the project itself.

[Sculptor1]

It's such a shame that science has no hegemony in modern society.
There is so much fakery out there.
Misused statistics.
False claims
Flat earthers
Ignored scientists such as Einstein and Oppenheimer; Lovelock and Semel Weiss throughout history.
Anti vaxers.
Religion.
On and on it goes

[Terrapin Station]

Another howler of tortured prose is "the quest for the being of beings in its difference from being." LOL

[Atla]

Atla wrote
The more I read about Heidegger, the less I get it. He thinks that philosophy is merely about our individual experience of being and what follows from it, and that's it? By itself, I wouldn't even file that under philosophy.

There is a single philosopher who changed the way things were done for a hundred years, and more. A hundred years this philosopher was either at the very center of philosophical thought, or somehow responsible for whatever was being discussed. If you read him seriously, with the intention to understand, then and only then can you take existentialism seriously, hence the reason why no one here relates at all to phenomenology.

They have not done a formal study of Immanuel Kant. I have only done a rather slipshod study, but I have read the Critique of Pure Reason cover to cover and read essays. You would, to be frank, need to do this to understand phenomenology. It is an acquired understanding, and my attempt was to make this prima facie motivating to read about this philosophy, but alas, it requires Kant to be taken seriously. Existentialism both is made possible by Kant, but is an opposition to his rationalism.

I am about done with posting for a while. My plan is to sit down with Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit for the next several months. I know this is what it takes, that this is the ticket price to get access to his world and this is just the way it is. I'll have to read essays (many online) as I go; I will have to reread, and reread again; it will require reading through impossible parts, but I know they will be clearer later. It always works like this.

If you don't have this kind of interest to drive you to understand the Kierkegaard, Hegel, Husserl, Sartre, Heidegger, and others, then you won't ever get them. All I can say is when you understand Heidegger (and I speak, of course, as an amateur philosopher) he will radically change your philosophical thinking, and your thinking about the world.

Though you're correct that most people don't even make it to the stage of the inner investigations, including a few people in this topic. They are just spouting clueless platitudes nothing more.

[Pattern-chaser]

It's such a shame that science has no hegemony in modern society.
There is so much fakery out there.
Misused statistics.
False claims
Flat earthers
Ignored scientists such as Einstein and Oppenheimer; Lovelock and Semel Weiss throughout history.
Anti vaxers.
Religion.
On and on it goes

And yet there are examples like the UK government's oft-repeated claims to be "following the science" when their actions and decisions are political ones. In this case, the government are simply trying to justify their incompetence by claiming the backing of science in a scenario where science has no relevance. And we can also look at philosophy forums, where many contributors recommend science as the only means of investigating life, the universe and everything. Subjects like metaphysics are ridiculed and dismissed because they are outside the purview of science.

I agree with you to the extent that sometimes my take on this is reversed: there are circumstances when science is the most useful and appropriate tool to address a particular issue, but it is not employed. But science is also, and often, misapplied, and this is the hegemony of science that the OP refers to. IMO, of course.

[Sculptor1]

It's such a shame that science has no hegemony in modern society.
There is so much fakery out there.
Misused statistics.
False claims
Flat earthers
Ignored scientists such as Einstein and Oppenheimer; Lovelock and Semel Weiss throughout history.
Anti vaxers.
Religion.
On and on it goes

And yet there are examples like the UK government's oft-repeated claims to be "following the science" when their actions and decisions are political ones.

You make my point for me. The government as using "science" as a sound bite. Science does not suggest what you do in a crisis, it only supplies the evidence.
And exactly, whilst claiming to "follow the science" they have basically ignored it.

In this case, the government are simply trying to justify their incompetence by claiming the backing of science in a scenario where science has no relevance. And we can also look at philosophy forums, where many contributors recommend science as the only means of investigating life, the universe and everything.

Pointless trying to argue with a strawman. Where's your evidence?

Subjects like metaphysics are ridiculed and dismissed because they are outside the purview of science.

Pointless trying to argue with a strawman. Where's your evidence?

Scientific claims of laws and definitions are all metaphysics.
The science works whether you know that or not.

I agree with you to the extent that sometimes my take on this is reversed: there are circumstances when science is the most useful and appropriate tool to address a particular issue, but it is not employed. But science is also, and often, misapplied, and this is the hegemony of science that the OP refers to. IMO, of course.

There is no hegemony of science. All situations can benefit from science, but at the end of the day its what you do with the information that science can provide.

Science might be able to demonstrate that blond haired, blues eyed children do better in IQ tests than black skinned ones; but that does not validate nazism. It might just as well suggest that blacked skinned children suffer from prejudice in the school system, and might suggest ways to reform, giving people better chances.
But were science to have hegemony the evidence would be front and centre, rather than manipulated or ignored as it most generally is.

[Pattern-chaser]

In this case, the government are simply trying to justify their incompetence by claiming the backing of science in a scenario where science has no relevance. And we can also look at philosophy forums, where many contributors recommend science as the only means of investigating life, the universe and everything.

Pointless trying to argue with a strawman. Where's your evidence?

Subjects like metaphysics are ridiculed and dismissed because they are outside the purview of science.

Pointless trying to argue with a strawman. Where's your evidence?

In both cases, you have been here in this forum, and participated in enough discussions, to see that what I describe sometimes happens here. I'm not going trawling for specifics, when we both know well what is posted here.

[Gertie]

There is a single philosopher who changed the way things were done for a hundred years, and more. A hundred years this philosopher was either at the very center of philosophical thought, or somehow responsible for whatever was being discussed.

I assume you're speaking of Kant.

If you read him seriously, with the intention to understand, then and only then can you take existentialism seriously, hence the reason why no one here relates at all to phenomenology.

Failure to have read and understand Kant is hardly the reason most (non-continental) Western philosophers don't take phenomenology seriously. Nearly all of them have read Kant, and understood him, despite disagreements as to the soundness or implications of some of his arguments. They don't take phenomenology seriously because it is laden with undefined terms and non-cognitive propositions, and thus conveys no knowledge (I take knowledge to be information that enables someone to do something).

Serious philosophy, like science, is at bottom pragmatic --- it aims to improve our understanding of ourselves and the universe in which we find ourselves, so that we can better deal with the challenges it throws at us and make our stay in it more enjoyable. Whereas science aims to uncover and characterize features of the natural world and their relationships to one another, philosophers seek to clarify and strengthen the conceptual framework into which that information is fitted. Philosophical sidetracks which don't contribute to that aim attract little interest.

Phenomenologists seem to be spellbound with awe at the "miracle," and absurdity, of human existence --- the absurdity arising from the incongruous presence of creatures who demand understanding, who are driven to seek it, in a universe forever beyond their understanding. All thoughtful persons are awed by that primal fact. But they are not spellbound by it, and they don't imagine that retreating to a pre-conceptual, neonatal state and obsessing over it will somehow allow them to penetrate that impossibility and deliver them enlightenment, any more than stripping naked and gazing for hours at one's reflection in a mirror will reveal a whole lot of information about the workings of one's body.

I am about done with posting for a while.

Does that mean I shouldn't bother replying to your last reply to me?

If you don't have this kind of interest to drive you to understand the Kierkegaard, Hegel, Husserl, Sartre, Heidegger, and others, then you won't ever get them.

If that is true it is the only subject matter of which it is. For any other the key points and theses can be summarized succinctly and capture the gist well enough to induce readers to pursue them further. The only person who might undertake a months long reading program without some prior inkling of the contents and practical value thereof would be someone with no other demands on his time --- perhaps a prisoner locked in a cell with nothing but a sleeping mat and a stack of phenomenology books.

As someone with no education in philosophy (except some theology) and interested in ideas not who said them, I think you make some fair points here.

I appreciate HAN's willingness to give extensive answers to all-comers, but it shouldn't be this hard to get some concrete idea of the key insights or knowledge phenomenology claims to offer.