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[Hereandnow]

Lagayscienza wrote
If you are right that science does not rest on a sound metaphysical foundation, then I need to ask why science works so well? Or why it works at all? I’m wondering what science would be like if all scientists became phenomenologists and so gained, through phenomenological method, a correct understanding of metaphysics. If that were to happen, how would science be different?

Carried away, perhaps, in all that follows.

Consider what science is with this originally addressed to Sy Borg: Typical: I know what the sun is, and it is not a god, but ths is a negative claim, for which I am grateful to telescopes for. But when I start talking about fusion and the release of atomic energy, is this really "knowledge" of the sun? Or is this rather just a massive quantification project? There is a reason physics quickly turns into math and other quantitative disciplines. But does this mean the sun (and "the world" which is dealt with in the same way) is a mathematical structure, or that mathematics is an imposition in the apperceptive engagement of dealing with what we call the sun? One always will, and there is no turning back on this, find Kant staring back at you when things turn to basic questions, for to observe is an event, and we are not mirrors of nature. The brain is not a mirror; it MAKES the world, but thsi doesn't at all mean we must therefore face idealism or solipsism, for nothing coud be more clear than the sun is "over there" and it is certainly not me but independent of me in a way that needs to be defined and understood. Hence, phenomenology.

Pragmatists hold that knowledge is all about problem solving, and I think they are mostly right about this. The hypothetical deductive method goes something like this: I encounter a X on the street that looks like a shoe, and before this, I already have to have a knowledge of shoes in place, so the encountering is not simply a spontaneous affair but an anticipated one. The X before me is now, in order to be a shoe-type of encounter, an encounter in time: X is a shoe only if X complies with all of the anticipatory possibilities I associate with shoes, in terms of appearance, use, connotative or idiomatic associations (Bob is a shoe-in to get the job), and so on. The shoe is the standardized meanings, both personally and publically, that are "always already there" that make the shoe what it is when I see one (a piece of Heidegger in this). Science is grounded in this, as is all knowledge, the familiarity and the language/culture that attends the possibility of encounter.

Already the integrity of the science/knowledge claim is called into question, for without this knowledge claim "already there" I couldn't really have an encounter at all. Even if I had a "what the he** is this?" encounter with some object X, it would still be an anticipated encounter, the unexpectedness of X playing against the existing anticipations, forming a question rather than a affirmation. QUestions are open while affirmations are closed, but both are in a contextuality of general understanding. This is a pretty big point for Heidegger. But anyway, anticipation is an inherent part of what it is to even be a knowledge claim at all. The shoe does not appear before me in the occurrent encounter of actuality, because the anticipation, the temporal dimension, is an essential apart of what it is to even have an encounter at all. Hence, ones asks, how much of the meaning of the shoe experience has to do with what is there, in the "living actuality" of this, and how much is just this powerful and omnipresent anticipation of things designated "shoe"? ANd then the inevitable: how is it at all even possible for a knowledge claim to be about this actuality? For this temporal structure is what knowledge IS. Like asking, is it possible to observe a thing, a feeling, a desire, a pain or delight, anything at all, as it "really" is? Without this predelineation always in place, the object is forever transcendental.

Science is mostly quantitative knowledge that pragmatically (as you say, "works very well") talks about what the world does, and what the world does is this anticipatory structure that is found with the perceiver, not in the object perceived. I am doing the anticipating, not the world (and btw, Heidegger does not think like this). The world, on the other hand, is qualitative, like the pain of the girl, qualitative, and science is silent on this because it cannot, will not ever be able to say what this pain IS; qualitative "ISness" issues from "the fabric of things". The pain, like all objects-as-qualitative-presences, is transcendental, and this is a major point, for her pain, if you will, belongs to eternity, as they say. This sounds like religious talk.

Phenomenologists say things like: We are not searching for an answer to the question: How do we know there is cup on the table? We seek an answer to the question: How does it come about that consciousness can make contact with the cup on the able? How does what’s that out there (the cup) get in here (pointing to head)?

I’m wondering why someone could not reasonably inquire whether those three questions are, in fact, the same question? And also, what would the phenomenologist say if told that, even though science is based, as phenomenologists would have it, on a poor metaphysical foundation, we actually do already know quite a lot about how consciousness makes contact with the cup?

I would refer you to the discussion above regarding what science knows. I would say say all three questions are essentially the same question. Troublw with reading Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and the like is you find the issues being explained in different ways, and words become ambiguous. Heidegger, e.g., has a very distinct idea in mind when talking about existence, being, existential and existentiell, ontology, and to explain him, terms can get weird and conflicted.

But to take how science know this relation, pretty straight forward: parts of the electromagnetic spectrum are reflected off, parts absorbed in, the object, and the former encounter the eye, and pas through the lens to the optic nerve and the cones and rods determine quality and intensity, and on the brain where the, what, the occipital lobe is it? creates an image, a phenomenon. Of course, you can do this with any sense, trace the causal lineage. But the question remains untouched" how does the image in the brain make a phenomenon that represents or has any relation at all to that out there? It is a very simple question, and you are invited to bang your head against it as I have done and continue to do. To no avail, I'm afraid. To do this, you assume a vantage point as you would do in a simple object to object description. But here, one can never leave the phenomenon. This is one reason Wittgenstein called the world mystical (Tractatus). LIke logic trying to say what logic is; it runs into itself doing the determining. No way out of this, really.

If the phenomenologist thinks that a phenomenological reduction will give a better, more reliable, more useful understanding of the cup in-itself, then could the phenomenologist not do the reduction and tell the rest of us what their better account of cup-ness is. If there is something that the rest of us, through our sensorium and technological extensions thereof, are missing about cup-ness, something that the phenomenologist has access to that we don’t, then that would be extremely interesting. If the phenomenologist cannot relate this special knowledge to others, then what will the phenomenologist do with this superior understanding of cup-ness?

I was tempted to say it's not the case thatphenomenoogists claim to have to have a better account, but it is clear that they certainly do make that claim, which is simply true of anyone who makes a claim at all: I believe the way I do with justification, and that is why I believe it. Believing is based in justification. Here is a justified belief: philosophers who think empirical science should be the evidential ground for addressing philosophical questions about epistemology and ontology and ethics when these questions turn to affirmation about the world, fail before they have even begun, simply because empirical science (notwithstanding what quantum physics might suggest and all of the non-empirical abstract thinking science does) takes causality to be the essence of what it is to know, and in fact there is nothing at all epistemic about causality. The evidence of this lies, of course, in the very nature of causality, which is devoid of epistemic properties. So the next time a philosopher talks about evolution or a brain's t-fibers firing to explain something, like an emotion or suffering, they are begging this very question about epistemology. As I have said earlier, it is not that there is some room for moving from causality into other kinds of relational definitions, for the principle is really very simple: if X moves, X is caused to do so. Just that. You could send a baseball flying into a thousand different causal matrixes and eventually end up "causing" me to think of an apple, but this apple-thought is not even remotely a baseball, so, the question goes, how does my cat ever get in my brain such that I know it? Literally impossible unless we reconceive relation, but there is nothing in science that can do this.

This is, again, NOT to say we do not have knowledge of the world. It IS to say, that the epistemic connectivity has to be found elsewhere.

When you say "the rest of us" I would say you refer to everyone who does not take the phenomenological pov, but this view is actually one absurdly simple. It says that we allow our observations to be as honest and inclusive as the world permits. Science cannot make this claim, for it ignores epistemology and its ontology cannot register the imposing givenness of value affairs, as with the afflicted girl (per the above).

The consensus lies with science because we are raised to think like this. Familiarity. But the argument doesn't not favor science in philosophy.

If the phenomenologist says that If the phenomenologist says that it is not possible to relate this special knowledge to others and that each person must do their own phenomenological reduction to get their own answer, then won’t each meditator, even if the meditation (the reduction) is done perfectly as per Husserl’s instructions, have a different subjective experience of the cup, of its cup-ness? Our brains are, after all, all different. If we had all successfully done the reduction, what do we all then do with our different individual, better metaphysically grounded understandings of cup-ness? What useful knowledge will have been gained? then won’t each meditator, even if the meditation (the reduction) is done perfectly as per Husserl’s instructions, have a different subjective experience of the cup, of its cup-ness? Our brains are, after all, all different. If we had all successfully done the reduction, what do we all then do with our different individual, better metaphysically grounded understandings of cup-ness? What useful knowledge will have been gained?

The phenomenalist doesn't say " that it is not possible to relate this special knowledge to others and that each person must do their own phenomenological reduction to get their own answer." Like all arguments, it assumes we share a world. And we can talk about it, but each conversation is thematically determined, and phenomenology has its own themes. Kant asked, how are synthetic apriori judgments possible? and wrote hundreds of pages on this. Husserl asked, what if we take the Cartesian method of doubt and follow through, on the assumption that consciousness is always consciousness OF something. questions like this do not lie outside possible agreement between us, for the structure of thought and phenomena are equally accessible. My world is your world to the extent we can agree, though it is true I can never enter your world. Reading Derrida makes the problem worse: utterances themselves cannot agree in any foundational way, for they are contextually variable, meaning the same word can be used in one context with success, and in another divergent context with success as well. Words are indeterminate, and it is not just my world against your world, but the foundational deficit of any utterance at all. This is something that goes beyond physical separation, for to speak those very terms, 'physical' and 'separation' depends on a systme of language agreement about the world. A sticky wicket I have not entirely come to understand. But Derrida does get very interesting, especially goes off the deep end with someone like Levinas, which I dare not even mention. The first time I read Levinas, I remember saying to myself, nobody could think like this.

Just ot keep in mind, I use the physical brain and its physical environment to make a point about how this kind of "physicalist" talk does not work. My true view does not think at all like this. Phenomenology does not recognize this pov aside from rejecting it in favor of a foundational phenomenology: what IS, is what appears to us: So much appearing, so much being; to the things themselves!; so much reduction, so much givenness. This latter is the icing on the cake, for the claim is that the reduction which suspends knowledge claims ultimately leads to revelation of the world as-it-is, an idea traditionally reserved for metaphysics. I.e., all ontologies in abeyance, for being itself is not being at all. Words themselves are in abeyance.

This last idea is one reason why analytic philosophy tends to be condescending and contemptuous toward post Husserlian phenomenology---see Blanchot or Levinas where things get truly weird. The latter, Levinas, most find unreadable, as in his Totality and Infinity. It DOES take an effort to engage this kind of thing at all. These guys have dropped all ways that science could explain the human condition, and work strictly within a phenomenological world, and metaphysics is not some empty concept, but is this powerful dynamic that confronts us when we reach out for higher meaning....but of course the term 'metaphysics' is mostly dropped as well. Heidegger's dasein is now the "what we ARE". It is a bit like a soul or spirit, really, defining what a person is by all that is there in what we think, feel, do and believe. One really has to let go of the metaphysics of science, which we all implicitly believe because we are enculturated this way.

Reading Heidegger's Being and TIme is entering into another world. But the post Husserlians take things to the telos of the reduction, which is a world beyond Heidegger, who thought Husserl tried to walk on water.

If everyone in the world did the phenomenological reduction, will the world finally understand cup-ness better than before? And how would this phenomenological approach lead to a better understanding of existence overall if we each applied the correct reduction to all phenomena? Religion for example. What would we all learn about the phenomenon of religion that we don't already know of cannot otherwise know?

Sorry again for the large number of questions. You have sparked my curiosity and I need to ask these questions if I am to understand phenomenology. I’ve been searching online for explanations and critiques of phenomenology so I can figure out what is bothering me about it, but there is very little out there. All I an find are papers on different interpretations of Husserl, Heidegger, et al but nothing foundational for the uninitiated. So, these questions are my own, the ones that are bothering me in my philosophical isolation, about phenomenology insofar as I have been able to understand it.

Yes, they would understand cupness better than before. But unfortunately, to actually DO the reduction, one has to pay the price. It's a lot of work. I believe I mentioned that one has to be already into this with a predisposition to get out of mundane interpretations of the world and into esoteric ones. The reduction liberates the cup from "pass me the cup" and all the other contexts in mundane affairs that settle the world without question. The goal is not Heideggerian, but post Husserlian: to see that the cup is only a cup, and the sun is only the sun, because of the familiarity of taking it AS a cup or the sun (that is Heidegger). Reified familiarity is all that the ordinary perceptual experiences are grounded in. The reduction removes familiarity and reveals the Being that familiarity presupposed.
Perhaps Eugene Fink's Sixth Meditation's opening lines would be interesting to you:

Originating in the radicality of utmost self-reflection, our meditative thinking,
in performing the phenomenological reduction, brought us into the dimension
in which we stand before the problem-field of philosophy. Instead of
inquirin g into the being of the world, as does traditional "philosophy"
dominated by the dogmatism of the natural attitude, or, where inquiry is not
satisfied with that, instead of soaring up over the world "speculatively," we, in a
truly "Copernican revolution," have broken through the confinement of the natural
attitude, as the horizon of all our human possibilities for acting and theorizing,
and have thrust forward into the dimension of origin for all being, into the constitutive
source of the world, into the sphere of transcendental subjectivity. W e
have, however, not yet exhibited the constitutive becoming of the world in the
sense performances of transcendental life, both those that are presently actual and
those that are sedimented,- we have not yet entered into constitutive disciplines and
theories. W hat we have first done, rather, is to sketch out the Idea
of constitutive clarification as the Idea of the analytical inquiry that moves
back from the "phenomenon of the world" (from the acceptedness-construct
[Geltungsgebilde]b in reductively disclosed transcendental life) into the construction
of the acceptedness, into the processes of world-actualization.

The Copernican Revolution is a reference to Kant's transcendental idealism, but thi is not about Kant or Descartes, but going beyond the "acceptedness-construct" which is perhaps THE most underscored part of phenomenological thought: the everyday accepting of a world and our being here without a moment's thought that this can be questioned at all, this "throwness" into a world. Fink's Meditation is a fascinating read. The trouble lies in understanding him because he works within an established mode of thinking. Fink sounds almost mystical. It is a Cartesian approach, this reduction, an attempt to first declare what is indubitable, and the attempt to do this takes inquiry down to the very wire of phenomenological presence, to where thought itself emerges, but still, entirely devoted to description in the most honest way. We no longer take causal explanations as the final word. One may think of the brain as a causal source of a thought, and this it is right to think like this, but when philosophical questions are in play, causality/brain connectivity is question begging, after all, the brain itself IS a phenomenon, meaning in order to conceive of a brain, one has to use a brain, and there is no pov apart from the relation that is NOT phenomenological. The "mirror" theory of a brain delivering the world in which we find brains is absurd. Only conclusion: thought is delivered to us by a brain, but the brain is delivered to us by thought/phenomena (eidetically structured actualities, says Husserl); and we are faced with transcendence of the origin of the thought. This is why phenomenology can sound so impossibly weird. It is because the WORLD is weird, parsecs more weird than people even imagine.


Then religion: Most thinking people are moral relativists, because they can see values throughout history and cultures varying, and analysis into these settings reveals reasons why people believe the way they do, and it has nothing to do with supreme beings descending, deus ex machina, making demands and judgments. So I am a relativist, too, in this vein, and the moral objectivist in my thinking hasn't made a showing yet. What makes, then, feeding Christians to hungry lions wrong? It was considered rather routine at some point in the Roman empire and people watched, presumably for entertainment. What makes it wrong something that exceeds mere attitudes and beliefs and, as anaytic philosophers often think, mere "egocentric commendation" of something? See the way Mackie handles this in his discussion of the "good" in chapter two and note how the term finds no rest. This is because he is absolutely committed to avoiding the simplicity of what is directly there in the, say, being torn apart by lions. All this talk about good sunsets and carving knives and wants and interests and pov's simply assumes that sorting out such complexities is the only approach that can be taken: the contexts in wich we use the term where ambiguities lie and analysis can yield insights that can lead to better arguable position.

But he is not even trying to deal with the world, just the term. It is patently absurd in moral philosophy that wants to understand actuality, like explaining to a plague victim, bleeding sores gangrenous black fingers and toes, that this can all be explained in terms of evolution favoring phenotypic suffering of genotypic random mutations due to its superiority in being conducive to survival and reproduction...which is true, of course, but so incongruous with reality one has to wonder about the purpose beyond the mere curiosity terms' meanings present. But of one does take the world seriously, then ethics and the "good" find their foundational analysis in the world itself, and so, let the world "speak"! Is that event of a knife your kidney really an "egocentric commendation" (with the analytical qualifications Mackie provides assumed. One has to read the chapter) of a knife-free kidney?

Putting analytic infatuation with words aside, and to the world. Pain and pleasure, suffering and happiness, and this entire dimension of our existence is given, not constructed. A question for the scientist: you mean to say that being erupted into existence, so to speak, according to the Big Bang theory (not altogether unchallenged, they say; but nevertheless), and 13 billion years or so later, it just started torturing itself through the agency of human beings (and turtles, dogs and cats, etc.)? There is something comically counterintuitive about this, for being, it would seem, "did" just that, and we are stuck wondering what being IS that would "do" this. Theological justifications and obfuscations off the table. This is a question for a scientific oriented inquiry, so we look at the world, not dogma. You can pretend this question didn't exist, but it is important to see that ethics and the foundation of its normativity rests with what being DOES. It is "doing" this as I speak or write: thought that is mine issues from being, and Derrida calls this the impossible, and the moral commandment not to harm others comes also from being itself, and the suffering of the girl we are talking about has its ethical meaning, but " not that it belongs in the domain of the ethical, but in that it ultimately authorizes every ethical law in general." (Violence and Metaphysics)

What is the engine that runs ethics? It is value. Worth repeating: no value, no ethics. It is in the caring that we even have ethical issues at all. Caring is subjective, so what is the objective counterpart to this: some value in the world, like a hunger or a bliss, in-the-flesh, so to speak. Being "does" this, so our ethics is grounded in the question of being, and being grounded in metaphysics and metaphysics is what this world (physics) is all about; therefore our ethics is just as significant as any biblical narrative could possible make it, in the fabric of things. If there is moral outrage in our midst, it has the gravitas of a divine command.

[Sy Borg]

Sy Borg wrote

How do you mean "a shining simplicity which is prior to all analysis"?

Your issues with analytic philosophy trike me as more related to the conduct of some practitioners than the concepts themselves. A new school in any endeavour tends to have an element that looks down its nose at those engaged in older methods. However, each progression results in another baby going out with the bathwater. There is always something lost.

At the heart of religion is death and its aftermath. And at the heart of that, we re left with just one question that may concern physics, metaphysics or both, that is - are there other dimensions of reality (behind the scenes) in which mentality of some kind may continue being after death? Related to that is the question whether consciousness is local or ubiquitous, eg. Hagelin's universal field and the existence of a non-physical souls.

You will, I expect, notice that the problem with the above (regardless of the physical reality) is attachment to this apparently temporal self. It hardly makes sense since we change throughout our lives without worrying too much about preserving our "former self". The idea of an immutable self is at odds with observed reality. Even if we ignore conditioning and consider the kernel of "youness" that would even be present if you were raised in the wild by wolves, that kernel would be basic, not much more sophisticated than the kernel of a garden snail. At core of each of us is just life blindly wanting to live - the "desire" that Hinduism identifies as a source of suffering.

Shining simplicity? The atman is Brahman? Or, as they say, one already is the Buddha? What happens when one seriously meditates, in the manner described in the Abidhamma? In the Eastern tradition, the Hindu's have more than one yoga. There is jnana yoga, and I think Husserl's reduction is the West's jnana yoga, the yoga of philosophy that leads back to a primordial simplicity, the kind thing romantics like Wordsworth (Intimations of Immortality) or mystics like Walt Whitman poeticized (Heidegger adored Hölderlin) about. I am claiming, arguing, that it is important to remember that our education has almost nothing to say about this kind of thing. Typical: I know what the sun is, and it is not a god, but ths is a negative claim, for which I am grateful to telescopes for. But when I start talking about fusion and the release of atomic energy, is this really "knowledge" of the sun? Or is this rather just a massive quantification project?

There is a reason physics quickly turns into math and other quantitative disciplines. But does this mean the sun (and "the world" which is dealt with in the same way) is a mathematical structure, or that mathematics is an imposition in the apperceptive engagement of dealing with what we call the sun? One always will, and there is no turning back on this, find Kant staring back at you when things turn to basic questions, for to observe is an event, and we are not mirrors of nature. The brain is not a mirror; it MAKES the world, but this doesn't at all mean we must therefore face idealism or solipsism, for nothing could be more clear than the sun is "over there" and it is certainly not me but independent of me in a way that needs to be defined and understood. Hence, phenomenology.

It's ironic but the Sun is so ubiquitous that it's a blind spot. I appreciate your frustration with science, as it does not tend to give the kind of answers you seek. All it does is provide the information from which you can hopefully surmise your answers.

Don't underestimate quantification, though. It can be excellent for providing perspective. For instance, consider the fact that the Sun comprises 99.8% of the solar system's mass. The ancients had little concept of the true situation, with the Sun appearing to them as no bigger than the Moon. Understanding the numbers can bring a whole new perspective, that is, the solar system IS basically the Sun.

Where science misses the mark is the next step, that what we call "the Sun" or "the "Earth" are only their central, most solid components that are readily measurable. Their extended fields and atmospheres are not treated as actually part of them, even though they are permanent parts of the systems. It's the same reasoning that deludes people into thinking we are not part of the Earth, that we are apart from it and living atop it. Anything that is not readily measurable will ten to be less well addressed by science than the readily measurable.

All of this means that the Sun is perhaps not the best example of something being "ever there" because we are essentially a tiny part of it, but I take your point of how solipsism and idealism differ from phenomenology.

But back to the point: The East, call it, says we live in illusion, so what can be made of this? How about a lifetime of conditioning we receive as memory in any occurrent affair, whether it is buttoning my shirt or thinking about philosophy (writing these words). Memory tells me this is this and that is that and the self it captive to this. Meditation terminates memory. And the world is free of it. If the atman really is Brahman, then then question you asks is thereby answered.

So it's essentially taking a mental holiday to rest and shake off the gremlins that build up over time.

Your issues with analytic philosophy trike me as more related to the conduct of some practitioners than the concepts themselves. A new school in any endeavour tends to have an element that looks down its nose at those engaged in older methods. However, each progression results in another baby going out with the bathwater. There is always something lost.

There is something to this, I know, and you could argue that clarity really does have to be a priority in any thinking and analytic philosophers nothing if not devoted to clarity. But my objection lies in that most of what they have to say is trivial vis a vis the breadth and depth of being a human being, and this is because they ignore metaphysics, and therefore ignore the very REAL threshold of finitude's existence. Only those who straddle the fence, like Rorty, are helpful. I can't remember the name of the paper by Strawson, but it dealt with realism, and he argued very convincingly to the conclusion that, well, it sure does seem like accepting the proposition that there are, in a qualified way, real entities that science talks about. And he was right about that, and nobody argues otherwise, and phenomenologists would tend to agree. But pages and pages of thick prose...for that?? Again, I say, removing metaphysics from philosophy is like ...like removing color from sight, and all that is left is black and white clarity.

I get that. It's same problem I have with ChatGPT. Utterly orthodox. Utterly bland. In Australian slang, Chat GPT and analytic philosophy tend to "get off at Redfern".

Ultimately, the point of science and analytic philosophy is not to answer the great questions, but to provide a reliable basis on which to base one's ideas. Without that discipline, people can waste entire lives pursuing pointless lines of thought, eg. Flat-Earthers.

At the heart of religion is death and its aftermath. And at the heart of that, we re left with just one question that may concern physics, metaphysics or both, that is - are there other dimensions of reality (behind the scenes) in which mentality of some kind may continue being after death? Related to that is the question whether consciousness is local or ubiquitous, eg. Hagelin's universal field and the existence of a non-physical souls.

But then, what IS death? What IS the soul? What IS physicality? These terms need to be explored before being used to account for anything, otherwise, the question is begged. Non-physical? Is this a reference to Hegelian rationality that is "real"? Is it that we are in a historical framework that is dialectically conditioned for only certain possibilities (Slavoj Žižek, the renowned Hegelian, talks like this) and we cannot even imagine what reason will disclose about "the nature reason itself" in some future framework of thought? I respond with Kierkegaard, who said of Hegel that he simply forgot that we exist. K was saying that this teleology of historical rationality is itself conceived by reason now, and that if some future historical setting conceived better than ours, this woudl be because it yielded to the non-rational dimension of world. Reason is an empty vessel. The world fills this vessel, speaking loosely, disclosure of the world will not be a rational disclosure, or better: disclosure will be rational, for as they say, if there is anything superior to reason, reason will discover it, but progress will be irrational, for disclosure will have to be about the world and its existence, and existence is a rather useless term, like "matter" or 'reality" are useless, empty, nothing at all, really. What in the world makes the whole affair important? Value. The value dimension of the world, which is IN existence.

Kierkegaard thought Hegel simply forgot that value-in-existence is the true telos of philosophy. Science has never been able to talk about value because it is a metaphysical concept. Hence, Kierkegaard's leap to an affirmation of faith, existential faith that is.

Death is total systemic breakdown. The soul is a collection of attributes. Non-physical refers to information without a physical substrate.

Reason is not an empty vessel, but an incomplete one. I agree that a better science will "yield to the non-rational dimension of world", just as science today is better than that of the past. Other galaxies were thought to be a fantasy, as were black holes. Many ideas that were scoffed at turned out to be correct. Trouble is, science must discriminate. It cannot follow every suggested metaphysical path or it would be wasting its time exploring countless blind alleys.

Thus, one does not expect science to give us all the answers because it's incomplete, and probably always will be.

I am leery about giving such weight to value, though, given that one person's trash is another's treasure.

You will, I expect, notice that the problem with the above (regardless of the physical reality) is attachment to this apparently temporal self. It hardly makes sense since we change throughout our lives without worrying too much about preserving our "former self". The idea of an immutable self is at odds with observed reality. Even if we ignore conditioning and consider the kernel of "youness" that would even be present if you were raised in the wild by wolves, that kernel would be basic, not much more sophisticated than the kernel of a garden snail. At core of each of us is just life blindly wanting to live - the "desire" that Hinduism identifies as a source of suffering.

Thinking about this, what, "feral self" raised by wolves is not the way this thinking proceeds. Nor is it Rouseauian as it believes we humans are good by nature. It begins with the Kantian idea of taking what lies before one there, in the current world, immediately in one's midst, to be treated like an object of scientific inquiry, a phenomenon. To get to this pov, one has to do a reduction, for when we encounter the world we face in the instant of the receiving of it, an already in place perceptual interpretative apparatus, and general science rushes in, like defining the sun in terms of fusion and energic quantifications. But this is not what sits there in the bare perceptual givenness of it. The givenness is there PRIOR to it being taken up AS this of that.
No one speaks of the "immortal soul" except perhaps Kierkegaard or Max Scheler, because eternity, that is time, now is a feature of phenomenological existence of the self; it is not in the self or a "when" the self is in. Time IS the self, a dimension of our very existence. This takes one to ask about subjective time. so called by Husserl. See his Phenomenology if the Consciousness of Internal Time. And of course, Heidegger's Being and TIme.
Long story short, immortality only makes sense if we understand time, and time needs to be removed from, what, things like the equational objectivity of Einstein, or the everyday sense of time, being late for buses and the like, as well as the religious concepts. A person. is. time. Fascinating study, Heidegger's Being and TIme.

You are suggesting a top-down approach but I think the bottom-up "raised by wolves" approach has value in clarifying the situation. No matter what method we use to find our essential self, if we do find it, it's going to be trivial. The Buddhists say it's non-existent - when you delve down far enough there is absolutely nothing - but I suspect that is exaggeration driven by enthusiasm. When it comes to the essential self - the unconditioned self - it's just basic properties - dominant, subordinate, bold, cautious, outgoing, self-contained etc.

As for time being the self, hmm, time would seem more an enemy of the self. The great leveller. Time is essentially entropy, and the self/life is a form that defies entropy, at least for a while.

[Lagayascienza]

Hereandnow Thanks for taking the time to write all that. Your responses have helped me get a feel for phenomenology more quickly than I could have done alone.

For the uninitiated, reading phenomenological philosophy is very hard work until one gets some sort of grip on the terminology/jargon. It's like the early days of learning a foreign language. Even a simple text is difficult because we have to keep going to the dictionary for the meanings of so many words. For the analytically minded, it's takes some effort to come to terms with concepts such as epoché, reduction, eidetic variation, intersubjective verification... But I think I'm getting there. Your responses have helped me get a feel for what I take to be the central idea: the need to come to grips with what is actually "given" in consciousness and, to that end, the need to quieten habitual modes of thought that hinder this so that we can actually see only that which is "given" in consciousness.

A few weeks ago when I first started reading about phenomenology, my inclination was to dismiss the whole business as mere Continental nonsense. That was partly because, as a defender of science and a campaigner against pseudoscience, I got the feeling that you dismissed science as totally misguided. I see now that you do not do that and that it is not contradictory to accept what both science and phenomenology can offer. Of course, I still have lots of questions. For example, I'm still not clear on how, or even whether, the insights of phenomenology are transferable, or how/whether they can be interwoven with science. But I'm now motivated to keep reading in the hope that clarity may come.

Thanks again for your help with this.

[Hereandnow]

Lagayscienza wrote

Thanks again for your help with this.

And thank you for allowing me to indulge.

[Lagayascienza]

Wen you have time Hereandnow, I wonder whether, if you are acquitted with Daniel Dennett's heterophenomenology, you could let me know what you think of it.

Dennet says that:
The total set of details of heterophenomenology, plus all the data we can gather about concurrent events in the brains of subjects and in the surrounding environment, comprise the total data set for a theory of human consciousness. It leaves out no objective phenomena and no subjective phenomena of consciousness

[Lagayascienza]

*acquainted (typo)

Does Dennett take anything from phenomenology in his philosophy of consciousness that you recognise as phenomenology?

[Hereandnow]

Dennet says that:
The total set of details of heterophenomenology, plus all the data we can gather about concurrent events in the brains of subjects and in the surrounding environment, comprise the total data set for a theory of human consciousness. It leaves out no objective phenomena and no subjective phenomena of consciousness

The first thing would be that Dennett has, in the mature attempt to get at the bottom of things, run to science. And to do this is to ....reading Dennett is decidedly mundane. Let's take a look at his "Consciousness Explained":

He will defend a "scientific materialistic theory," so we know where is he stands and where he is going, in general. He takes a condescending tone in the very first pages, preparing the reader for his more objective and serious perspective. Science tends to be derisive of what is not science, which makes sense because the defense is going to be essentially negative, will have to tear down the old confidences, not unlike what Critchley says in his opening lines in his Very Little, Almost Nothing, Death: "Where does philosophy begin? It begins, I believe, in an experience
of disappointment....Not to esteem what we know, and not to be allowed to esteem the lies we should like to tell ourselves."

Anyway, a brain's causal relation to phenomena is never to be called into question. Too obvious. Now, consider Dennett here:

The trouble with brain events, we noticed, is that no matter how closely they “match” the events in our streams of consciousness, they have one apparently fatal drawback: There’s nobody in there watching them. Events that happen in your brain, just like events that happen in your stomach or your liver, are not normally witnessed by anyone, nor does it make any difference to how they happen whether they occur witnessed or unwitnessed.


But no, it is not as if there is no one watching them. This is a critical point: Dennett is going to disillusion us with his very well grouded scientific analyses, but consider that when he says no one is watching, he assuming that if one were to be watcing we would have an unproblematic case of knowledge, and if you're not thinking about epistemic problems, this is true. But take a closer look. If one were to actually wtiness a brain's image of something while examining the interior of a brain (Rorty Mirror of Nature) what would this witnessing be about? Would it be released from the problems that attend any witnessing at all? To witness, and understand, one does not simply "receive incoming information" like some tabula rasa, as if the things magically imparted their nature to us. We interpret. A brain is a brain because long ago in English this term evolved in a matrix of historical conversations about this grey thing in our heads. Watching anything at all, in other words, is an imposition of this interpretative perspective, so though I am not watching my liver right now, if I were to watch it, that would be a temporal disclosure such that the past, my education and the historical genesis of the ideas in the personal inculcation of it, would be brought to bear on the object we call a liver.

It sure does seem like when I witness something, I know it with real clarity, but as Wittgenstein pointed out, there was time in history that wildly divergent thinking was equally as psychologically compulsive. There is no way out of this hermeneutic circle, so called, for the world does not wear it meanings on its sleeve.

Dennett thinks he is taking us to the bottom line of all responsible understanding of the world,. But has he really taken disillusionment to its destination? Its telos? To do this, one has to make the further move into phenomenological analysis.

Moving on....Dennett on dualism: a condescending naivete. Not that Dennett's analytical take is wrong, but it is, as Kierkegaard put it, one myth for another. Now here: "Philosophers and psychologists often use the term phenomenology as an umbrella term to cover all the item." It is clear he is going to move into a discussion of qualia, which he discusses elsewhere at length. He is right, qualia IS a nonsense term, and "pure phenomena", that Husserl et al repeatedly discuss, well, there is nothing "pure" about it, so goes the argument.

I would berate his thinking in exactly the same tone. His trouble is, and this may surprise, he is dogmatically fixated on an interpretative perspective, that he cannot allow the "question", that "piety of thought," as Heidegger put it, to interpose between belief and the world.

Anyway, on to his chapters on phenomenology with "Our experience of the External World": pages of physiology, a reduction of phenomena to physiology. First, always to keep in mind that, as I do like to repeat, these accounts of physicality are ALL of them themselves phenomena. I just want to stop Dennett in his tracks, and take his own derisive and condescending pov and throw it right back at him: Will you please tell me why the very act of reducing the world to scientific nomenclature is in any conceivable way NOT reducible itself to phenomenology? You see, phenomenologists like Heidgger are very, very aware of science andhave nothing but respect for it. But they are telling someone like Dennett, if you want true disillusionment, then you have no choice but to take this to its true finality, and this is a study of actualities as actualities, and this does not mean we escape categorical thinking, which is impossible (to think at all IS to think categorically), but the world is to be taken to its thematic finality , which means we are asking different questions entirely. We are now in a study of the presuppositions of science, not science. This philosophy's proper field.

Ear canals and optics nerves do not simply vanish with presuppositional inquiry, but---and this move is not easy, for most simply because it requires a pulling away from the hold "commonsense" has on us, but are given a new interpretative setting, the kind of thing Dennett takes pride in, removing from our interpretative constitution silly things like Casper the friendly ghost, and the like. I mean, Dennett really does try to insult his way through his analyses, and I am right there behind him! People really need to be better at thinking about things, acquire and analytic attitude---but if you are going move into philosophy, you had better leave your bunny slippers behind (to match his condescension), because science itself is profoundly assailable, when one starts looking into, not its knowledge claims, but the assumptions of its knowledge claims. Where he says: "what we are fooling ourselves about is the idea that the activity of “introspection” is ever a matter of just “looking and seeing.” He invokes Rorty to make the point that phenomenological intuitions are unreliable: "we have privileged access to our own thoughts and feelings, an access guaranteed to be better than the access of any outsider. (“Imagine anyone trying to tell you that you are wrong about what you are thinking and feeling!”) We are either “infallible”—always guaranteed to be right—or at least “incorrigible”—right or wrong, no one else could correct us."

What Dennett is not going to tell you is that Rorty, at the basis of his pragmatism aligns himself with Heidegger! In fact, in his Mirror of Nature, Rorty opens by saying Heidegger is one of the three greatest philosophers of the century (along with Dewey and Wittgenstein, not to mention Kuhn) Rorty by no means is a naturalist at this level of thinking, but he also thinks metaphysics is nonsense, so all we have is natural science, and we are brought to a crossroads in our thinking: Pragmatism is right, I think, and all of our knowledge claims are really pragmatic structures of the conditional if...then. What is a piece of granite? We encounter this in TIme, so it is NOT a thing in the sense science tends to say it is. IT is an EVENT. This is Heraclitus' world, the world of becoming. The scientist's "spatializing" of the world, things being out there, over there, a hundred kilometers from river, are also temporal objects, and this temporality is subjective time, not Einstein's, and this begins with Augustine, through Kant, Kierkegaard, then on to Brentano (whom I haven't read) and Husserl and Heidegger; anyway, it is a major analytical feature of an object qua object. No one has ever witnessed a thing over there in the usual sense, as the thing cannot be dislodged from the recollection-to-anticipation of the event of encountering it. The spatially determined thing "out there" is just an abstraction for the original space/time/affective actuality, all three of which are just general determinative terms for something unspeakable: The primordial givenness of the world, which is where the reduction really takes us, and why I say Buddhism and phenomenology have the same trajectories toward, if not to some impossible non categorical encounter, than to an intimation of the absolute within this radical finitude. Philosophers like Dennett do NOT think like this, because, I suspect, they cannot. Why? The fixity of their attitudes and education. An existential dogmatism that wants to "reduce" the world to a comprehensible standard, and science is this.

You can see I never tire of saying this: Science is causality, microscopes, telescopes and quantification, such that what it is to hear or see is now a systemic complexity, of looking closer, seeing more, and talking about the many intensities and quantities and causal relations. Do these explain more? Absolutely, within their explanatory contexts. But the context of possible explanations never, ever escape the phenomenon. I have to "SEE the eye" to make all those physiological descriptions. Dennett, of course, understands this in a basic way, but is dismissive because he wants his reduction to be complete, holding at bay the very possibility of metaphysics, and this is where he and Rorty and Dewey and almost Wittgenstein, are aligned.

But not Heidegger and certainly not the other more daring phenomenologists.

There is in phenomenology, a kind of dramatic move. It is the kind of thing that set Rorty to stop teaching philosophy, and move into literature. A look at Rorty: literature takes one closer to the intimacies of what it is to be a person, closer to the " bare feels" true engagement that lies outside of science. But since he is certain there can be nothing to "non propositional knowing" (truth is made not discovered, and truth is a property of the proposition, adn there are no propositions out there in the trees and rocks and clouds. You see how his mind works: a true localization of things like science would have it. Thought and propositions here, that thing over there. Truth only comes into existence when one attends to a thing. Otherwise, it is not metaphysics, but really nothing at all, which is the Wittgenstein-inspired pov of analytic philosophers. The assumption that there is a world out there that science speaks of, independent of our cognitive apparatus is just nonsense. It may be weird to get a feel for this, but Rorty at once abides by science as the only wheel that rolls, but science's claims at the basic level are just nonsense. Because there ARE no basic claims like this. We face Heidegger's nothing, or, Kant's noumena, which comes down to nothing.

So I asked why Rorty and Dennett cannot think like in the mysterious terms underscored by post Husserlian phenomenologists and I said it was education and a fixity in their convictions. But I bring the matter then back to why anyone would be interested in going through all the trouble to read something as hard and counterintuitive as continental philosophy. I think, again, one simply has to already be committed to go further into what it is to be a living person. I opened with Critchley saying philosophy begins with disappointment, but really this isn't right. Philosophy begins with outrage and rebuke, and it ends with disappointment in the hands of analysis that forgets the outrage, that is, the outrage of religion. Religion is not grounded in an analytic of the physicality of a brain. Two things, I have been arguing: the first is the impossibility of epistemology. This should stun the hell our of Dennett: Where is the dedication to the detailed descriptions of the anatomy of the eye and ear now? Where is that confidence? This epistemic question goes to everything, for "to know" underlies all one can ever raise as an issue. Think of it like a scienctist that takes a thesis' paradigms, moves into the soundness, the agreement in details, then, Oh no! It all falls apart right at the very foundation. One goes back to the drawing board to see what the nature of the problem is, back to the essential assumptions. Here is where one finds phenomenology.

ON the matter of his heterophenomenology, let me get back to you.

[Lagayascienza]

Thanks, Hereandnow for that detailed response. I will need to read it closely.

I read Dennett's Consciousness Explained some years back and will need to reread that, too.

In case you have not read them, I managed to find links to two free pdfs on Wikipedia's Heterophenomenology page in which Dennett explains his Heterophenomenology. The two papers are:

Dennett, D. (October 2003). "Who's On First? Heterophenomenology Explained" (PDF). Journal of Consciousness Studies. 10 (9–10): 19–30.

and

Dennett, D. "Heterophenomenology Reconsidered", May 31, 2006

I'm interested to see how Dennett thinks the subjective first person accounts of phenomenology can be used along with the data of science in explaining consciousness

[Lagayascienza]

I also downloaded to my Kindle Husserl's Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy – First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology

It's not easy.

[Hereandnow]

It's not easy.

No argument there.

[Hereandnow]

Sy Borg wrote
It's ironic but the Sun is so ubiquitous that it's a blind spot. I appreciate your frustration with science, as it does not tend to give the kind of answers you seek. All it does is provide the information from which you can hopefully surmise your answers.

Don't underestimate quantification, though. It can be excellent for providing perspective. For instance, consider the fact that the Sun comprises 99.8% of the solar system's mass. The ancients had little concept of the true situation, with the Sun appearing to them as no bigger than the Moon. Understanding the numbers can bring a whole new perspective, that is, the solar system IS basically the Sun.

Where science misses the mark is the next step, that what we call "the Sun" or "the "Earth" are only their central, most solid components that are readily measurable. Their extended fields and atmospheres are not treated as actually part of them, even though they are permanent parts of the systems. It's the same reasoning that deludes people into thinking we are not part of the Earth, that we are apart from it and living atop it. Anything that is not readily measurable will ten to be less well addressed by science than the readily measurable.

All of this means that the Sun is perhaps not the best example of something being "ever there" because we are essentially a tiny part of it, but I take your point of how solipsism and idealism differ from phenomenology.

I don't underestimate quantification, but I do want to know what a knowledge claim in a scientific thesis really is. It is no different from any other knowledge claim, the everyday kind like knowing what shoe strings are when I tie my shoes.

I agree that it is important to distinguish phenomenology from idealism, but how this is done is difficult to follow, because one is asked both to accept that the world and its objects remain apart and distinct from me, but also that this separateness is bound to consciousness and the temporal sturcture of experience. In other words, the independence of thing cannot be absolute; it has to be connected to the observer in order to be acknowledged, for there must be something that makes knowledge possible. But again, the distance between me and this pencil is obvious, and it still stands as something that itself is not just an idea of the mind, for ideas of the mind are clearly not separated from me by this distance, making the distance a descriptive feature of the encounter. Its "over-thereness" is unchanged. Someone like Kant will point out that objects in space and time out there bear the mark of subjectivity: This cup has geometrical features that are, as he says, apriori (necessary and universal) and apriority belongs to logic and logic is not supposed to be IN the things. OR take causality: why is it impossible for an object to move be itself? Causality cannot be an empirical concept because of this impossibility applying to things "out there."

Phenomenologists take this in different ways, but it is generally taken that an object's objective standing cannot be denied as, again, it is an undeniable descriptive feature, and phenomenology is essentially descriptive.

But they are working in the tradition begun by Kant, as I see it, beginning with the insistence that to know something requires some connectivity between the known and the knower. (See how miserably analytics does with Gettier problems which simply ignores this connectivity, and sticks with science's causality. It is a tragic attempt to make sense of epistemology.)

Regarding measuring, it is interesting to consider that this essential connectivity between ourselves and the earth could very well be metaphysical, and I base this on the epistemic problem I raise over and over. First thing that comes to mind is why analytic philosophers are willing to ignore this. It is because the ONLY solution lies with metaphysics, that is, a condition that is unseen by science (and everydayness) but must hold in order to make sense of things. It goes simply like this: you spend enough time working out this simple epistemic impossibility, and you are left with seeking an accounting outside of causality (many philosophers, anglo American ones and Brits, stick with causality through thick and thin, even though it makes no sense in this matter. See those Gettier problems and attempted solutions. Patently absurd, because they forget that P, in S knows P, can never be disentangled from belief and justification. Justification IS PART of P. This is the only way to solve this). But what could this possibly be? A physical relation that is acausal??

Only one alternative, really, and this is the proximity of the known object to the knower that has no "distance at all, which the relation in the immediate apprehension and the connection is an extention of S itself: I know P because there is an abiding unity between me and P. So back to your empirical observation on what "deludes people into thinking we are not part of the Earth, that we are apart from it and living atop it." I thought this brilliant, and right, this foundational unity Keeping in mind that if we cannot be separated from the earth, nor can the earth be separated from the sun or anything else for that matter.

Of course, one has to be careful with the metaphysical claim that we are at one with the earth which is how we can know things about it, and it is important NOT to contrive a lot of bad new ageish thinking about it.

[Lagayascienza]

I'm trying to get past, or perhaps into, Husserl's transcendental idealism. He seems to be saying that mental and spiritual reality possess their own reality independent of any physical basis. I find that really difficult to take on board. And I find it difficult to "bracket" the naturalistic understanding of things. But my reading in phenomenology is still in its early days and so I intend to persevere.

I have read elsewhere that Contemporary phenomenology has for the most part abandoned Husserl’s dream of finding indubitable foundations for knowledge. So I keep feeling the temptation to jump forward from Hussel's Ideas to thinkers such as Heidegger, Sartre, Camus and others who disagreed with Husserl on certain things but who took what they thought was useful from Husserl and went on to develop their own ideas. I will try to resist that temptation so as to get as clear a picture as possible of what Husserl is actually proposing. But he is damned difficult to read.

Why does Continental philosophy, and commentary thereon, often feel like trying to walk through waist-deep treacle? It's so damned prolix! Meaning gets lost in viscous verbosity. One wants to exclaim: So many words to say so little! I don’t understand why, if there is something important to say, it can’t be said in prose that anyone can understand. At its worst it seems like obfuscation rather than explanation. It reminds me of reading the paper, Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, which was published in Social Text and which resulted in what became known as the Sokal Affair. At first glance this paper seems deep and meaningful but, to anyone with even a shallow understanding of science, it soon reveals itself as nonsense. I got the same feeling when I read Heidegger years ago and some modern Continental philosophy today.

When I read analytic philosophy by, say, Russel, Quine, Aye and Mackie, their meaning is more or less immediately clear.

Maybe it’s an acquired taste that will take me time to develop.

[Lagayascienza]

Sorry if the above seems off topic. The OP was "On the nature of religion". But, since Hereandnow argues for a phenomenological understanding of religion, I felt that I needed to get some handle on phenomenology first, rather than try to discuss religion from a purely analytical POV without any understanding of how phenomenology would address the question.

[Hereandnow]

Lagayscienza wrote
I'm trying to get past, or perhaps into, Husserl's transcendental idealism. He seems to be saying that mental and spiritual reality possess their own reality independent of any physical basis. I find that really difficult to take on board. And I find it difficult to "bracket" the naturalistic understanding of things. But my reading in phenomenology is still in its early days and so I intend to persevere.

I have read elsewhere that Contemporary phenomenology has for the most part abandoned Husserl’s dream of finding indubitable foundations for knowledge. So I keep feeling the temptation to jump forward from Hussel's Ideas to thinkers such as Heidegger, Sartre, Camus and others who disagreed with Husserl on certain things but who took what they thought was useful from Husserl and went on to develop their own ideas. I will try to resist that temptation so as to get as clear a picture as possible of what Husserl is actually proposing. But he is damned difficult to read.

Why does Continental philosophy, and commentary thereon, often feel like trying to walk through waist-deep treacle? It's so damned prolix! Meaning gets lost in viscous verbosity. One wants to exclaim: So many words to say so little! I don’t understand why, if there is something important to say, it can’t be said in prose that anyone can understand. At its worst it seems like obfuscation rather than explanation. It reminds me of reading the paper, Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, which was published in Social Text and which resulted in what became known as the Sokal Affair. At first glance this paper seems deep and meaningful but, to anyone with even a shallow understanding of science, it soon reveals itself as nonsense. I got the same feeling when I read Heidegger years ago and some modern Continental philosophy today.

When I read analytic philosophy by, say, Russel, Quine, Aye and Mackie, their meaning is more or less immediately clear.

Maybe it’s an acquired taste that will take me time to develop.

More of less immediately clear, the Russell, Quine, et al, because they leave alone epistemology and ontology, or they reduce this to available thinking. Before Russell there was Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, and before this was Hegel and the post Kantians and before this was Kant, and then on to the preKantian thought that just prepared the stage for Kant. I tried to read Sartre before Kant (though Heidegger many years later) and understood one thing truly, which was his Nausea, the existential biographical (your first person) novel of surreal encounters with the world, culminating in the famous chestnut tree encounter; a tree? No accident: the Buddha was enlightened under the Bodhi tree. I visited this tree's descendent while in India. Anyway, the one thing is that understood existential alienation. Everything else was lost on me. Kant, then, was radically different, like reading a science text, but the examined world of Kant's was outside of science, and there was terms like apiority, aposteriority, analyticity, synthesis, and that most weird word of all, the transcendental. Kant really does define the playing field for phenomenology, which is part of a post Kantian tradition.

They say this continental tradition, Kant through Derrida, then post Derridaians, is grandfathered by Kant (Husserl being the father?) and I think one reason it all seems so foreign to meaningful thought is perhaps you haven't read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Why not do what I did: audit a course on Kant's Critique? I watched a Youtube of a lecture series given by Hubert Dreyfus on Heidegger, and then, why audit a course when you have the course right before you on Youtube. I have "taken" many such courses. Everything is on Youtube, from Wittgenstein to Derrida to Jean Luc Marion. Even Michel Henry, Jean Luc Marion. But these guys assume you've read Kant and Husserl and Heidegger; but still, listening to someone talk about their basic thinking is very helpful and inspiring. I mean, what does one do with a term like "transcendental ipseity"? Such a term doesn't begin to make sense without Levinas' Alterity and Transcendence and Levinas is post Husserlian and studied Jean Wahl's Human Existence and Transcendence.

I know this to be true: if one only studies analytic philosophy, one will be a vacuous atheist, without realizing one has been working in a tradition of thinking that has explicitly turned away from what philosophy is really all about, which is our metaphysics. I would suggest reading Heidegger's Concerning Technology but...but then I do suggest this, but one has to read twice the introduction. There is a lot Heidegger invents because he wants to be free of traditional assumptions, and in doing this, he created a new vocabulary, and these words are now in play in all of post Heideggerian thinking, this in turn is talked about in critical ways, and to do this, there is yet another generation of nomenclature, which itself will be examined. Heidegger's "feast of thought" as he believed that language (and recall I mentioned Rorty whose book opened with "truth is not discovered, but made) is the crucible where truth is "made" but in the openness (gelassenheit) of the world.

Which reminds me: I have a vast library of philosophy, all on pdf. Hundreds of files of books, essays papers, certainly more than a thousand, and far beyond the mere collected works of Husserl and Heidegger. Not everything ever written (Jean Wahl, for example, I found in Kindle), but fathomless! You are welcome to it if you can tell me how to give it to you. I got it for free long ago through a bit torrent. Rarely do I have to buy anything; quite the contrary, what is there on, say, Levinas, the papers that make essential connections and examine essential ideas open issues I wouldn't otherwise know were there.

Again, tell me how to send them to you, if interested. It is, btw, not just continental philosophy, but analytic as well.

[Hereandnow]

Lagayscienza wrote
Sorry if the above seems off topic. The OP was "On the nature of religion". But, since Hereandnow argues for a phenomenological understanding of religion, I felt that I needed to get some handle on phenomenology first, rather than try to discuss religion from a purely analytical POV without any understanding of how phenomenology would address the question.

What I do is post around for a bit see if anyone has interest, usually find someone, talk about my thoughts, then I put down posting for six months, a year while I read, that is, study the texts in my possession and on the the internet. I occasionally come out just to write, since my paper writing days are over (unless I feel so inspired), and argue about what I have been reading about.