I'm just not sure that there is, in fact, an alinguistic given. Not everything is language, but we are the sorts of creatures who are deeply integrated with linguistic practices... it seems a stretch to think that we can bracket away language in looking at objects. They're all named and have differentiations and everything. We can pretend that the object we see doesn't have all of the "naturalistic" predicates pertaining to it and see where our mind takes us -- but I think that's about it. That's just a suspension of judgment, though, and not a mental ability to see things as they are absent a worldview. Or, at least, that's how I'd put it. — Moliere

Bracketing should not be looked at as a logical procedure, I argue, as if the object can only be seen if language contributes nothing to the perception. I hold that one can, in the temporal dynamic of receiving the object, acknowledge that which is not language within the contextual possibilities language gives us, and this is evidenced simply in the manifest qualities of the encounter, visual, tactile of whatever. to me it is as clear as a bell: the taste of this pear is not a language event, notwithstanding attendant structures the understanding deploys in the event of the experience. The trick seems to be to overcome the default reduction of the pear to the familiar. This is habit (this goes back to Kierkegaard who actually thought this habitual perceptual event was what original/hereditary SIN was about. Weird to think like this, but his Concept of Anxiety originally holds a great many of the century later themes for continental philosophy).

I think philosophy has thought its way out of "direct apprehension" of the world, and in doing so, undercuts the actuality before us. Philosophers have "talked their way out of" the actuality of the world. But this leads to the core of this argument: how do language and the world "meet"? This is no place for a thesis, so I'll say I agree with Heidegger and others who say language is part and parcel of the objects we experience, and it is only by a perverse abstraction to think of them as apart. But there is nothing in this that says language and any of its descriptive analytic accounting, is the sole source of the understanding's grasp of the world. I don't agree with Rorty, in other words, when he rejects non propositional knowledge;I think rather, non propositional knowledge occurs IN propositional knowledge. I think of Hume saying reason has no content, and would just as soon annihilate human existence as not. It is an empty vessel, and the meanings are unrestrained by this. God could appear in all her glory, and language's restrictions wouldn't bat an eye.

Also, I'll note, I don't think there are foundations to science, so losing its foundations isn't something I mind. Science isn't as grandiose as Husserl puts it, in my view. Which might go some way to making sense of our views here: — Moliere

You are certainly not alone in this. But Husserl is clearly NOT defending scientific foundationalism. Just the opposite. Science is a contingent enterprise, for it takes no interest in examining its own presuppositions. Prior to talk about timespace, there is Heidegger's (or even Kant's) temporal ontology, and Husserl's Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time. It is an analysis of the structure of experience at the presuppositional level of inquiry.What Husserl thinks is so grand is not empirical science, and repeatedly emphasizes this. It is the intuitive givenness of the world that is taken up by and underlying science.

I agree that givens in the world just are. And if they cannot be spoken, then what does metaphysics have left to say? — Moliere

That is a good point. This is why I argue for a value ontology. Redness as such really has no independent epistemic intimation of what it is. But the pure phenomenon of ethics and aesthetics does, and Wittgenstein agrees, sort of. "The good is what I call divinity," he wrote (Value and Culture). Pain itself constitutes an injunction not to do that, whatever it is. What of pleasure, love, happiness? This kind of thing bears the injunction to do such things encourage these. To me, this is simple, obvious. It is not that the world speaks, but one has to see that an ethical question takes one beyond facts, and so, what is the difference between what is factual and what is ethical/aesthetic? The answer lies in a value reduction whereby facts are suspended or bracketed. The essence of the ethics is this value-residuum. I say Kant did the same thing with reason.

Why is value and ethics grounded in metaphysics? That is a hard question.

This kind of inquiry is metaethical as it tries to isolate the value dimension of ethical affairs. This "good" of "bad" of happiness and suffering. Consider how Kant had to build an argument that ultimately posted transcendence as the metaphysical ground for pure reason. This is because, and I defer to early Wittgenstein again, there is a complete indeterminacy at the terminal end of inquiry. Value issues from this indeterminacy, which I call metaphysics.

This line of thinking is stubbornly resilient critique, because it puts the onus of justification on the world and its presence or the Being of beings. if you prefer. It is an appeal to actuality. I do not expect, nor have I gotten, nods of approval.

Hmm. I suspect there's a very healthy dose of value and meaning making within secular humanism and environmentalism, surely as robust and arrogant as any overtly transcendent spiritual system? — Tom Storm

But value as such is not very mysterious and no one likes to talk about it. What is it, in the final analysis, that makes bad things bad and good things good? Factually speaking, there is nothing there, so where and what is it, this, what G E Moore called "non natural property"? Wittgenstein famously said there is no such thing and value; and if there were, it would have no value. But he also identified divinity with the Good. He insisted this was strictly off limits to discussion, and when the Vienna Circle met, he would turn his chair to the wall if they started talking about ethics.
Sure, we talk about value all the time, but philosophically, can sense be made of it, this mysterious, non natural property of the good and the bad in our affairs?

Surely this would need philosophy (and a particular type of philosophy at that) to be more broadly valued. How does complex philosophy of this kind move from a narrow subculture of specialised interest (where disagreement is the norm) and become anything approaching a cultural preoccupation and new way of 'seeing'?

Given your views on phenomenology and the ineffable how do you determine what is effable and what is not and why does it matter? — Tom Storm

As you know, that is a really tall order, and it requires a really tall philosophical thesis to rise to the occasion. Best place to start here is Husserl Cartesian Meditations. You may be a bit shocked by what he has to say. A snippet:

As we go on meditating in this manner and along this line, we
beginning philosophers recognize that the Cartesian idea of a
science (ultimately an all-embracing science) grounded on an
absolute foundation, and absolutely justified, is none other than
the idea that constantly furnishes guidance in all sciences and
in their striving toward universality whatever may be the
situation with respect to a de facto actualization of that idea

What he has in mind can, I think, perhaps rests with this single intuition: One can attack any thesis, any proposition, essentially the way Descartes did. But can you doubt the merely descriptive just being there? This is not leading to Descartes affirmation of the cogito. It is much broader, this affirmation that one is in an indubitable intuitive world of presence. Not I think, therefore I am; but, everything IS there before me; therefore everything IS apodictically grounded in an intuition of pure phenomenological presence. This, he argues, underlies as the universal presuppositional basis for all empirical science, and he wants make this intuitive horizon of our existence the foundational science for philosophical inquiry.
In a qualified way, he is on to something very important. This goes to metaethics. E.g., one cannot doubt one is in pain. One can doubt the propositional content, the veracity of the facts, and granted that there are ambiguous examples of pain, but in cases of unambiguous pain, as occasioned by being stabbed in the kidney, say, one is witnessing an absolute. And it is not some tautological apriority; it is existential, and this is supposed to be impossible, the kind of things miracles are made of.

Just to note, I don't think "wanting" implicates "true". Because religious beliefs are never amenable to methods of knowledge-generation, like ever, while they could be true -- they'll never be known. — Moliere

I think religion is just as amenable to knowledge generation as anything else; it is just that religion needs to be rendered clear in terms of what it addresses that is in the world, that is actual. I hold it that popular religion is nothing less than the narrative response to the metaethical question, what is the good and bad of ethical problems? I think religion removed from its incidental encumbrances such as Who Saves Who and Why, and all the rest, has a existential core to it. Notice how ethics and religion would vanish if the question of good and bad were settled foundationally. Religion, properly understood, is the metaphysics of the ethical good and bad, the source of what we are calling ineffability. Questions about the Real, what consciousness is, the relation between thought and the world, and on and on, are dramatically overshadowed by questions of our suffering and delight.

I feel like I've found a kindred spirit, but I'll admit I think I'm now on the materialist side of things. And not as an inference, but as a choice. I think the materialist way of looking at the world makes us better, for the kinds of creatures we are. (we can sorta glimpse that there may be more, but usually, the "more" makes us do bad things) — Moliere

Not sure I follow. As I see it, materialism takes what is a metaphysics of the Real of "out there" things, and applies it to mind, affectivity and moods, inquiry, language; but how does it explain any of this given that these are not revealed at all AS material. In fact, I cannot see how material is delivered to us at all as a working concept, except as a stand in for other thinks one doesn't really want to go into at the time. You know, grab your materials and run! If anything is a philosophical nonsense term, it's material substance: never been witnessed.

My way of thinking is that if something is an accounting in metaphysics, then it's already something which we can only decide upon based on our feelings on the matter. Want to live forever? Sure, we're immortal. Want to note how we don't? Well, sure, we're mortal.

Like, literally, you could say anything, and as long as people like what you say then it'll be counted as true.

So the brain IS -- immortality. Or whatever religious belief you want.

EDIT: Just to note, I don't think "wanting" implicates "true". Because religious beliefs are never amenable to methods of knowledge-generation, like ever, while they could be true -- they'll never be known. — Moliere

Metaphysics, I argue, is the foundational indeterminacy of our existence. Many roads to Rome here, but take any concept that has meaning in our world, put it to the test and inquire about it, following inquiry down the rabbit hole in the search for something that is not questionable, that is absolute and as an underpinning to your concept, guarantees its veracity, or reality. You will not find this, BUT, you will find intimations of such things. As with value, discoverable in our ethics and aesthetics. One example I have won out, but makes the point with poignancy: put a lighted match to your finger for a few seconds. Now ask, why is it morally wrong to do this to another person (or you cat)? Words may be there at the ready for you to say this, but it is not the words that address the question. I is the pain. What is pain? A given, a preanalytic alinguistic given. As if the world were "speaking" the principle, don't do this!

But givens in the world cannot be spoken. They just are. Meet metaphysics. It is not some distant speculative notion, conceived in the imagination. It is the hard, arguably the hardest, because understanding is above the common course of thinking, reality. to me, it has its power revealed in the most powerful encounters with the world: like being sentenced to the stake's flames, for midnight trysts in a forest's alluring mysteries, and screaming to God for deliverance.
Not to put you off, but such things are the Real we seek, when we ask philosophy's most imposing questions.

This may be limited characterization of Anglo American philosophy. W. V. Quine, one who belongs is such a tradition, said the following in Word and Object, "There are, however, philosophers who overdo this line of thought, treating ordinary language as sacrosanct. They exalt ordinary language to the exclusion of one of its own traits: its disposition to keep on evolving." — Richard B

But the evolving he has in mind follows science's lead. Causal explanations of
psychology are to be sought in physiology, of physiology in biology, of biology in chemistry,
and of chemistry in physics—in the elementary physical states. From Facts of the Matter (pp168-69) he writes, Causal explanations of psychology are to be sought in physiology, of physiology in biology, of biology in chemistry, and of chemistry in physics—in the elementary physical states.

"As Christopher Hookway succinctly puts it, “for Quine, the physical facts are all the facts." (from David Golumbia's QUINE, DERRIDA, AND THE QUESTION OF PHILOSOPHY)

As a non-philosopher I find this is dense and hard to follow, but very interesting.

It sounds like you are advocating for a metaphysical, shall we even say, 'faith based' belief? But obviously not in the traditional sense.

In essence, you seem to be saying that analytic philosophy's approach is too narrow and limiting and serves to keep metaphysics safely at bay and 'the unfamiliar world and its stunning issues' contained. And you are suggesting that the future of philosophy and some notion of transcendence may be found in using the phenomenological method and the metaphysics it 'opens up' to our awareness (sorry if the language is clumsy). Is this a fair summary?

What is it that you think lies beyond the censorious methodologies of analytic philosophy? Where do suppose the phenomenological approach takes human beings for it to be called a 'new religion'? — Tom Storm

Sorry if this is hard to follow. I guess a person eventually becomes the what he reads.

My take on religion and philosophy is at a glance, pretty simple. the world is moving into an era of radical disillusionment, and the old narratives are simply not sustainable. What we see in the lying and cheating in politics is in part the death throes of popular religion, as believers become desperate in an increasingly unbelieving world.

You know, back in the sixties many scientists actually believed religion would simply die out. But this will not happen. For religion has an existential grounding, not just an historical one, and this lies with ethics and value. Science cannot touch these issues, and there is a strong tendency to redefine them to fit what physical science can say. But ethics and value are the MOST salient features of our being here in the world, and I don't think this can be argued about. If it was not for this dimension of our world, we would be as very complex sticks and stones.

Religion is, at root, "exclusively" about this very dimension of our existence. It is hard to see this given all of the history and metaphysics, but ethics and value is what religion is ALL about. Not even a challenging claim, as I see it. Phenomenology is a way to isolate essential things int he world and give them analysis at the foundational level of what they are. Kant was the first (?) phenomenologist as he took the givenness of experience and abstracted pure reason as a structural feature of our existence. It was there, everywhere in everything we encountered; i.e., part of its essential structure so that in order to be a human experience at all, it had to be invested with reason. As I see it, the same is true form value, only here, we have abstracted to the meaning of things, and not dictionary meanings, but the concrete meanings that give the world its "impossible" dimension. Wittgenstein wouldn't talk about it. this is a man who went to war with the intended purpose of facing death! Meaning, or value-based meaning, was paramount to him, that is, he felt the world very deeply and he had to know. Such an interesting person, brilliantly analytic, but so passionate! Few ever like him.

Anyway, in the end, religion will not parish because what it is about is an integral part of our being here. In the structure of our existence, there is the openness of metaphysics; ethics and value facing this openness insists on consummation and remedy. The next religious phase of our philosophical evolution will be to prioritize ethics and value. As I see it, Husserl's epoche lays a foundation for what will happen, for it is a Cartesian move inward, and here, I argue (as best I can) this leads to a radical unfolding of subjectivity. What this is about and what the argument is has its beginning just here. The more I read post or neo Husserlian thinking, the more I am convinced.

I believe that there are limits to what language can explain about the word because of the intellectual limits of the human brain, in that language cannot transcend the mind. Language doesn't have a power that is not given to it by the mind. — RussellA

I understand what you're saying about language, but brain talk used to explain language's limitations has a serious problem. I won't labor the point, but brains are language, too. So they get their meaning from the contexts in which we talk about brains, and outside of contextual identities, it loses meaning. So there must be something else, some other explanatory means that can account for brains AMONG the trees and tables and coffee cups of the world. In other words, brain talk is not foundational.

And if you are defending a physicalist view about the world, then the thesis is just untenable, unless you can explain epistemic connectivity between brains and objects in a physicalist setting with out abandoning physicalism itself.

Perhaps neither the anti-reductionist Phenomenology nor the reductionist Cartesian method can be used by themselves. Both lead to problems. The Cartesian method suffers from treating the world as a set of objects interacting with each other. Phenomenology suffers from rejecting rationalism, relying on an intuitive grasp of knowledge, and free of intellectualising.

Taking the analogy of art, a complete understanding of a Derain requires both an intellectualism of the objects represented within the painting and an intuitive grasp of the aesthetic artistic whole. IE, a synthesis of both the Cartesian and the Phenomenologist. — RussellA

You sound close to things Heidegger says, that the world and its concepts are "of a piece". I think this right, with emphasis! But on the issue of ineffability, I also think there is nothing precluded in this regarding novel and extraordinary experiences in which there is an intimation of deeper, more profound insights about our Being here. Descartes and his substance talk leads to trouble, but the direction for greater more "epistemically proximal" apprehensions of what we call reality toward our interiority makes sense to me.

Materialism takes an objective model and applies it across the board, but this leads to an existential alienation, as if what we really are is forever distant in t he "out thereness" of things, and one could argue that this kind of thinking in the modern age, so bound to its objectifying methods, is what has led to the crisis of identity.

What can I say but that:

This passage has an ineffable quality of sophistry

Thank you for the list! — Richard B

Sorry about that. Henry is pretty out there. The basic philosophical idea is this: When you face the world with understanding, it is not that the world is sitting there telling you what it is. What makes the world the world is your history of experiences, and this is what separates your world from a "blooming and buzzing" infant's world. But if it is education that informs the understanding, then how is it that the this education can ever access the "out there" of the world as it really is, given that the understanding is all about this stream of recollection? Sure, there is something before me, a tree or a couch, but isn't this recognition of what these are just the occasion for memories to be brought to bear in the specific occasion, and the palpable things of the world in their "really what they are" ness just an impossible concept; impossible because to have it as an an object at all is to be beheld AS a kind of regionalized set of memories, you know, memories about couches kick the moment you see a couch and there is no "in between" time to catch the couch in all its "pure presence". To perceive at all is to, with humans, with language taking up the world AS this language phenomenon.

Husserl thinks it is possible for a person to stand apart from the naturalistic attitude in which everything just moves along in the usual fashion, and couches are there as couches with no question, and insert a kind of conscious divide that allows the "intuitive actuality" of the occasion of encountering the couch to be recognized, as if one could SEE the world as it really is with the natural tendency to just go along suspended.

It is a very strong claim. Most think it impossible. But it goes directly to the issue of ineffability, for what is really on the table here is whether it makes sense to talk like this at all. For me, in t he meditating mind in which one allows memory, not to put too fine a point on it, to fall away, there occurs a crtain uncanny freedom, and in this freedom the world becomes a very different place, as if what was there all along had been forgotten in the naturalistic attitude.

This state of mind is proximal to what the issue of ineffability is all about. It sounds like sophistry, or as others have put it, the "seduction of language," when reading Henry because he is deeply embedded in the scholarly works of the neoHusserlian thinking. These guys just assume.

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Please list the presuppositions that I have to consciously dismiss that give me the familiarity of the world in a perceptual event. — Richard B

Speaking generally, consider what Michel Henry has to say about the the four principles of phenomenology. It is a movement toward pure givenness:

The first—“so much appearance, so much being”—is borrowed from the Marburg School. Over against this ambiguous proposition, owing to the double signification of the term “appearance,” we prefer this strict wording: “so much appearing, so much being.”1 The second is the principle of principles. Formulated by Husserl himself in §24 of Ideen I, it sets forth intuition or, more precisely, “that every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition”2 and thus for any particularly rational statement. In the third principle, the claim is so vehement that it clothes itself in the allure of an exhortation, even a cry: “zu den Sachen selbst!” The fourth principle was defined considerably later by Jean-Luc Marion in his work Reduction and Givenness, but its importance hits upon the entirety of phenomenological development as a hidden presupposition that is always already at work. It is formulated thus: “so much reduction, so much givenness.”

Henry comes after Heidegger and was well aware of the criticism regarding having a "pure experience" of phenomena. But this is a methodological and descriptive thesis, not a deductive argument. What is "pure" lies in the unfolding, not in what the concept says. the question is, can one make this dramatic move of severance from ordinary experience?

The list you mention would be everything, as I see it, that would encourage the assumption of knowledge in which the seeing passes over the presence of the phenomenon and into our "consummate ordinariness". Husserl wanted to get "zu den Sachen selbst!' Back to the things themselves!

Reminds me of Monet who said he wished he could be made blind from birth, and then to have his sight given to him so he could see with a truly innocent eye.

Anyway, it is hard to argue about. Not really far off from what Kierkegaard called this the beginning of original/inherited sin: when self consciousness makes one aware of the world, as if for the first time. He thought this was a rudimentary step toward redemption.

If knowing is a justified true belief, I don't know there is a chasm. I believe there is and I can justify my belief that there is. I infer there is, but I don't know there is as I don't know whether or not my belief is true. — RussellA

The rub lies in the justification. What are you tryin to justify? What is being argued here is simple: how is it that epistemic connectivity can occur between two objects, a brain and my couch? Justify this. If this proves impossible, and it is, then you have to reassess the basis of your ontology. You will have to turn to phenomenology, which is about the Totality of our existence, and not just an aggregate of localized arguments that is found in analytic thinking.

Hrm, I feel the exact opposite. Phenomenology is a potential route to giving scientific explanations for religious feelings -- if we understand the structures of consciousness, then we'd have theories by which we can understand how people have visions, and such.

To me phenomenology shows how experience is a rich place for exploring the limits of language -- it's able to objectify what isn't, strictly, an object and make us able to communicate about general patterns of experience (at least, insofar that phenomenology isn't just a nonsense, a solipsistic invention for someone by themself -- a possibility, by all means, but it seems too intelligible to me for that) — Moliere

Look at phenomenology as a presuppositional analysis, and just that, of what we experience in the usual way. I certainly won't bore you with what they say, and this would be Kant through Heidegger (and while I have read a lot of it, I am by no means an expert) but will simply point out that Richard Rorty thought Heidegger was one of the three greatest philosophers of the 20th century, and this was a very busy time for philosophy. Rorty is important here because he really understood, though in an arguable way, continental philosophy, and he wrote extensively about and with and against analytic philosophers (like Davidson, Putnam, et al). He was strongly influenced by Thomas Kuhn whose Structures of Scientific Revolutions showed how one could explain science's progress in a way that kept theory really more about itself and less about the way the world revealed itself. He wrote about Heidegger and Derrida with this exact "distance" kept away from science's faith in empirical work's ability to "reveal" properties about he world, and defended, and this is and has been a very important revelation to me, the idea that there is noway anything out there can get "in here" (the brain).

Of course, he talked like this to simplify the strong claim he made that truth is made, not discovered. One has to give that notion some serious thought. He also thought Dewey, the pragmatist/naturalist, was among the three greatest philosophers, and you can see this in his writing: talking naturally about the world in terms familiar and commonsensical, but all the while, underlying this, was a theory of foundational pragmatism that entirely denied traditional models of a world independent presence in the intimation of its existence to empirical observation and interpretation. He was no Kantian, nor a phenomenologist, if you asked him, but in the broader sense of phenomenology, he was well aligned with Heidegger (arguably, again). You know, the early Wittgenstein is thought to be a phenomenologist.

It was the same epistemic divide that pushed Rorty to hold that truth was made, not discovered, that is in place for transcendental idealism. I read phenomenology because empirical science cannot address this simple yet all important question: how does anything out there get in here?

Only one way out of the problem this simple question poses: it is not a denial that brain generates experience, but that what a brain IS, like all things, has it accounting in metaphysics. we think of a delimited object like a house of a fencepost, and so this epistemic connection utterly fails. this delimitation has to be removed, and then the full breadth of what we are can be revealed. I hold this is possible, though not very familiar in reasoning why this is so. Oh well---the world is NOT a familiar place at the basic level of analysis.

A word such as "mountain" is a physical thing as much as a mountain is a physical thing. The "mountain" is as much an object as the mountain. Somehow, "mountain" means mountain, is linked with mountain and corresponds with mountain. The "mountain" came after the mountain, in that "mountain" has only existed for less than 100,000 years whereas mountain has existed for at least 4 billion years.

As the "mountain" came after the mountain, as the "mountain" is an object, as the "mountain" somehow relates to the mountain, in that sense, the "mountain" has objectified the mountain. — RussellA

I would never argue against such a thing. Never crossed my mind to even try. But the issue of ineffability is not about how air tight language's hold on the world is. It is about how all of this confidence falls away when basic questions are asked.

The limits of our concepts
I have learnt the concept of "mountain". On arriving in Zermatt for the first time, the reality of mountains far exceeds my concept, but on leaving, my concept will probably have changed, hopefully giving me a better understand of the nature of mountains. Yet no matter how much my understanding improves, my understanding of the true nature of mountains will always remain insignificant. Metaphorically, my understanding of a mountain will be that of a horse's understanding of the allegories in Hemingway's The Old Man and The Sea, not because of a lack of trying, but because of the natural limitations of its brain. I am sure that if a superintelligent and knowledgeable alien race arrived on Earth, and tried to explain the true nature of time and space, we wouldn't have the foggiest idea of what they were saying. Not because we didn't want to know, but because of the physical limitations of our brain. — RussellA

Physical limitations of the brain; what an interesting assumption. A rigorously conceived materialism leads to only one conclusion: the annihilation of any and all knowledge claims. The annihilation of knowledge. Unless, of course, you have an escape route to some acausal relation of accessibility between two objects, like a brain and my couch. This escape route, of course, would be a refutation of materialism.
Hemmingway likely never intended any allegorical reading of his work. Not that this matters to interpretation, but it is interesting to note that he had no romantic illusions about anything.

Sartre and existence
If knowledge and understanding is limited by the inherent structure of our brain, and similarly our use of language, then it follows that there will be a natural limit in our understanding of the reason for our own existence. In Sartre's terms, the "for-itself" may exist without ever finding a reason for its own existence. Existing without any justification or explanation, which is, for Sartre, a tragic existence. Without an explanation for our own existence, to exist is to simply be here. One experiences a groundlessness, existing without ever knowing why. An existence that is accidental and subject to chance, We may search for meaning, but ultimately there is no meaning in "being-in-itself", as there is no meaning in the world waiting to be discovered. — RussellA

My point about Sartre goes to this thesis that the world is not a "system" of rationalized entities of Kant. Kierkegaard inspired him on this (see his Concept of Anxiety and you can literally see where Sartre got his thinking), and it was an attack on Hegel's rationalism. To me, this was a very important insight when it came to a discovery of the nature of ethics, for ethics is "about" (I mean, in the basic analysis) value, and value is not a rational category. The thousand natural shocks are the sticks in our eyes and scorched flesh sticking to burning automobile seats, and THIS is not a conceptual affair, and its presence to the understanding is not the way understanding can conceive of it. It is an intuition that is "prior" to language, or presupposed in language's interpretative taking it up "as" something, some contextually bound discourse.

But I don't agree with Sartre nihilism. Look, if you are going the talk about brains producing experience, you're not talking about Sartre. And btw, obviously I do believe brains produce experience, for this has been shown in such abundance that one would just as soon believe the moon to be made of Gruyère cheese as deny it. But here, the discussion goes to presuppositional analysis, where this kind of thing simply is suspended.

The limits of language
Language is a product of the brain, and is therefore limited by the brain. If our understanding is limited by the brain, then what can be achieved by language must also be limited. Language cannot be used to escape the "for-itself". Language can only mirror our limited understanding of the world, a world that radically exceeds that which can be explained in language. The chasm between the world and what can be explained in language is insurmountable because of the limited nature of the brain

Language as a mirror of the intellect is limited in its description of the world by the limits of the intellect, which is limited by the physical structure of the brain. Consequently, our understanding of the world is more about how the world appears to us, rather than how it actually is. — RussellA

This chasm, how do you know about it? You see the problem?

Are you claiming that, that of which these monks speak is ineffable? I invite you to contemplate how that could be. If it is ineffable, then they cannot b speaking about it; and whatever they are speaking of, it is not ineffable. — Banno

But this goes to the point, which is that ineffability is defined in such a way that the foundational issues of our existence are rendered nonsense, empty, because there is found here an apparent impossibility. which is an explanatory nullity that underlies everything. It is not as if science has met its new paradigmatic anomaly, and quantum physics is there to rescue empirical theory; rather, it is that Kant was absolutely right about one thing, that underlying all we acknowledge as real in the world is an index to metaphysics. He was wrong about another thing in failing to see that metaphysics is an existential "phenomenon", and this term is highly disputatious in its use here. But I disagree with philosophy's familiar categories that place powerful but nebulous experiences out of the boundaries of, call it palpability or realizability. Put bluntly, metaphysics is not some Kantian extrapolation to an epistemic impossibility (the noumenal transcendental unity of apperception) that cannot be spoken, for if it could not be spoken, we would live in world that had none of its intimation in the first place. This is the way I read the early Wittgenstein's cancelation on bad metaphysics, but he was wrong to take what he thought to be most important and declare it nonsense (most egregiously in ethics). And language games keep metaphysics at bay as well: an attempt to fill a breach in human understanding, a breach that is a structural part of our existence.

Ineffability has been argued into indefensibility, and this has created a false sense of thinking that to be in intellectual good conscience in philosophy, one must never speak of the most stunning issues that press upon us. this is where Husserl and Fink left off. They need to be rediscovered, for the they were right: beneath the familiar world, there is an altogether unfamiliar world of intuitive apprehension. This is revelatory in its depth as it intrudes into and discovers "intuitive ineffabilities" in what belonged to religion, and this is where philosophy belongs.

As I see it, philosophy is going to be the new religion, and phenomenology will be its method.

If trying to get “straight” our concepts about our shared reality is a dead end, I will enjoy the fruits as I build roads to new frontiers. If the alternative is listening to some phenomenologists talk about a privilege and private realms of deep insight, I think I might get more by learning a Gregorian chant. — Richard B

Didn't mean to provoke. I though everyone knew analytic philosophy went nowhere. Private realms of deep insight? Well, are you saying private realms have none of this? To me, this is just dismissive. What do you have in mind?

Words objectify what they are referring to. "Morality" identifies morality as a thing, "mountain" identifies mountain as a thing. This is how language works, and this is how we can use language to communicate — RussellA

But this just puts the burden on the term "objectify". I prefer to say one faces something, and this something is more or less closed or open as to what it is.

But as you say "If God were actually God, and this was intimated to you in some powerful intimation of eternity and rapture that was intuitively off the scales, would language really care at all?" No, language wouldn't care. I don't need language to have the private subjective experience of morality or a mountain. Humans experienced these things pre-language. — RussellA

Pre-language is a problem, given that you say it, to say what it is. But I actually agree with you, and instead of "pre-language" I want to say discovered IN language, but that which is discovered is NOT language. The discovery of what is not language, is a discovery that takes place in language; and even if one has to speak to say it, this does not reduce "it" to the saying. This may seem obvious, I mean,after all, put a flame to my finger and this is not linguistic event. But it can and will be. The question is, in the understanding, when we say the thing, the event, what it is, are we not wholly committed to the language possibilities provided by history and culture? Below, you seem to say, yes, we are so committed. I say yes and no.

On the one hand, language imposes restrictions on what can be said. My understanding of a "mountain", my concept of "mountain" has grown over a lifetime of individual experiences, and is certainly different to your understanding and concept of "mountain", built up over a lifetime of very different experiences. Yet we both use the same word when using language to communicate, seemingly inhibiting what we can say.

For me, the word "mountain" is a label to a set of private subjective experiences. A single word can label a set of experiences. A single word is an object that refers to a set of experiences. When I think of a word as a label I am thinking not of a single thing but of a set of experiences linked to that word. When I think of a word I am thinking of the set of things that that word refers to

When we use the same word in conversation, we will be thinking of very different sets of experiences, but providing we have agreed beforehand with the definition that "A mountain is an elevated portion of the Earth's crust, generally with steep sides that show significant exposed bedrock.", although our language may restrict what can be said, it doesn't restrict what we can think. — RussellA

Yes, I agree with this. This is the default body of meaning that comes into play always already there when I encounter something. Importantly, there a cultural history, that presents centuries of language development, as well as a personal history in which these were assimilated.

"Love" is a thing, but I don't think of it as one thing, I think of it as labelling the vast set of things that it encompasses. Language is not that inhibiting. — RussellA

I think it is and isn't. Depends. I wake up in the morning, open my eyes, and there is the world. But the is given to me in my education that is tacitly brought to bear on things, making the world familiar and comfortable. So there is this. But this does not preclude something "new". The ineffable is made notorious by claims of some impossible, non propositional knowing. My question is, why impossible? Sartre had this concept of radical contingency: when we encounter the world, the world radically exceeds what language can do, for language has this structure, an early Wittgenstein's logical grid, and logicality itself is a perfect, tautological system of meaning relations, and this perfection rules in the way you bring out, which is Kantian: we "see" entire categories, universals (Hegel emphasized) IN the one thing, and without this unity, there is no thought. Sartre's famous Nausea was about this "superfluity" of existence that is unbounded by reason. Nothing to stop my tongue from turning into a live centipede, for the world is not constrained by anything.

I side with Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but it is, in my thoughts, rather profound to think how the world is radically independent of our categories of thought. Where does this leave ethics? For ethical restraint is NOT a logical determinant.

I vaguely feel like I might have asked this already but can't find it. Some cultures seem to believe time is circular versus linear. I don't know what that can mean. Like a cassette tape that records over itself after a certain amount of time has passed, or is it a simple emphasis on how the seasons change and each winter will be more similar to other winters than other seasons? What do they mean? — TiredThinker

Just a thought: There is in place a structural problem, which is that you can never get the bottom of what time is since time is presupposed by the "getting". But more importantly, the linear concept of time has as its basic elements, past, present and future, and it is very difficult to disentangle these from one another. first, past and future don't have any, well, presence, I mean, there is never a past of a future there to witness, for witnessing is always a present event, but this present falls apart entirely without a past of future to give it meaning. How would this even work, given that to acknowledge a present event begs the question, what is an event? And what is an event if not a beginning toward and end, and what are these if past and future are removed from the analysis? So we are stuck with this construction: past, present and future are aspects or features of a temporal unity that itself of not a "thing of parts", if you will. But this unity itself stands outside of time, or rather, does not "stand" at all, for it belongs to metaphysics.
All inquiry meets metaphysics, and this is ubiquitous at the level of basic questions. But to consider how past, present and future are, in analysis, just ONE. One dynamic. The question in my mind is, can we realize this prior, primordial unity in a way that is not an abstraction of speculation? How does this play out in meditation, say; or Husserl's reduction? Or apophatic theo-philosophical inquiry?

"But let's not forget that a word hasn't got a meaning given to it, as it were, by a power independent of us, so that there could be a kind of scientific investigation into what the word really means. A word has the meaning someone has given to it" — Richard B

Interesting: See how Eugene fink takes Husserl's reduction down to the Kantian cutting edge, where the occurrent experience is at the threshold of its production. I think a thought and thereby "give" this to the world. But when the thought manifests, the only way I can identify this as a thought is through yet another "giving" to the world of thought. Cut out the middle man: it is, through the agency of myself, the world giving to the world.

It is the nature of words to objectify what they are referring to, to identify as a thing, whether it be "mountain", "pain", "searching" or "wanting".

If a philosopher wanted to understand a topic, such as morality, without objectifying it, then they would have to use something other than words. Philosophers use language because there is no other way. The alternative is not even to try, and that would be a dead end. — RussellA

Just to note: Is language so inhibitive? If God were actually God, and this was intimated to you in some powerful intimation of eternity and rapture that was intuitively off the scales, would language really care at all? Language imposes one restriction on what can be said, and this is logical form. Meaning can be anything at all, and it being "objectified" simply means it can be placed before you awareness. this doesn't reduce whatever it is to object status, but could elevate objects to a higher status, or lower, in the case of my cat (arguably).

But unlike others, he had the acuity not to say more. — Banno

But then, phenomenologists had a lot to say. One cannot say the presence of the world, but what does this mean? One doesn't speak in this way about anything. The point would be about that dubious assumption that there is nothing to say: keep in mind what it takes to speak meaningfully, which is to have interlocutors who have shared experiences. In Tibet, it was (is?) common for monks to speak in extraordinary ways, by our standards, to one another about experiences of deep meditative states. It was rather standardized to them. Such conversations included intimations of things we might call impossible if we were to attempt to fit them into our language's contextual possibilities.

There is the assumption in western philosophy that "sense" of the Real of the world is unproblematically determined, something we all know. Ineffability gets it bad rap from just this, but it should be understood that this is a cultural determination, and the sense of the Real is actually something indeterminate. Take Husserl's reduction down the phenomenological rabbit hole as far as it goes, and what you encounter is a revelation Wittgenstein never imagined.

No wonder anglo American philosophy is such a dead end, so busy trying to squeeze meaning our of ordinary language. Well, the world is not ordinary at all.

That's one task, which you are interested in. I don't see why this MUST be philosophy's goal. It is a distortion of the history of philosophy to look at in this manner. — Manuel

It is not an historical claim and cares nothing for historical consistency. Philosophy isn't the history of philosophy any more than empirical science is the history of science. It is something that issues from the structure of existence itself.
At any rate, Good Luck in all your study endeavors. You sound like someone with an open mind and I am sure you will find great things!

I think we have good reasons to believe that talk is the "vehicle" of thought, so prior to all that, is thought. The actual processes of language use is, misleading, when we utter a word, we are mixing several aspects of people: the way they produce sound, mixed in with various organs trying to express what thoughts try to convey. Actual language is something we can't introspect into. But there's evidence that an immense amount of effort goes into something even prior the articulation of speech. — Manuel

But it is this "good reasons" attitude that stands in the way of acknowledging something important, that the move toward an analysis of language and the structure of knowledge relations is the foundation of our understanding existence. Transcendental idealism, as I said, dominated philosophy for so long for a very good reason: one cannot get around this. Good reasons is an understatement, a bit like saying there are good reasons to believe it gets dark at night. You illustrate thinking in a terrible turn toward positivism that simple divested, and continues to do so, philosophy of its gravitas.

Language makes the world. See Rorty's Contingency, Irony and Solidarity for an excellent read on this. Rorty straddles the fence, and I don't agree with what amounts to a nihilism, epistemic and ethical (hard argument) but he gets Heidegger and Wittgenstein and sees that if one is going to talk about things at the most basic level, then the description of the making of meaning is where the issues are. think about it: You say, "there's evidence that an immense amount of effort goes into something even prior the articulation of speech." How do you know this? What brought you to this "understanding"? There is simply no getting by this: through language the world "appears". And this is not to say talk about conditions prior to language is wrong AT ALL. Of course, this is part of the "science" of anthropology, speaking generally. But this is philosophy, and the questions are about the presuppositions of this kind of thing. It is like talking about the unconscious. Psychologists have been doing this since before Freud, and they are not just being absurd. But take the matter one step further, and ask, isn't it a contradiction in terms to talk about the unconscious given that in order to bring it to mind at all, it has to be conscious? And unconscious affairs are really conscious theories about metaphysics. And again, consider the concept of the past: isn't the past just some impossible concept? Has it ever been witnessed? Material substance is like this, for we use this term all the time in many contexts and it is certainly useful, but take the matter down to basic questions, and it simply vanishes, for talk about the philosophical thesis of materialism simply has no referent. If it's a "feeling" then the matter goes to others, beginning with Heidegger (or better, Kierkegaard; see his Concept of Anxiety), who give this a thorough and daring examination.

What is a house is a combination of "matter and form", as Aristotle said and we have advanced now to the point where we recognize that we cannot pick out a "mind independent" entity and call it a house. It is dependent on our conceptual scheme. — Manuel

And this is just pre-analytic. Of course there is a house over there, by the tree. Kant would never deny this because he had to go home after work. But then CPR is very different. Philosophy is NOT a confirmation of our everydayness. It is an annihilation of it.

It's a fine line between basing all arguments on science, which is poor philosophy, but no less important, is not to downplay it all. Yeah, many of us have read science books, journals, podcasts etc.

Not that many are actual physicists or biologists. It's not an easy skill for most us to develop. So we should be careful here, it is all too easy to go one way or another. — Manuel

It is the Willard Quine's attitude that is the failing of anglo-american philosophy. He said, "I hold that knowledge, mind and Meaning are part of the same world that they have to do with, and that they are to be studied in the same empirical spirit that animates natural science." This is the bedrock of analytic philosophy, and it has led to a crisis of vacuity by ignoring the onto-theological/phenomenological dimension of our existence. Quine had a Erdos number, meaning he was very mathematical and good enough to write a paper with Paul Erdos. Put the two together, and you have the ideal of clarity and logical efficiency--which would be fine if the world were reducible to these. the problem lies in the attraction these values have for prospective philosophers: they tend to be very positivistic and find their inspirations from the rigidity of mathematical models.

This is why reading contemporary analytic papers amounts a very meticulous handling of almost nothing at all, for once you divest philosophy of its theological content, it really has nothing to say. this is why Rorty simply left philosophy and went to teach literature, He knew analytic philosophy had reached its end, and there was simply nothing to say, convinced that "non propositional" knowledge" was nonsense. Analytic philosopher simply do not see that the world IS theological. This is what gives it its depth of meaning. this is not to say it is "religious"; rather, it says what stands before one in the openness of inquiry is thematically theological. Hence my complaint about Strawson.

Look, I know that there are disciples of Husserl and Heidegger who are constantly and furiously saying that "that is NOT phenomenology, it ignores the crucial aspect of X, as Husserl (or Heidegger) point out!"

I'm not a particular fan of restricting a discipline to one or two figures. As a name of class in school, sure, there is no "phenomenology". But if you read a very good novel, as far as I can see, you can very well get excellent descriptive phenomenology, which can then be applied to real life. — Manuel

No, it is not a philosophy for living; not a didactic novel. It is a rigorous system of thought. In the recent writings, consider Michel Henry introductory remarks:

Phenomenology rests on four principles which it explicitly claims as its foundations. The first—“so much appearance, so much being”—is borrowed from the Marburg School. Over against this ambiguous proposition, owing to the double signification of the term “appearance,” we prefer this strict wording: “so much appearing, so much being.”1 The second is the principle of principles. Formulated by Husserl himself in §24 of Ideen I, it sets forth intuition or, more precisely, “that every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition”2 and thus for any particularly rational statement. In the third principle, the claim is so vehement that it clothes itself in the allure of an exhortation, even a cry: “zu den Sachen selbst!” The fourth principle was defined considerably later by Jean-Luc Marion in his work Reduction and Givenness, but its importance hits upon the entirety of phenomenological development as a hidden presupposition that is always already at work. It is formulated thus: “so much reduction, so much givenness.”3

My point about the long science oriented schooling we have all had was to emphasize that the kind of thinking that issues from the above is, as I have said, thematically alien. Kant is just this, though keep in mind that I find his rationalism is way off the mark. Heidegger took the Kantian "Copernican Revolution" to the lengths of our Totality. Heidegger Through Phenomenology to Thought, by William Richardson, is very helpful to understand him.

I think you are assuming that all can be explained, or that there is a deeper level that needs to be taken into account. I don't agree with Moore, I don't know why you keep bringing him up, yes, Strawson mentions it, I think Moore is wrong on what he was trying to prove, direct realism. — Manuel

He does more than mention him. It circulates throughout, this unanalytic demonstration of what is plain to see. His "feeling" is grounded in this.

I don't mind, I have this habit too. The only thing I could say is that you should perhaps try to take one example to flesh it out to the max, to get the point across. I'm not sure of what you are trying to say, other than a certain phenomenology is needed, that we need to take into account that which allows us to raise these questions, which you say is language, and that Heidegger destroys materialism.

Maybe I'd agree that more phenomenology is better, perhaps.

But to say the classics are wrong, is too vague as they cover many topics. In any case, it was the classics who inspired Kant (Descartes, Locke, Hume, Leibniz, etc.), and Husserl and Heidegger. — Manuel

I'm trying to say: If philosophy is the a study of our existence at the most basic level of analysis, then its purview lies beyond, or underlying andsubsuming that of science. It job is to discover the presuppositions that are implicit in our affairs of thinking and living, so that the world that stands before us gets a foundational analysis that discovers, and this part is most controversial, what is its own presupposition. This precludes the various contextualities carved out by the familiar categories of worldly thinking, though (and this is ALL borrowed thinking). The only way to accommodate this purpose is phenomenology. But, as I said, this is so unfamiliar to our education, it gets little air time, if any at all. Most don't know it even exists in anglo-american philosophy settings.

Philosophy's mission? To replace popular religion with a rational phenomenological discourse on human spirituality. The essential thematic direction is metaethics and metavalue analysis. Rorty was right about this: philosophy has already reached its end, its analytic Camusian end of rolling rocks around and going nowhere, and now finds it self as mere entertainment, solving Gettier problems and the like. The analytic tradition is dead, after one hundred years the "naturalistic" attitude in the spirit of Quine.

How long is a thread about what cannot be said? — Banno

It's too long, I know. If you have time:

Think of it reductively: it is not about what cannot be said, but about what has to be removed from thought to see clearly. Ineffability is, in this inquiry, not a positive thesis but a negative one, and the positive thing we can say is what survives the reduction that is a process of discovery, this is the ineffable. Most of what is said in tis thread makes the mistake of deploying familiar language, and Wittgenstein's Tractatus makes the same error, for it does not occur to him that what-should-be-passed-over is no more silent than anything else; it is the positive residuum of removing presuppositions that implicitly give context and determine ontological propriety. Wittgenstein thinks with the working assumption that the world is the world that is delimited in all the usual ways, and he thinks like this because this is the consensus, and he never, ever thought that the intuitive landscape that is so familiar, that constitutes the norm could be other than this. In this he is like Kant and many others who think what we all talk about and the history of the way we talk about it is simply the established sanity for the way the world is. But consider what Hume says of reason, that it is an empty vessel that cares nothing as to what content it carries. It is not the structure of thought imposed upon the world that makes us finite and delimits meaning. It is the WORLD that does this, so the question of ineffability really come sdown to content that lies outside of the world, and by "the world" I mean the meanings that circulate through our institutions. We are inquiring about something new, something radically "other".

So where does this take ineffability? The reduction I have in mind is Husserl's. The idea is to consciously dismiss presuppositions that implicitly give us the familiarity of the familiar world in a perceptual event. The lamp before me comes to me not as an innocent lamp perceived with an innocent eye, and herein lies the matter of ineffability: We look upon things and invest them with meaning in the dynamic of a predelineating past. The present is never "pure" because the very education that allows the perceptual act itself to occur, fills the event with the thickness of experience, always, already, the moment the lamp appears. But if one can mitigate this hold that this body of delineating presuppositions has on perception, one can "liberate" the moment commensurately.

Possible? Is this not confirmed in the experience of achieving greater proximity to a pure intuition (putting Dennett aside altogether. Keeping in mind that strictly analytic philosophers put clarity over content, and are very conservative philosophically. What they miss is that the actualities philosophy faces are simply not clear, so instead of talking about what is before them, they take the totality of everyday thinking as unquestioned authority) in the simple reductive act of attending exclusively to its presence? If I ask one to observe and try to acknowledge only what is there before you in the occurrent event, and make an effort to do only this, is there not a "sense" of presence that steps in?

We tend to ignore this kind of thing, but it is well worth noting that Husserl's students, who practiced the method of the reduction were said to turn religious. And not to forget the Buddha who was the quintessential phenomenologist, called this because he reduced the world to a bare presence, and he called this (from the Abhidharma), in translation, of course, ultimate reality. Wittgenstein in the Tractatus would instantly reject this. The Investigations Witt would allow it meaning in a language game, but, as I understand it, the matter would not be allowed to be carried into some profound revelation of "presence".

Here we disagree from the very beginning. I don't think there is one fundamental task for philosophy, there are several, and the most important of them to you, can be considered the "fundamental task" of philosophy, for you.

I don't see this particular question as being prohibited by analytic philosophy, it perhaps has not been pursued as you frame the issue. Bryan Magee, for instance, a philosophy popularizer, maybe the best one, surely thought about this question and concluded that Schopenhauer's "will" is the maybe the closest answer we can get. He could be called analytic. — Manuel

I disagree. there is only one issue, but this plays out in complicated ways, and I am of the evolving opinion that these are pragmatic in their nature. The one question is an ancient one: what is the ground for the "phenomenon" called the Good? This is a category of inquiry called metaethics, an metaethical matters are metavalue matters. So the real question is, what is metavalue? As a problem, it is complicated, because what is declared good in the ethical/aesthetic sense, is embedded in factual entanglements.

Think of it like this: language is a pragmatic tool, socially constructed. Then consider (and this is why Derrida is so important) that the world of meaningful utterances issues from language, which is what Wittgenstein, in the analytic world, understood very well. Face it: all talk about consciousness, material substance, reality, and of course, across the board, is first, prior to any sense that can be made, talk. And talk is contextual. It does no good to go on about space time, e.g., in philosophy, if you haven't given that in which understanding itself occurs. Kant is the progenitor of this, but he was blinded by a primacy of reason. It was Husserl then Heidegger (and the Greeks, and Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, and on and on) that pushed forth the "Totality" of being a human self that hit the mark. The self is a language construct, argues Heidegger, and through language, his ontology issues. This is the bedrock of hermeneutics and its thesis of indeterminacy (which I have a lot of reading to do on).

Derrida plays out the hermeneutical problem in spades, drawing on Saussure, first, in his Structure, Signs and Play, a very accessible essay. (unlike Differance, which is not friendly at all, by most accounts). Derrida is important for one reason, by my take on this: he shows that the true grounding of true propositions is a profound indeterminacy, and this indeterminacy is the 'true" grounding of our existence. This is Heidegger as well, but Derrida forced hermeneutics to its logical end.

Schopenhaur's will? I, not for a moment, accepted his infamous pessimism; and the idea of a will has never set well with me, simply because as a term that is supposed to be foundational, the "will" brings in too much. It is not a candidate for foundational "metaphysics".

Strawson's claim, and Chomsky - is simple, I think, either we are part of nature (the universe, reality, being, whatever) or we are not. If we are part of the universe, not gods, then we will have limits as other animals do. I think it is a safe statement to say that there is a great deal we don't know - not "just' in science, but everywhere else.

In fact, I think elementary phenomenology shows this. Do we understand how we can lift a finger? I can't discover the reason in my action. — Manuel

"Everything else" is, epistemically, science, and when the term science is put under review, it is not its method that is in question; it is it content. There is no escaping the method, the scientific method is, I hold, simply part of the structure of experience itself. It is a "forward looking" experiment, that looks to results of hypotheses as what yields knowledge. What IS a house? One must look first at the structure of language acquisition that makes it possible to ask the question. Infants hear noises, learn to associate these in social settings, and it is the pragmatic successes that constitute the meanings of terms. What Dewey calls the "consummation" of engagement. For Dewey, to acknowledge a house as a house at all, is a problematic completeness, like making a step on the sidewalk and having a "theory" of what stepping on sidewalks is, confirmed in the successful negotiation of foot descending on concrete.

The so called hypothetical deductive method. So experience itself is like a laboratory, of spontaneous confirmations that the world is the world, and here you would have Strawson's "feeling" bound up in tis very pragmatic idea. Reality is just this "sense" that everything, every default problem solved that saturates apperceptive events, like mindlessly walking down the street, is in, if you will, working order. Not at all far afield from Heidegger ready to hand "environments of instrumentality".

Talk about nature brings up the most important dividing line in phenomenology, from Kierkegaard through Heidegger, and this is our "throwness" (geworfenheit). The natural setting in which we live and do science is familiar place, and in it, we move along fairly regularly within its norms, but phenomenology makes a very big deal out of what Heidegger will call ontology, Husserl calls the epoche, Kierkegaard calls the recognition of spirit (original or inherited sin): it is what happens when one is dislodged from stream of events, and stands in wonder of existence. This is a structural shift in Being towards authentic freedom, responsibility (esp Sartre who wanted WWII traitors to be held accountable), and for Heidegger, it is the point of doing philosophy. Many questions, yes, but one purpose, which is to realize one's own freedom in the radical dynamic of becoming, We are not IN time; we ARE time.

Science and its naturalism is suspended for the deeper analysis of our existence that is part of ontology.

Well, if you can't give reasons, that's a problem. What matters is that you like this approach. — Manuel

But of course there are reasons. they would take too long to discuss. The essential reason why phenomenology is THE preferred method of ontology, is essentially Kantian: All talk in empirical science cannot escape the Totality of human dasein. THIS IS OUR FINITUDE. I capitalize this for a good reason.
But the proof is in the pudding, true. One is not going to "like" this at a glance. It does take a lot of reading, which is why I said earlier, you are what you read. Literally. If all I ever read were science, I would neither understand not like any of this. But Mill's argument steps in: how does one judge the superiority of one thing over another? Well, one would have to know both, intimately. Everybody already knows empirical science, for this is ubiquitous in our education, in the news, in practice, and so science rules thought. Phenomenology is NOWHERE is this education. Therefore, in order to "know both" one has to take special pains to learn phenomenology. It is not an idea. It is a completely new thematic enterprise.

It was simple really. Although I think Heidegger gives a very profound account of being, in a very particular way that often highlights things we take for granted, I could see no way forward from his program, it was mostly being stuck in Being and Time. I don't think his "turn" work ever matched his early stuff.

With Strawson and by extension, many of the 17th century classics I felt as if I could build on what they were saying. As for the "feeling", all he intends to point out is that in giving any explanation, not "just" science, there comes a point we can say no more about it. Temporality plays a role, of course, so do many other things, our cognition, our intuitions and so on. — Manuel

But Strawson and the classics, to put it bluntly, get it completely wrong vis a vis philosophical foundations. Evidence? Explain how knowledge of the world works at the most basic level (the OP). I mean, this question annihilates materialism's assumptions instantly. Most, and this is true of almost all papers in analytic philosophy, or what Strawson talks about is what he does not intend, but the term 'materialism' and really what is left is this "feeling" that he led with based on Moore's hand waving example. There is NO analysis of the hand waving example. NONE! Phenomenology is all about this one matter, one could argue.

Yes, "materialism" was a scientific term that meant something. I don't think - as it is used today by most people - that it makes any sense. I don't see a difference between mainstream materialism and scienticism. Strawson includes everything in his materialism. Big difference. — Manuel

He includes a systematic disclaimer.

Look, I write too much, I know. My fault.

Some people could argue that it must follow, I am less confident about that. It seems to me that that leaves us stuck in a view in which all there is, are appearances all the way down. I don't agree with that. — Manuel

The idea of appearances all the way down is completely absurd. The essential task that philosophy brings one to is not the drawing of a line between appearance and reality, but to ground what it is in the world that intimates the Real, and first the Real has to be affirmed as something that is not nonsense. So what is it that is there, in our existence, that intimates the Real? This is a prohibited question in analytic thinking.

The rejected philosophical alternative lies with Husserl and his phenomenological reduction, which was taken up by post Heideggerians in the so called French theological turn. This is why I reject Strawson's materialism: his thesis includes a typical rigidly determined sense of the impossible that separates what we know (and he cites science for this) from what is not known, which is vast, by his estimate, and this is why he defends such a flexible or inclusive concept of materialism, to accommodate the radical distance between the known and what is not known. He does not take seriously the Husserlian claim that a true scientific approach to philosophy requires a thematic redirection toward the intuitive grounding for all scientific thinking; nor did Heidegger, Sartre, or anyone I have read, until Levinas and Michel Henry, Jean luc Marion, et al.

But as you say, this is an imposing philosophical task, reading Husserl. But as I see it, it is essential. The epoche is a method, not a thesis, whereby one removes from the perceptual act all but the essential givenness of the intuitive encounter. All schools are in abeyance in the attempt to approach the "pure phenomenological" that is IN the world prior to the "naturalistic attitude". Husserl holds this to be a method of discovery, not simply a thesis, and he claims this method is THE way philosophy should go. I think he was right. Not something I can convince another person to see. One has to "do" this, and it requires a turn away from science altogether. It is a new set of philosophical themes.

Having experience tells us something about the mental aspects of the physical, I don't see this as naive, it's simply follows from the logic of it. I hesitate to say "common sense", because I guess you'd say that's scientific reductionistic emptiness.

It's very hard to spell out what common sense is, but I think it's something people have. — Manuel

What is it that underlies common sense? I think you're right to say it is something people have, as if there is this unexamined intuition that is always already there, from which issues forth tacitly, assumptions about the Real of everydayness. Strawson calls it a sense. Why I call his position naive is his belief that this is as far as one can go. I think this sense can be isolated and analyzed. Heidegger does this, but he rejected Husserl's dramatic epoche. I thought it strange that you could read Heidegger and move toward Strawson because Heidegger examines the very thing Strawson indicates to be that which justifies his materialism, namely, that "feeling"; for Heidegger, that feeling or sense is the dynamic of the temporal structure of our existence (which he got from Kierkegaard, among others). Heidegger's dasein leaves Strawson's feeling rather in the dust.

I mean, if you continue to equate materialism with scientism, then that's fine - it's what most people take the term to mean. I don't think that term must follow. All I'm saying is that there is one fundamental stuff in the world, and that everything else is a variation of it. This doesn't reduce representations to neurons, nor does it deny that a novel can be more profound than quantum theory, nor that history is just meaningless events. I think it's pretty astonishing. — Manuel

Well, all of his ideas about where thinking leaves off prior to the abyss of not-knowing are from science. I think the very concept of material substance is from science, I mean, the term itself is a scientific one, and any give or take regarding its meaning is stuck with this. I know, he invites us to choose another, and he knows he teeters on idealism.

But as to fundamental stuff, one could go with Heidegger and Derrida and admit that the question that we encounter issues forth IN language: the question is the piety of thought says Heidegger, and when we reach the end of thought, it is thought's end, and not some impossible intuition.

Partly right, I say. Husserl had it right before him. This is, of course, very tough to defend.

Chomsky believes that people think, and that thinking - somehow, takes place in a brain. Not crazy. — Manuel

No, it's not crazy at all at this level of analysis. Nobody, from Kant through Derrida says so. But as a way to describe the foundation for knowledge relationships, it is so bad that it is instantly refutable. For when one thinks the word 'brain' and all that is a brain rushes to mind, all one can "get" is the phenomena, the stuff that the positing of a brain is supposed to take care of, explain. But the brain itself is just this kind of thing: a phenomenon! In order to posit something that can explain phenomena, one would have to step OUT of phenomena, but this stepping out would require some impossible distance, separation, pov that is not phenomenological at all. Simply. after now more than two hundred years of transcendental philosophy, NOT possible. And everyone knows this; obviously Strawson. As you said, he takes his inspiration from Moore's hand demonstration (like Diogenes who walks across the floor, thereby refuted Zeno); but this is just the analaytic school throwing up its hands and affirming, yes, it is impossible to escape the phenomenological nature of any assumption. So, after years of struggling with Kant (and the varieties of Kantians) they quit, and started with "best explanation" talk, and this has led them to a crisis of vacuity (as Strawson admits several times here) for if you just take philosophy down to verifiable/falsifiable standards, science then moves to the forefront meaningful thinking.
Strawson seems to address this in his contra-Ryle:

The way a colour-experience is experientially, for the subject of experience that has it, is part of its
essential nature—its ultimate reality—as a physical phenomenon. When we claim (with
Russell) that to have an experience is eo ipso to be acquainted with certain of the intrinsic
features of reality, we do not have to suppose that this acquaintance involves standing back
from the experience reflectively and examining it by means of a further, distinct experience. It
doesn’t. This picture is too cognitivist (or perhaps too German-Idealist).

And this is the extent of his argument. Simply and absurdly dismissive. His examples all from physics space/time, atoms and subatomic particles, energy/particle interconvertability, and he considers "that physics’s best account of the structure of reality is genuinely reality-representing in substantive ways, and that the term ‘materialist’ is in good order. I sail close to the wind in my use of the word ‘matter’, facing the charge of vacuousness and the charge (it is seen as a charge) that it may be hard to
distinguish my position from idealism"; so what he gives us is an idealism, with the many inclusions for the monist view he defends, of a unity that must be inclusive of both the assumption of non experiential "being" and experiential being. So what does the non experiential being amount to? No more than what science and common sense tell us: a kicking of a chair; a raising up of arms. He has never in the course of the paper exceeded Moore's Diogenes-like example (of course, as he promised). He has, at most, made clear that the assumption scientists make that there must be an outside to our inside, is a good one. Let's call this a defense of materialism.

It's rationalistic because it postulates a world out there, not a perception-dependent reality, like Berkeley who tries to use God to render himself consistent. But if experience comes from brains, and not our eyes, then there is no contradiction between "physical" and "idealism" in this rationalist sense. — Manuel

But again, there certainly is a difference. There is a reason why Heidegger wanted to be liberated from the history of bad metaphysics, and dropped terms like 'physical' and idealism'. I am the one challenging the physicalist model. Heidegger doesn't bother with this because in his world this belongs to an entirely improper orientation. I am simply doing a reductio on the assumption of materialism, underscoring that there is no epistemic way out, not of the interior of a brain, for the argument goes much, much further than this: Eve the idea of a brain itself is annihilated. This is where Rorty is coming from. He is not saying materialism is wrong. Rather, there is beyond what can be said, nothing to say (from Wittgenstein, whom he ranked as high as Heidegger).

Strawson's Real Materialism fairs no better, because BOTH inside and outside are nonsense terms. In his terms, he would allow his thinking to be called ‘experiential-and-non-experiential ?-ist’ But here, he is just buying into a scientific category.

He can be read in many ways. I surely agree that standard materialism would be an extremely tortured view to read into him. I think his observations about our being in relation to present-at-hand and essentially unconscious activity to be very interesting — Manuel

Heidegger is wrong in his notion of present at hand. If this is interesting to you, then it can be explored, but for now, let's say his accusation that Husserl is trying to "walk on water" with his intuitionism lacks insight.

This charge of being naive doesn't get old. It seems that a pre-requisite for being deep depends on being as obscure as humanly possible, for some reason. If you find Derrida useful, good. I find Russell useful, you might label Russell naive, as is frequently stated. — Manuel

I don't mean this to be insulting. I call it naive for the above reasons.

Well, one should keep in mind, which Kantians don't usually bring up for some reason, is that he was a Newtonian. He took space and time to be the a-priori conditions of sensibility, as opposed to say, cognitive openness or a background of intelligibility, because he thought space and time were absolute as Newton showed. He then incorporated this into our subjective framework and denied the validity of these to things in themselves.

Today we know that Newton is only correct within a range of phenomena, but not others. We now speak of spacetime, due to Einstein.

I don't read into it much scripture. Again, you can label the world whatever, it's a monist postulate, not more. The idea that experience is physical was mind-boggling to me. But as he says clearly, his physicalism is not physicSalism. These are very different. — Manuel

You comments on Kant are unclear. Cognitive openness? Background of intelligibility? Both of these could be affirmed in the CPR. But you have something specific in mind.

Einstein's space/time presupposes the structures of conscious events that make theoretical physics possible. THIS is why physics cannot serve as a source for thinking about philosophical ontology.

The point about religion misses the mark. The mark was about the non arbitrariness of science and the arbitrarily of "feeling" something to be the case.

What something "really" is, is honorific. You can say I want the "real truth" or the "real deal", that doesn't mean there are two kinds of truth, the truth and the real truth nor the deal and the real deal.

You can ask, what constitutes this thing at a certain level. So in the case of neurons, you stay within biology. If you want to go to a "deeper" level (which can be somewhat misleading), you go to physics, not biology. But if we are not talking about neurons, and instead are speaking about people, we can speak in many different ways, not bound down to the sciences at all. — Manuel

No, that's not quite right. I put the term 'reality' in double inverted commas for a reason: Materialism's material IS what takes the place as the "real" substrata that underlies all things, and in doing so, it leads our thinking into thoughts about what is really "real" to a reductionist position delimited by the contextual possibilities of the term "materialism". You should see this. This is not some harmless, neutral idea that embraces all possible relevant disclosures. It carries serious baggage, as I said earlier. What baggage? The assumption that science is the cutting edge of discovery at the most basic level of analysis. That baggage. It is called, pejoratively, scientism.

If you say so. That's why I said I'm the odd one out. I could call myself a real materialist in Strawson's sense, or a "rationalistic idealist" in Chomsky's sense and not be committed at all to the ontology of current science. I don't believe in this notion of commitment, my thoughts could change depending on arguments and evidence. — Manuel

Rationalistic idealist?? You lost me. especially as to how one could waver between two things that are mutually exclusive. But then, I would have to have this explained to me.

Who says I have not read Heidegger? Why are you assuming this? Because I referenced Strawson, you assume I have not read him or Husserl? That's quite amusing. I used to be a Heideggerian, and I think he has interesting things to say, no doubt. Hegel I can't stand. I prefer Schopenhauer. I should read more Kierkegaard, but I have my own interests too.

I don't find Derrida is useful at all, in fact to me it's the opposite. But I am not going to pre-judge people who do find him useful because "they are what the read". You can tone it down a bit you know. — Manuel

The reason I assumed you didn't read Heidegger is simple: Heidegger undoes any construal of materialism. It simply seems impossible that after reading Being and Time, one could go on with any faith in anything that does not acknowledge the hermeneutical nature of epistemology. The OP is all about the failure to account for just this. Being and Time addresses this in spades.

You think my "you are what you read" was over the top? Apologies.

Derrida just takes Heidegger, as Rorty put it, to the full conclusion of his thoughts. After all, if language is essentially interpretative in laying out the conditions for revealing the world, then all eyes are on language, and Derrida rightly makes the case that this leads to a radical indeterminacy, for words are simply not stand alone in their references.
Look, I have read these guys (and I am by no means an expert, btw) and I can't see how one can move from a Heideggerian to what Strawson defends. Strawson seems naive, frankly, and I attribute this to his love affair with materialism. Not prejudging so much as, I don't see how you be serious.

It's not a standard of the scientific method, it's saying how much more the physical is compared to the view of the physical presented by people who call themselves "materialists", Dennett, Churchland and others. — Manuel

The scientific method insists on standards of confirmation that are not arbitrary. A "feeling" that something is the case as it is taken up by Strawson, is not like an intuition of logic or one of, say, Kant's apriori space. It has no content and there is nothing "there" to acknowledge and interpret. Rather, it is just a reification of common sense, a pretending really, that the feeling that assures one all is well ontologically. But nothing at all is "well". And the concept as an ontology is absurd and really no better than religious affirmation in scripture in which feelings are very strong indeed.

As to the "certain kind of feeling" comment, it's more or less true. You can keep on asking why questions infinitely, but beyond a point the question itself does not advance any further answers. So one is either content to give the best explanation we may have of a thing so far as we can tell, or we'll merely end up talking about terminology, which is not interesting.[
It depends on what questions you are asking and this changes entirely what the best explanation could be. Take the simple matter raised in the OP: what is the "best explanation" here, at the genuinely most basic epistemic connectivity is? A concept about how this is possible, this kind of connectivity, is fundamental to all other claims to what could be a foundational substratum to all things, i.e., an account of what "reality" is at the basic level of inquiry. IF one assumes materialism in this, THEN one is bound to the essential descriptive features of materialism, and there is nothing in materialism that can do this. One would have to redefine materialism for this, and I think Strawson wants to have all things subsumable under materialism as he often pulls back to say how "open" the idea is. But it is not open at all. It in fact closes theory. If you want openness, then Heidegger is your man.
— Manuel

The point of the essay was to show how much more "materialism" is, than what is commonly assumed. It includes everything there is, because we simply don't know enough to claim that there is something else which is not physical. — Manuel

But the term 'physical' equally says nothing. This comes down to a term having a descriptive capacity to explain the what is there, and what is there is indeterminacy at the basic level, not the physical or the material. These are terms simply borrowed from everyday talk, stand-in terms for general references. They are anti-analytic, as if inquiry found its terminal point. But there is only one terminal 'point' and this is openness itself; not the kind of scientific openness that looks to established paradigms in science for its clues to proceed, but existential openness that puts science, too, and its objectivity, in abeyance. All Strawson provides is a reification of "common" sense. But the world is not common at all.

We have not exhausted, at all, what the physical is. It's a monist claim. But if you dislike the name "materialism", you can call it "objective mentalism" or "critical idealism" or even "dialectical phenomenology", everything would be that one thing postulated by the term you use. And then you'd have to give a very good reason for justifying the introduction of another substance or ontology. Simply asserting the mind isn't matter is missing the point completely. — Manuel

I don't assert the mind is not matter. That would be assuming the term 'matter' has any sense outside it comfortable contextualities.
No, materialism comes with very specific baggage, and the point is one cannot simply declare it to be without any real meaning, then conclude all things are this. One is committed to science's paradigmatic limitations with this term and the trouble with this is, science cannot examine its own presuppositions, like the mind-body-epistemic problem. Attention must go exclusively issues raised by Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Husserl, so forth into Derrida and others.

I don't deny that Husserl has some useful things to say. He is not good at explaining them very well, admittedly, but if one wants to go through that monumental effort, there may well be some interesting ideas to be gained from him.

It's fine to prefer one school of thought over another, that's just the way we are. — Manuel

We are what we read, and there is such a thing as bad thinking. No doubt Husserl can be demanding. But the Cartesian Meditations are not so impenetrable at ll. But his IDEAS I and II really do lay out the details of his phenomenology.

But pls, it's not just a whatever floats your boat matter. Why not read Heidegger's Being and Time, just for the philosophical pleasure of coming to grips with the greatest philosopher of the past century?

For instance, by pointing out the … well, inconsistency … in someone engaging in arguments for the sake of - hence, with the intent of - preserving the status quo of physicalism which, as worldview, upholds the nonoccurrence of teloi (such as those which take the form of the very intents to uphold the worldview). — javra

For me the telos rests with what I see as simply without doubt, the most salient part of our existence, which is value. I've said it before, but it always bears repeating: value is by far the strangest thing in all there is. It is sui generis, this "ouch" at the touch of a flame and this falling in love, this happiness, and this what sets it apart from Wittgenstein's "states of affairs". The "Good" is what Witt called divinity, and of course, he knew all about the long historical philosophical narrative of this term, but it is, by my thinking, the true bedrock of foundational analysis. Wittgenstein famously turned on Russell, and Russell called him a mystic. Well, the world is, at the very heart of where the understanding can go, utterly indeterminate. Only value-meaning stands out in affirmation: nobody invented love, bliss, suffering, pain misery and all the thousand natural shocks. This the world "does to us", so to speak. And it is what we live and die for.

Sure. — Manuel

So I've read it, and as I knew, because I have read enough analytic philosophy to know, it was nearly altogether empty of content. These philosophers write as if Kant, whose thoughts ruled philosophy for a hundred years and beyond (in one way or another) never existed. The mentality here comes from science and the "naturalism" that follows from this attitude,and attitude it is, for there is nowhere in this paper that ever exceeds Moore's axiomatic wave of the hands, as if from this, and the aimless talk about mental and non mental or experiential and non experiential physicality one finds grounds for affirming materialism, implicitly showing that all this amounts to is a "feel" (that is a quote) for the rectitude of scientific thinking at the most basic level. I mean, he hasn't even begun to think philosophically.

If you would like to argue about this, I am open to this, but I have to say that it is a typical approach in analytic discovery: there is no discovery, only an endless reference to what is commonly held in the naturalistic point of view, and he never gets beyond Moore's waving of his arms and declaring this to be ample proof that "there is waving of the arms" is true. Strawson relies simply on common sense. Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Jaspers, and on and on, never happened, as if science is now here and we can finally just adopt science's playing field as a place to play out arguments about ontology. Really? Materialism is NOT an empirical concept, but he tries to make it into one, all the while throwing incaveats about how to qualify materialism away from its being an absurd metaphysical ontology, which, if approached honestly, is just this: ask a simple question, what is the "material" of materialism? He says it is not unlike the question about the material a shirt or a lamp is made of. He sees it as a kind of attitudinal carry over from the common cases of affirming "what is it?" questions, and so, the "material" of materialism just refers us to another body of established thinking, like asking what a bank teller is refers us to talk about banks, money, and so on, so asking about material in his sense refers us to other contexts where material finds a comfortable place to settle; and this is simply the way of it with analytic philosophy: monumentally unenlightening!

Analytic thinking, from Russell to Quine and Strawson is just a lot of very well spoken and painfully elaborated vacuity.

Just look at this passage:

For (briefly) what we think of as real understanding of a natural phenomenon is always at
bottom just a certain kind of feeling, and it is always and necessarily relative to other things
one just takes for granted, finds intuitive, feels comfortable with. This is as true in science as
it is in common life. I feel I fully understand why this tower casts this shadow in this sunlight,
given what I take for granted about the world (I simply do not ask why light should do that, of
all things, when it hits stone).

This is a stunning example of what I am talking about: Materialism is....what?? Just at the comfortable end of....whatever? How does this serve as a litmus for any kind of affirmation according to the rigorous standards os the scientific method? Does the thesis of materialism really rest with what one is "comfortable" with in the mind set of the scientific attitude?

If one wants a true scientific approach to achieving a scientifically respectable philosophy, then Husserl is the place to go. Just read the first chapters of his Ideas I, and see.

Anyway, sorry for the tirade. I am thoroughly disenchanted with analytic philosophy, as you can tell.

I either think Galen Strawson's "real materialism" is correct, namely that everything is physical, including or especially experience, which makes the physical much, much richer than mainstream physicalism or I take Chomsky's view that "materialism" no longer has any meaning. — Manuel

I have strawson' paper here. Give me a bit to read it.

Muddled reasoning in the just expressed (maybe all too implicit) physicalist stance that intentions are all illusory on account of teleology in no way occurring, yes. Then again, I’m not a physicalist. — javra

Not clear as to why the notion of teleology helps this here. I mean, to me, it makes the matter complicated, as if now one has to reconcile the world with, not just impossible epistemological relationships, but an overarching logos that underlies all things.
Perhaps I am missing something?

I don't know if you can "meet" systems of neuronal activity, or any biological activity for that matter, at least if you have in mind anything that people have in mind when they meet other people, or animals even.

It's not as if the neuronal activity will say anything, given that neurons don't speak, nor will it feel emotions, given that neurons themselves have no emotions.

I've really only met and talked with family members that were people, not abstract systems of their biological makeup. So, I think you can go to sleep with ease, and everything continues as is. — Manuel

My uncle is not an abstract system, granted. This here is meant to test the plausibility of a physicalist/materialist ontology.
You have to take a radical step back. The thesis of physicalism and its reduced brain to sheer physicality, leads to one conclusion: None of this that we talk about is happening at all at the most basic level of analysis. Not even the "physicality" of physicalism. It is vicious circularity: If all that can be acknowledged is reducible to a physical condition, then the supposition itself is just some physical condition, and calling it 'some physical condition' is also reducible in the same way; and so on.
One would have to include in the concept of physicality an epistemic feature, allowing the brain to have knowledge of something other than itself, (and even this knowledge would be, without without this epistemic ability, just another localized physicality) but this is just pulling a knowledge relationship out of a hat. What "epistemic ability"?? How could this even be conceived, this "knowledge at a distance"? This acausal access between objects, like a brain and a sofa?

I don't think theyre are mutually exclusive, but rather compatible. The key then would be to establish why science and philosophy are not in opposition but actually referring to the same thing — Benj96

Compatible, but like knitting is compatible with geology; consistent, no contradictions arise, but simply because they are talking about different things. Heidegger does not oppose Einstein. His understanding of time in Being and Time just has nothing to do with him, not referring to the same thing. The one is grounded in quantitative measurements of compared observed phenomena, the other is an analysis of the structural features of the perceptual act.

Difficult to summarize something like this. One idea: From Husserl, Heidegger draws upon the insight that the act of cognition that apprehends something in the world is "pre-given" or predelineated, meaning what you see before you is a temporal whole, a unity that is always already conditioned by past and future, and so, the claim Heidegger makes is that the self and the world have to be viewed as a "unitary phenomenon". To me this phenomenological concept of time is just where thought needs to go, for it shows that when one meditates, or beholds the world in a thoughtless, accepting attitude, the disappearance of the past and the future in the perceptual moment is a reductive movement that liberates one from time itself; after all, time as singularity, asks, singularity of what? If the past and the future are just aspects of a unity, what unity could this be? Why, the original unity, out of which pragmatic abstractions like past, present and future issue. And this original unity is what has been called "nunc stans, or standing now, which is eternity. It is NOT that past, present and future simply disappear, but rather that they fail at the basic level of inquiry to hold up as foundational, as rock bottom certainties (axioms). Someone like Heidegger would say this analysis itself IS the rock bottomest that one can achieve. Buddhists and I, I argue, say the rock bottomest insight opens an intuition or revelation of a presentation of Being that is is that is a radically OTHER, considering that everything is absolutely other. My couch, e.g. But this goes on and on.

Now this gets complicated, and it always has to be said that I paraphrase others, I lift thinking from texts. I f you ask ME what I think, it is far less disciplined and far more interesting, because philosophy needs to be personal, and I am a just a middling, meddling philosopher, but I am good at synthesizing what I read into an interpretative "reading" of the world, which is NOT an academic, or shouldn't be, affair.

It does depend on what you read. If you read analytic philosophy, then this will not register as well as it really should. Analytic types want clarity over content, and so they dismiss whatever cannot be clearly stated (they desire respectability in an age of technological rigor). the trouble here is that the world at the level of basic questions is not clear at all like this. In fact, this imposing but unclear threshold position is hands down, THE most fascinating dimension of philosophical thinking.

Anyway, Kant through Derrida, then into the so called French theological turn; this is where the intriguing insights lie. One thing I try to emphasize: Philosophy actually has a single mission, I am happy to argue, and this is to replace popular, traditional religion. Alas, it will be a long time before this is accomplished; or maybe not. Things have a way of suddenly making themselves.

Right, so I'm a time waster, aren't I? — enqramot

Absolutely not! I, for one, don't come to this forum for conservation. I come to explain and argue, and in the process, I clarify what I think, to myself! Reading is one thing, writing is another, and the latter is where the real work lies.

To truly catch up with you I’d have to first spend a lot of time to study at least some of the key theories pertinent to this discussion, something I’m not currently prepared to do because of time restrictions and perceived lack of practical value of such knowledge. In particular, I’m yet to find out what in physicalist model makes knowledge connections impossible, so right now I cannot comment on that. To my common sense it doesn’t seem impossible but if there are existing arguments against it, first they need to be tackled, of course. — enqramot

You should have led with that.

The argument is alive and well in both disciplines. As science one wound imagine the the direct attempt to establish definitive proof thought (philosophy). — Benj96

Actually Benj96, the whole matter would rest with how willing you would be to go into this. Time, that is. Science and philosophy are completely different fields of inquiry. Science's "direct attempt to establish definitive proof of thought" is not what you think. After all, "direct" is arguably the most problematic term there is. But it opens up thought on the matter that is thematically unrelated to what science has to say.
The relation one has with the world in philosophy is about the presuppositions of science, not the usual assumptions, and these presuppositions are not in the usual sense, observable.

I'm not clear where you are going with this: can you elaborate. — Janus

When I take a hard, close look at the world, the first thing I encounter is myself. And when I reduce this encounter to its pure apprehension, dismissing the language and the familiar things that are usually there to take hold of things, and I try to witness the pure intuited event of being there, the singularity of things yields to an intriguing sense of "being"; and as weird as this sounds, it really does go like this, as if existence is affirmed, not in the trees, roads, furniture and so forth, but is within, as if the sense of reality is conferred upon things by my end of the perceptual encounter, not the thing encountered. It is quasi-Cartesian: the reduction takes me to the strongest proximity of what is most directly presented, and this is not the out thereness of things, but in the depths subjectivity.
In meditation, when perception is its purist, an "intuition" steps forward that is not negatable, as a thought or an "attached" feeling. It is the intuition of being itself, and as I try to understand what this is, I find there an affirmation of the self, not a negation, as if the whole point is to uncover just this.

Times context is the medium between that which causes (energy - in a timeless state travelling at speed C) and that which is caused (objects that have duration - exist in the realm of time).

Change itself has a Duality in that when it is understood not to experience time - it is cause (energy). And when it endures the experience of time it is "that which is changed - (matter).

These are the two polarities of change - one pole being causer (matterless/timeless), the other being physical - effect (matter with duration in time).

A relativistic spectrum. — Benj96

But benj96, that is an answer a scientist would give. How about a philosophical approach?

Well for me "causality" must (as all things must) be put in context.
Causality is temporal is it not? It relies on the passage of time: A becomes B becomes C. That is causality. — Benj96

But if causality needs a context, so does time.

But what about in the case where time doesn't exist? For example in a case where "change" is impossible?

For me the only instance in which change is not possible is offered by physics - the speed of light.

At the speed of light, no energy can interact with/change itself/impart information. Because to do so would demand that somehow that information travel faster than the cosmic speed limit "C". (the speed of light).

If two photons are hurtling along at the speed of light side by side, how does change occur between them when the information on both photons cannot reach eachother without exceeding the speed their currently travelling at?

Photons travelling at that maximum speed therefore cannot influence one another, time for a photon is dilated so much that all moments are instantaneous (past, present and future). In essence time does not pass (no change) at the speed of light nor distance.

It is only us (as objects) experiencing time (rate, because we are not travelling at C) that can observe the distance and time (speed) travelled by light.

That's relativity.

Because we are under the influence of change while light (energy at C) has no rate/is not. What does that mean for causality?

It means that light is not under the influence of causality because it is the source of causality. Change/ability to do Work/energy exerts change on the system around it (matter) but doesn't exert change on itself. Because when it does it is matter (E=mc2). — Benj96

Of course, physics. But when a physicist talks about causality or time, their observations look to the observable world and calculate its behaviors. Even abstract ideas like the ones you present above issue from empirical paradigms originally. But then, as the cosmologist reviews the theory and the data, she does this in a temporal event herself. and this is not going to be discovered through observation, because this concept of time is part of the structure of the perceptual moment itself.

What is required is a critique of the structure of time that is presupposed by an theories of a physicist's time.

Consciousness cannot be reduced to systems of neuronal activity. Physicalism claims that if you take a certain amount of non-conscious stuff, assemble it in a certain way, run some current through it, voila! consciousness. This is a fairy tale. — RogueAI

Yes, it is. The matter calls for a very different conception of what a brain is, what anything is, and what conscious events are, and this is not going to come from the scientific world. It will have to be affirmed in subjectivity. Perhaps here, the explanation will be discovered that consciousness is NOT a localized brain event. The logic of the argument I have been defending leads to only one conclusion: Either there is some magical acausal connection that intimates that out there to this Me in here; or the epistemic connectivity lies with a metaphysical unity of all things.
My thinking is that metaphysics is nonsense if conceived apart from finitude. Note how analytic philosophy takes Kant's insistence that only empirical truths can make sense about the world, and ends up with just this impossibility of knowing. But can finitude really be separated from infinity, that is, noumena? No. So brain events actually belong to metaphysics, and metaphysics is not some impossible beyond; rather, it is IN immanence!