But this is due to your failure to understand that no event has ever occurred unless witnessed. Ontology and epistemology are analytically bound. — Astrophel

So 'only what is known is real (happens)?' – that's idealist-solipsist / antirealist nonsense (pace G. Berkeley ... pace N. Bohr et al).

Much can be said about the process of observation, taking measurements, hypothesizing, experimentation and testing. The 'basic data' is already there, in the physical world, to be noticed, recorded, studied and understood. There is no single 'perceptual event'. Conscious beings notice their environment and make sense of it to the best of their ability. — Vera Mont

No one argues otherwise. Here, the argument is about the presuppositions of such things. To begin to philosophize is to ask questions about what is presupposed in science. Saying the basic data is already there in the physical world is true only if one really doesn't want to think about philosophy, which is an option.

No, that is a question. — Vera Mont

What??

Here, the argument is about the presuppositions of such things. — Astrophel

You mean like presupposing that events have meaning? And that, without even a definition of 'meaning'.

To begin to philosophize is to ask questions about what is presupposed in science. — Astrophel

Go ahead and ask relevant questions. Wake me when you have answers.

What?? — Astrophel

This:

You know something? That is a knowledge claim. — Astrophel

Wrong. The leaf or whatever exists outside and independently of the human organism. The organism has sensory equipment to inform the brain about various attributes of an encountered object. The brain is told what a leaf looks and feels like; its size, shape, colour, texture, temperature, tensile strength, pliability, flavour. The eyes may have recorded similar objects attached to a a large, hard, branching object and noticed that the small ones fall off the large one every fall and new ones grow every spring, suggesting that the thing named 'leaf' is a product of the living organism dubbed 'tree'. Other objects, small and large are observed to grow and shed 'leaves'. Putting all this information together, the brain forms an approximate understanding of deciduous vegetation. That understanding can be expanded and enhanced by further study. While some humans' understanding of 'leaf' remains rudimentary, others' may learn a great deal more about the varieties, forms and functions of leaves. We can all claim some knowledge, but certainly not the same knowledge. — Vera Mont

Look, all of this is rudimentary. Trouble lies where least expected. It is about the assumption that there is an object outside of the reach of perception. This brain that is being "told" what is "over there" and entirely apart from the content of what the brain thinks and generates as experience: To affirm this, one must leave experience. That is impossible to even conceive.

Again, this is not to say flowers are not flowers and cats are not cats. All remains what it is and science goes its merry way. But what dramatically changes is the analysis of the relations and content of what is given in the world, for they are no longer reducible to abstract quantitative values that science takes for reality. Now the entire human presence is "present" in the here and there, the before and after. Affectivity, THE most salient feature of existence (even by a naturalist's standard) is now front and center IN the object, for what one encounters is an event of conscious apprehension and that which is apprehended.

Or did you really think a human brain was some kind of mirror of nature? A brain and its "sensory equipment"--a MIRROR? Let's see, the electromagnetic spectrum irradiates this grass, and parts are reflected while others absorbed, and what is reflected is received by the eye and is conditioned by cones and rods and sent down the optic nerve and....now wait. Have we not entirely lost "that out there" in this? And again, for the third time, it is not being said that perception is impossible. I am saying that what perception IS must be radically reconceived.

Okay, I'll bite. How? You're the metaphysician, tell us. What does life mean? Why is is is? — Vera Mont

This is absent from the discussion, the meaning of life. I am only asking about the matter above. It is a matter of epistemology and ontology. One basic, but ignored premise must come to light: there is NOTHING epistemic about causality.

'Only what is known is real (happens)?' – idealist-solipsist / antirealist nonsense (pace G. Berkeley ... pace N. Bohr et al). — 180 Proof

A little less naivete, if you will. If you read what is written, then you will have noticed that the world remains the world, and science and everydayness is accepted in all of its objective verifiable and falsifiable conditions. No one is raising the absurd specter of solipsism, which is pure straw here.

Not "only what is known is real"; this is too ambiguous and carries the burden of ill conceived ideas. Rather, when an encounter with an object occurs, it is an event, and must be analyzed as such. What lies "outside" of this event requires a perspective unconditioned by the perceptual act, which is impossible. Unless you actually think that the world intimates its presence to a physical brain...by what, magic? Just waltzes into the brain and declares, here I am, a tree! I assume you do not think like this.

So you take Kierkegaard's word over Hegel in matters of Theology? Is that it? — Arcane Sandwich

I would say a qualified yes to this. My view is found more in the vicinity of philosophers like Michel Henry and Jean Luc Marion. These are post neo Husserlian thinkers. Husserl argued that philosophy needed to ask the basic questions about what lies in the presuppositions of science and the "naturalistic attitude". To look this deeply into the essential givenness of the world, one had to suspend of "bracket" knowledge claims that otherwise dominate ideas. Just look at the world around you and try to "reduce" what you see to what is actually there in the perceptual content which constitutes the actuality of what is before you. Scientific categories are on hold, as are any of the usual associations. There is Kierkegaard in this, for when thought is reduced to a bare minimum, something startling happens (or can happen. Depends on whos is doing this): the actuality that has always been there rises to prominence, and one sees the world generally ignored in the "habits of the race" as K put it. He refers to the endless idle talk and cultural engagements that have come to rule one's world.

I take issue with his knight of faith. I do not think, and you find this is Meister Eckhart, that the world can be made at all compatible with the call to divinity, if you will. See his Fear and Trembling. He thinks the model of faith lies in a radical simplcity that can go about business, as a cobbler or an accountant, and the like, all the while possessed by god's grace. I think the two are quite antagonistically related.

I take issue with his knight of faith. — Astrophel

I read that concept of his as the "gentleman of faith", comparable in some sense to Nietzsche's "over-man", at least in an existential sense.

See his Fear and Trembling — Astrophel

He makes the case there that belief in the divine must be irrational by definition, since the divine (if it exists) transcends human reason.

I read that concept of his as the "gentleman of faith", comparable in some sense to Nietzsche's "over-man", at least in an existential sense. — Arcane Sandwich

They both declare war on Christendom and rationalism. But what happens when all that "structure" is removed from metaphysics? One faces existence without it, hence the term existentialism. But here is where the similarities end. N goes the way of the gladiatorial, while K follows an existential Christianity.

He makes the case there that belief in the divine must be irrational by definition, since the divine (if it exists) transcends human reason. — Arcane Sandwich

Hard to say this, for it is a performative contradiction: "the divine must be irrational by definition" is itself a construction of reason, a well formed proposition exhibiting logical features of predication, universals, modality, and others (see Aristotle's of Kant's logical categories). Better to be clearer: In the context of discussing existence, there appears a superfluity that is not rational in its essence at all, yet is discovered only in discursive thought. To understand this is simple: put your finger over a flame for a second or two. Now, that experience has no rational dimension to it, nor does the color yellow or any "quale" you can think of. Yet it is thought that brings it before the understanding so that it can be recognized; and without recognition, it would remain in the darkness, hidden (lethe).

One has to take a long hard look at this, because it is important.

This kind of talk leads one to Heidegger (who borrowed significantly from Kierkegaard without due respect, calling him a "religious writer"). What is it to "recognize" a truth? To know something to be the case? Heidegger thinks the Greeks understood this with truth as alethea, and to see the significance of this would take some serious reading. But in a post: consider the standard truth tables taught in logic classes, and see how abstract they, referring to propositional values only. What happened to actual world?? It simply does not matter, which is why ango american philosophy collapsed in on itself. Heidegger's alethea refers to the presencing of the world that issues forth in thought. Language is the house of being, he writes. It cannot be relegated to abstraction, for it is the dynamic of our very being (dasein) that lights up the world, so to speak. From whence does reason have its existence? Transcendence, just as the terrible pain of your finger in the flame. Truth as alethea brings us OUT of abstraction and into the world where metaphysics has its ground.

Kierkegaard knew very well about this problematic, for he had read Aristotle, Augustine, Kant, Hegel, and so on (he was, of course, literally a genius). One must know in the first place in order to acknowledge the "collision" between reason and existence. Reason cannot, keep in mind, understand what it is, cannot "get behind" itself (Wittgenstein). for this would take a pov outside outside of logic itself and this cannot be "conceived".

This is absent from the discussion, — Astrophel

What discussion? You make incomprehensible statements about what you do not and can not know, and then double down on them with gobbledegook.
Done here.

:up: :up:

But here is where the similarities end. N goes the way of the gladiatorial, while K follows an existential Christianity. — Astrophel

Kierkegaard makes the point (in Fear and Trembling, precisely) that God told Abraham to do something irrational when he ordered him to sacrifice his son. Is it rational for a father to sacrifice his son? No, it isn't. That's why God's order was irrational. Still more irrational was Abraham's decision to obey God's order anyway. That, according to Kierkegaard, is true Christianity. Rational Christianity, he argues, is for the Thomist-minded masses. The gentleman of faith, or the knight of faith, if you will, it not Thomist, nor can he be Thomist, because Thomas Aquinas wanted to reconcile Reason and Faith. They cannot be reconciled, in Kierkegaard's opinion, because Faith must triumph over Reason. And while Aquinas himself concedes that point, Kierkegaard goes further, arguing that true Christianity is not for the masses, which is a point that brings him closer to Nietzsche than to Aquinas. Everyone can be a Christian, not everyone can be a knight of faith or an over-man. To be a knight of faith is to be willing to sacrifice rationality itself, not to merely subordinate it to faith. This, is the true moral lesson of the story of Abraham and God: the very core of Christianity is irrational, and necessarily so, because it is pure, unadulterated faith, uncontaminated by human reason. However, the existence of faith, of pure faith, does not demonstrate, by itself, that the object of faith (i.e., God) exists as well. What Kierkegaard is merely saying in that regard is that if God exists (and we don't know if he does), then we must irrationally believe in him, just as Abraham irrationally followed God's irrational order.

@Count Timothy von Icarus what's your opinion on what I said ?

What discussion? You make incomprehensible statements about what you do not and can not know, and then double down on them with gobbledegook.
Done here. — Vera Mont

No, it's philosophy.

Well argued.

I don't think Kierkegard was a fideist. I do think that at times he errs by setting practical reason (the "subjective") over and against theoretical reasoning in a pernicious manner, abrogating the catholicity of reason (which is the first step on the road to misology). I don't think this is a road he wants to travel though. One of the things that cracks me up about Kierkegard is that he seems very much motivated by the same concerns as Hegel, his arch-rival.

He might have benefited from St. Augustine and St. Anselm's "believe so that you may understand."

Or did you really think a human brain was some kind of mirror of nature? A brain and its "sensory equipment"--a MIRROR? Let's see, the electromagnetic spectrum irradiates this grass, and parts are reflected while others absorbed, and what is reflected is received by the eye and is conditioned by cones and rods and sent down the optic nerve and....now wait. Have we not entirely lost "that out there" in this?

No? Where exactly do you suppose we lost it?

Saying "we only see light that interacts with our eyes, so we never see things," is a bit like saying "it is impossible for man to write, all he can do is move pens around and push keyboard keys."

One basic, but ignored premise must come to light: there is NOTHING epistemic about causality.

I already have a quote ready for this: "...every effect is the sign of its cause, the exemplification of the exemplar, and the way to the end to which it leads." St. Bonaventure - Itinerarium Mentis in Deum.

Rather, when an encounter with an object occurs, it is an event, and must be analyzed as such. What lies "outside" of this event requires a perspective unconditioned by the perceptual act, which is impossible. Unless you actually think that the world intimates its presence to a physical brain...by what, magic? Just waltzes into the brain and declares, here I am, a tree! I assume you do not think like this.

But since you are concerned with others' unattended to presuppositions, I will just point out a few I think I might be seeing on your end:

1. Representationalism and correlationalism are the correct ways to view perception and epistemology.

2. Truth is something like correspondence, such that not being able to "step outside of experience" makes knowledge of the world impossible (and, in turn, this should make us affirm that there is no world outside experience?)

3. Perceptual relationships are decomposable and reducible such that one can go from a man seeing an apple to speaking of neurons communicating in the optic nerve without losing anything essential (reductionism).

And then the old "view from nowhere" and "mind as the mirror of nature," which seems to get rolled out to create strawman and false dichotomies far more often then it is ever actually endorsed. "Oh look, it's impossible to know the world as one would know it without a mind. If not-A, then B" (where B is variously anti-realism, pragmatism, deflationism, eliminativism, etc.). But we might reject the premise: "It is either A or B," C or D might be options open to us as well.

I don't even disagree with the idea that being and thought are two sides of the same coin, but I do think the empiricist assumptions behind "no events occur unless they are witnessed" might be off base.

Kierkegaard knew very well about this problematic, for he had read Aristotle, Augustine, Kant, Hegel, and so on (he was, of course, literally a genius). One must know in the first place in order to acknowledge the "collision" between reason and existence. Reason cannot, keep in mind, understand what it is, cannot "get behind" itself (Wittgenstein). for this would take a pov outside outside of logic itself and this cannot be "conceived".

It depends on how reason is conceived. Reason for the ancients and medievals is ecstatic and transcendent, "the Logos is without beginning and end." Often today it is not much more than computation. How it is conceived will determine its limits. Is reason something we do inside "language games?" Is it just "rule following?" Or is it a more expansive ground for both? Does reason have desires and ends?

Important considerations.

the catholicity of reason — Count Timothy von Icarus

Kierkegaard didn't believe in the catholicity of reason, he was a protestant from Denmark. He was essentially a Christian Viking, from a theological POV. That's why he emphasizes irrationality (i.e., "berserk") and the knight of faith (i.e., "berserk-er"). I guess Kierkegaard's question here would be, what theological evidence is there for the claim that human reason has catholicity? For what you call "catholicity of reason" could very well just be the "secularity of reason", or perhaps even "the secular universality of human reason".

Not sure if you see my point here. If not, I can try to make it clearer. If not, then I would explain it with the following thesis: Kierkegaard, as an individual, transcended Protestantism, and he became an existential Christian instead. A true "gentleman of faith", in his own terms. He transcended the "knight of faith" and he became a "gentleman of faith" instead. That's why he tried to re-establish contact with Regina Olsen, but it was too late.

abrogating the catholicity of reason (which is the first step on the road to misology) — Count Timothy von Icarus

For him, you mean? Or for anyone in general? If it's the latter, then I agree with Kierkegaard on this point: how do we even know that human reason has catholicity? It could just be secular universality for all we know.

One of the things that cracks me up about Kierkegard is that he seems very much motivated by the same concerns as Hegel, his arch-rival. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well, but my thesis (another one of them, anyways) is that Hegel was an existentialist, or at the very least a pre-existentialist, just as Kierkegaard was.

He might have benefited from St. Augustine and St. Anselm's "believe so that you may understand." — Count Timothy von Icarus

What do you think of Tertullian's (or whoever "really" said it): Credo quia absurdum, "I believe because it is absurd."?

If the answer to that last question has something to do with the catholicity of reason, then I'll just ask again the same question that I've been asking: perhaps what you call "catholicity" of reason is just the secular universality of human reason?

This is absent from the discussion,
— Astrophel
What discussion? You make incomprehensible statements about what you do not and can not know, and then double down on them with gobbledegook.
Done here — Vera Mont

Let me give it a try. Astrophel is basing his view of relations between subject and world in part on phenomenologist Michel Henry. Given the respect for Henry’s work on the part of enactivist cognitive theorists, I think there are substantial compatibilities between Henry and these approaches in psychology of perception and related philosophy of science.

So let’s take your comments about scientific observation and rethink them from an enactivist perspective:

Much can be said about the process of observation, taking measurements, hypothesizing, experimentation and testing. The 'basic data' is already there, in the physical world, to be noticed, recorded, studied and understood. There is no single 'perceptual event'. Conscious beings notice their environment and make sense of it to the best of their ability. — Vera Mont

What is the relation between observation and knowledge?
You mentioned that we have to ‘make sense of’ what we observe. Let’s talk about what this ‘making sense of’ consists of. Notice that the development of human knowledge is not simply an internalizing of external facts. ‘There’s a leaf out there and here inside my brain is a representation of that leaf.’ We can instead track the development of knowledge in terms of a remarkable increase of complexity of organization in human brains, human social organization and our built technological environment. Every leap in knowledge is manifested by the construction of new devices, new apparatuses of observation and measurement. Put differently, knowledge evolution involves the construction of a biological niche that we inhabit , interact with and are changed by.

When we build such things as apparatuses of measurement , we don’t use them simply to passively observe an aspect of the external world, we bring together different parts of the world together with our devices and our devices together with our activities. Knowing what a leaf is ‘in itself’ is useless to us. What we want to know is how the leaf interacts with us and other other aspects of the world that we are actively involved with. This is not a passive observational mirroring or representing. , it’s a synthesizing. In coming to know the world we are building new webs of interconnections where there were none before. Saying that knowledge represents the world makes no more sense than saying that the evolution of more and more complex forms of life is a representing of the world. Human knowledge as biological niche construction allows us to actively manipulate our world in more and more complex and controllable ways. But doesn’t scientific knowledge depend on the fact that there are laws and properties intrinsic to the things of the world?

These laws and properties are what show up for us in the ways we interact with our world through our built
niche. The reality of the world shows up for us in terms of constraints on what works and what doesn’t. We can’t build that niche any way we want to, just as there are constraints on what will allow organisms to survive. But st the same time , the laws and properties that we ‘discover’ in nature are not external to the ways we arrange and rearrange our relations with that world as knowledge
develops. The properties we observe are not properties of the things in themselves but properties of our arrangements of interaction with them, and as these arrangements of knowledge evolve, the properties change. Not any old way, but not also not as fixed external ‘laws’.

That is gloriously phrased.

But st the same time , the laws and properties that we ‘discover’ in nature are not external to the ways we arrange and rearrange our relations with that world as knowledge
develops.

It seems easy to agree with your enactivist precepts, agree with the critique of "the view from nowhere," and to agree on the importance of act ("act follows on being"), and on the error of focusing on "things-in-themselves," while not wanting to affirm this though.

Prima facie, does it make sense that scientific advances in understanding gravity change what gravity is and how it works? Did the coastline of North America change when men began to map it?

It seems other premises would be needed for this assertion. Something like: "things are defined entirely by their relations" (e.g. a bundle type theory). Being known is one such relation. Thus, when our knowledge changes, the thing known changes, and so "things' properties are not external to our knowing."*

But this would seem to indicate a further premise along the lines of: "Natures and essences do not exist," and following from that "all predication is per accidens, and no predication is per se." That is, nothing is said necessarily of any particular substance/thing. Whereas if any cat or tree necessarily interacts in certain ways (has certain properties) then our knowing cannot change this.

Yet these premises are seem harder to swallow. You mention constraints. The next question is, "from whence these constraints?" Well, one view that might recommend itself is that "things do what they do because of what they are," i .e., natures that explain why things interact as they do, and we might think the case for natures is particularly strong for those substances that are (relatively) self-determining, self-governing, self-organizing wholes (principle, organisms, although other dissipative systems might be lower down the scale here).

*Hegel gets close to this in the Doctrine of the Concept, but this is merely an "unfolding," and so avoids making all predication per accidens.

Prima facie, does it make sense that scientific advances in understanding gravity change what gravity is and how it works? Did the coastline of North America change when men began to map it? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Scientific advances in understanding gravity, mass and energy from Newton to Einstein changed the meaning of these concepts in subtle ways. The notion of coastline doesnt exist independently of the actual processes of measuring it, and these processes conform to changeable conventions of measurement.

You mention constraints. The next question is, "from whence these constraints?" Well, one view that might recommend itself is that "things do what they do because of what they are," i .e., natures that explain why things interact as they do, and we might think the case for natures is particularly strong for those substances that are (relatively) self-determining, self-governing, self-organizing wholes (principle, organisms, although other dissipative systems might be lower down the scale here). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Complex dynamical systems approaches applied to cognitive intentionality explain how intentional stances produce specific constraints, constraints which do not act as efficient causes.

Scientific advances in understanding gravity, mass and energy from Newton to Einstein changed the meaning of these concepts in subtle ways. The notion of coastline doesnt exist independently of the actual processes of measuring it, and these processes conformist conventions of measurement.

Sure, the concepts/notions might change (or we might say our intentions towards them). That seems fine. What seems implausible is that all the interactions mass should have changed because our scientific theories did, or that North America had no coastline, no place where the land met the sea, until someone measured it.

Complex dynamical systems approaches applied to cognitive intentionality explain how intentional stances produce specific constraints, constants which do not act
as efficient causes.

How so?

Anyhow, the fact that a knife is a bad toy to give a baby, that one can't mate a penguin and a giraffe, or that one cannot take flight by flapping one's arms vigorously like a bird does not seem the sort of things that should require recourse to cognitive science to explain.

Sure, the concepts/notions might change (or we might say our intentions towards them). That seems fine. What seems implausible is that all the interactions mass should have changed because our scientific theories did, or that North America had no coastline, no place where the land met the sea, until someone measured it. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Our scientific theories are not immaterial idealizations, they are intrinsic components of our material interactions with the world that we are trying to understand. When our theories change, a crucial aspect of those material interactions are transformed.
To say that America has a coastline is to assume some configurative understanding of what a coastline is, which is to say, a system of anticipations concerning what it means to interact with it. It is fine to use the word ‘coastline’ and imagine it has an independent reality, but whenever we use the word we commit ourselves to a particular implied system of interactions. We want to insist on the independence of ‘coastline’ at the same time that it is OUR word and OUR way of understanding how it is independent, which is a kind of dependent independence.
Measurement is built into the word coastline, even when we imagine a coastline prior to any human measuring of it.

Complex dynamical systems approaches applied to cognitive intentionality explain how intentional stances produce specific constraints, constants which do not act
as efficient causes.

How so? — Count Timothy von Icarus

As Alicia Juarrero explains:

The bottom-up causality of nonlinear far from equilibrium dynamics is thus truly creative; it produces qualitatively different wholes that are not reducible to sums, com­pounds, or aggregates. Once self-organized, furthermore, these emergent global structures of process actively and dynamically influence the go of their compo­nents, but not qua other. In contradiction to the received views on causality, that is, the whole also actively exerts causal power on itself top down. Self-organization, in short, strongly counsels for a wider denotation for the
term cause, one reconceptualized in terms of “context-sensitive constraints” to include those causal powers that incorporate circular causality, context-sensitive
embeddedness, and temporality. On this interpretation deterministic, mechanistic efficient causes become the limit of context-sensitive constraints.

Anyhow, the fact that a knife is a bad toy to give a baby, that one can't mate a penguin and a giraffe, or that one cannot take flight by flapping one's arms vigorously like a bird does not seem the sort of things that should require recourse to cognitive science to explain — Count Timothy von Icarus

Nor should the meanings of these examples be reified as epistemological truths, as G.E. Moore tried to do when he attempted to demonstrate an epistemological certainty by raising his hand and declaring ‘I know that here is a hand’.
You’re doing the same thing by asserting with bold certainty ‘ a knife is a bad toy to give a baby!’ , ‘one can't mate a penguin and a giraffe!’ and ‘ one cannot take flight by flapping one's arms vigorously like a bird’! Are these certainties that need to be justified, and if so, is there an end to justification, a bedrock of belief underlying their sense and intelligibility? And what kind of certainty is this bedrock?

Thanks, but that's not what he said. I was objecting to responses like "You know something? That is a knowledge claim."
and found no virtue at all in the 'answer'

A better question would be, why do you think only good things are meaningful? Meaning, and of course, this is not the dictionary sense of meaning, but the affective sense, referring to the pathos of one's regard for something, is about something affectively impactful, and this includes have an interest, being concerned, loving, hating and the entire range of value possibilities. A fatal birth defect is meaningful to the extent it occurs in the context of such engagements. — Astrophel

to the straightforward question:

Explain in what way (e.g.) a fatal birth defect is "meaningful". — 180 Proof

In fact, he has done good deal of appealing to authority, but no actual relevant discourse.

A better question would be, why do you think only good things are meaningful? Meaning, and of course, this is not the dictionary sense of meaning, but the affective sense, referring to the pathos of one's regard for something, is about something affectively impactful, and this includes have an interest, being concerned, loving, hating and the entire range of value possibilities. A fatal birth defect is meaningful to the extent it occurs in the context of such engagements.
— Astrophel
to the straightforward question:
Explain in what way (e.g.) a fatal birth defect is "meaningful".
— 180 Proof
In fact, he has done good deal of appealing to authority, but no actual relevant discourse. — Vera Mont

He’s summarizing Henry here, who’s a tough nut to crack. What he’s getting at is the association between objectively causal , representational models of nature and the accidental or arbitrary. The two would seem to go together due to the assumed affect and value-neutrality of objective causes. Forces of nature are not presumed to harbor any affective value in themselves. Henry argues that this externalistic way of thinking is a derivative distortion of the primary relation between subject and world.

Kierkegaard didn't believe in the catholicity of reason, he was a protestant from Denmark. He was essentially a Christian Viking, from a theological POV. That's why he emphasizes irrationality (i.e., "berserk") and the knight of faith (i.e., "berserk-er").

Yes, but Kierkegaard believes in a transcendent orientation towards the Good in the same way that Plato, St. Augustine, or Hegel did. Our desire for—and to know—what is truly good is what allows us to transcend the given of what we already are.

IMO, Kierkegaard's problem is that he has inherited the deficient presuppositions of his era and leaves them unchallenged. For him, the desire for the Good cannot be the desire of reason (practical reason) because all desires relate only to the passions and appetites. This is the same presupposition that leads Hume to posit his Guillotine (the is-ought gap), and to declare that "reason is and ought only be the slave of the passions." (Lewis speaks to this in the passage quoted here: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/956012)

Hence, reason is sterile and inadequate for Kierkegaard because his era has already deflated it into mere calculation, and so the infinite sought by the soul must be sought in passion, as set against reason.

However, even ignoring this, what I would also consider to be his error is to suppose that this transcendence could only apply to practical reason/passion (whose target is the Good) and not to theoretical reason. He essentially grants his opponents their deficient premises on theoretical reason, and in doing so sets the "subjective" against the "objective" in a sort of contest where one must prevail. Much of the prior tradition, by contrast, makes them both part of the same Absolute. The Good, the Beautiful, and the True are all equally Transcendentals, practical, aesthetic, and theoretical reason part of a unity. The desire to know what is "really true" is also a source of transcendence, pushing us beyond the given of current belief and opinion, just as practical reason pushes us beyond current desire.

For him, you mean? Or for anyone in general? If it's the latter, then I agree with Kierkegaard on this point: how do we even know that human reason has catholicity? It could just be secular universality for all we know.

Are there many sui generis, potentially contradicting truths or just one truth? Likewise, are there many unrelated, perhaps contradictory reasons? Can one give reasons for reason that are not circular?

Kierkegaard is a Christian, and so he should recognize that there is one "Way, Truth, and Light," (John 14:6) and one Logos (John 1). Yet he is also the inheritor of Luther, who told Erasmus:

"If it is difficult to believe in God’s mercy and goodness when He damns those who do not deserve it, we must recall that if God’s justice could be recognized as just by human comprehension, it would not be divine.”

...opening up an unbridgable chasm of equivocity between the "goodness of God," and anything known as good by man. Calvin does something similar with his exegesis of I John 4:8, "God is love," such that it is [for the elect, and inscuratble, implacable hatred for all else].

I already gave you a Dante allusion, so here is another. In Canto IX, Dante and Virgil are barred from entering the City of Dis by the demons. Virgil is a stand-in for human reason. The furies who taunt Virgil irrationally claw at themselves, as misologes also strike out without reason. Then they threaten to call for Medusa, to turn Dante to stone.

Virgil is so scared of this threat that, not trusting Dante to keep his eyes closed, he covers the Pilgrim's eyes himself. Then Dante the Poet bursts into an aside to the reader to mark well the allegory here.

There are a few things going on. The angel who opens the gates of Dis for them is reenacting the first of the Three Advents of Christ, the Harrowing of Hell (all three show up), but I think the bigger idea is that one risks being "turned to stone" and failing to progress if one loses faith in reason after it is shown to be defenseless against the unreasoning aggression of misology (D.C. Schindler's Plato's Critique of Impure Reason covers this "defenselessness" well).

The very next sinners Dante encounters are the Epicureans, who fail to find justification for the immortality of the soul and so instead focus on only worldly, finite goods. It's an episode filled with miscommunication, people talking over one another, and pride—exactly what happens when reason ceases to be transcendent and turns inward, settling for what it already has. This is the Augustinian curvatus in se, sin as being "curved in on oneself." Dante himself was seduced by this philosophy for a time, and was seemingly "turned to stone" by it.

Anyhow, one would misread St. Augustine's "believe that you might understand," if it was taken to be some sort of fidest pronouncement of blind faith. In context, it is very practical advice. One cannot learn anything if one doubts all one's teachers and refuses to accept anything. This is as true for physics as theology. We can even doubt that our parents are truly our parents. We might have been switched at birth. But we will never understand, be it physics, or what it is to be a good son, if we do not transcend such skepticism.

What do you think of Tertullian's (or whoever "really" said it): Credo quia absurdum, "I believe because it is absurd."?

Tertullian never said it. He said "prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est," "It is completely believable because it is unfitting," and the context is Marcion claiming that it would be unfitting for Christ to die a bodily death. The point is more that it makes sense because only God's radical, unfitting condescension can bridge the chasm between man and creature. As St. Athanasius says "God became man that man might become God."

Post-Reformation anti-rationalists glommed on to Tertullian because of "a plague on Aristotle," and "what has Jerusalem to do with Athens?" but fundamentalists would do well to note that two paragraphs after this part of Prescriptions Against the Heretics he says: "no word of God is so unqualified or so unrestricted in application that the mere words can be pleaded without respect to their underlying meaning," and that we must "seek until we find" and then come to believe without deviation. Also worth considering, the things they like most about Tertullian seem like they would be precisely those things that made him prey to the Montanist heresy.

To say that America has a coastline is to assume some configurative understanding of what a coastline is, which is to say, a system of anticipations concerning what it means to interact with it.

No, it's to assume that there is a difference between land and sea and a place where the two meet. Words, concepts, models, I'd contend these are a means of knowing, not what we know. Hence, when a concept or model changes, it does not imply that what is known through them changes. This is for the same reason that if I light a photograph of myself on fire I don't suffer burns, or if I unfocus my telescope, the craters in the Moon aren't smoothed away.

whenever we use the word we commit ourselves to a particular implied system of interaction

Yes, a system of interaction where the ocean is not a cliff or a beach. But these interactions don't depend on us knowing about them.


"America did not have a coastline until it was mapped," and "penguins and cockroaches didn't exist until man experienced them," are prima facie implausible claims. Extraordinary claims require solid evidence. Yet as noted above, one can easily accept enactivist premises, reject the "view from nowhere," and recognize the epistemic primacy of interaction without having to suppose any of this. You seem to need additional premises to justify this sort of claim, not merely dismissing other views.

As it stands, this looks akin to saying "three and three doesn't make five, thus it must make seven." Well, the first premise is right. The conclusion is extremely counterintuitive though and it's unclear how it is supposed to follow.

Alicia Juarrero explains:

Forgive me , but I am at a loss for how this is supposed to support the suppositions in question.

Nor should the meanings of these examples be reified as epistemological truths, as G.E. Moore tried to do when he attempted to demonstrate an epistemological certainty by raising his hand and declaring ‘I know that here is a hand’.
You’re doing the same thing by asserting with bold certainty ‘ a knife is a bad toy to give a baby!’ , ‘one can't mate a penguin and a giraffe!’ and ‘ one cannot take flight by flapping one's arms vigorously like a bird’! Are these certainties that need to be justified, and if so, is there an end to justification, a bedrock of belief underlying their sense and intelligibility? And what kind of certainty is this bedrock?

I didn't say anything about certainly, I said one could explain the nature of some constraints very well without recourse to cognitive science and dynamical systems.

But to the point, I would simply reject the unchallenged assumption made by many critics of Moore that all knowledge is demonstrative knowledge, or that knowledge is merely justified opinion. Yes, if all knowledge requires justification then one has to traverse an infinite chain of syllogisms to know anything, this was a going concern of the skeptics as far back as ancient Athens. But here is a syllogism:

P1: If all knowledge was demonstrative we would need an infinite chain of justifications to know anything and one cannot consider an infinite number of syllogisms in a finite lifespan (making knowledge impossible)
P2: But we do know things.
C: Therefore, not all knowledge is demonstrative.

If one rejects P1, they have rejected the grounds for complaining about "justification stopping somewhere." Either they affirm that we can consider an infinite chain of syllogisms or that we don't need to.

If they reject P2, then they are committed to the claim that they don't know anything, in which case they can hardly know that either P1 or P2 is false.

:up:

Also, is it supposed to be a vice to "assert with bold certainty" that a knife is a bad toy to give a baby?

Yes, I'm quite certain you shouldn't throw a razor sharp object into a baby's crib. Anyone whose philosophy has led them to think that they mustn't lean in too hard to the courage of their convictions on this has adopted a "philosophy" that seems to be a far cry from the "love of wisdom."

Are you sure this isn't Hegel's "fear of error become fear of truth?"

No doubt, it would be more acceptable to say merely that it "wouldn't be true for me that razors are good toys for 6 months olds," and to allow that others might justifiably disagree. The ol' tyranny of bourgeois metaphysics I suppose—temperance, prudence, fortitude, and justice all subservient to tolerance.

No? Where exactly do you suppose we lost it? — Count Timothy von Icarus

This small stretch of thought is meant to be an introduction to metaphysics , in a nutshell, an introduction to someone entirely convinced that no alternative to "the empirical spirit that animates science" (Quine, a confirmed naturalist) should be taken seriously. Getting lost is what happens with the naturalist assumptions are used to try to talk about epistemic relations.

Saying "we only see light that interacts with our eyes, so we never see things," is a bit like saying "it is impossible for man to write, all he can do is move pens around and push keyboard keys." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Which sounds like you're saying we see with our understanding. But this isn't the issue. The issue is how the object is delivered into a knowledge claim. If one thinks a brain is a physical organ that generates perceptual events, then it has to be explained how it is possible that these events can be about objects in the world. If one is a naturalist, like Vera Mont, then there is going to be lots of complex talk about subtle organic systems of connectivity, but the trouble is, of course, such things are essentially grounded in causality, and, as Rorty once put it, if causality is the explanatory ground to epistemic relations with objects, then I no more "know" my cat is on the rug (and it is) than a dented car fender knows the offending guard rail. Simply because causality is entirely devoid of epistemic meaning.

I already have a quote ready for this: "...every effect is the sign of its cause, the exemplification of the exemplar, and the way to the end to which it leads." St. Bonaventure - Itinerarium Mentis in Deum. — Count Timothy von Icarus

If is far worse, than this. First, I only pointed out that causality does not make a knowledge connection just in response to the claim of a physicalist's metaphysics. But the above seems plainly false for the only way for an exemplification to exemplify is assume a particular causal series that demonstrates this. This is rare, and when it comes to a causal matrix of neurons and, synapses and axonal connectivity, well: my cat in no way at all "is exemplified" by this.

But I said it is far worse. If causality cannot deliver "knowledge about" this means ALL that stands before me as a knowledge claim--explicit or implicit, a ready to hand pragmatic claim or a presence at hand (oh look, there is a cat) claim, or just the general implicit "claims" of familiarity as one walks down the street---requires something entirely other than causality to explain how it is possible. Because the argument isn't that I really don't know the cat is on the sofa because I am solipsistically bound to an epistemically closed world; rather, it says I DO know the world and all things inner or outer, privately or publicly. It doesn't question that we have knowledge of the world. It asks what has to be the case given that we do have such knowledge.

1. Representationalism and correlationalism are the correct ways to view perception and epistemology.

2. Truth is something like correspondence, such that not being able to "step outside of experience" makes knowledge of the world impossible (and, in turn, this should make us affirm that there is no world outside experience?)

3. Perceptual relationships are decomposable and reducible such that one can go from a man seeing an apple to speaking of neurons communicating in the optic nerve without losing anything essential (reductionism). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Number one: representation and correlation are just ambiguous terms. Almost without meaning. Is it a Kantian representation? And the thing out there impossibly distant? Or is the thing something of primary qualities, space and time. I mean, what correlates with what?

Number two: Not being able to step outside of experience means either everything is IN experience, or experience is IN everything, in order to account for knowledge. Pragmatists fail to explain the phenomenological encounter. Only phenomenologists can address this. The cat is there. Undeniable. It is crowded by regions of associations that give it its full presence. Truth as alethea: A discovery in the affective, conceptualized object that is predelineated in the potentiality of possibilities of a finite historical totality, and so on. Language brings the object out of hiddenness, Heidegger; but Heidegger did not take, as far as I have seen, epistemology up at all, because phenomenology begins with description, and so, the object is there and this being there is primordial, an "inexorable" presence. Period.
I want to know how its being there before me, reaches me, or I reach it. What spans that epistemic distance?

Number three: I don't follow. A reduction moves from what is extraneous to what is essential, thus, A person's social troubles can be reduced to an account of his, say, unresolved infantile issues, the details being incidental. A decomposable perceptual relation? meaning one that can be constructed and ignored at will, no one having privilege over any other: is this yarn, or is it the sum total of a molecular aggregate? Both, depending on the context of the matter at hand. Derrida concludes that there is nothing outside the context. But, like early Wittgenstein, the point really is apophatic, a "reduction" that preserves what cannot be said.

Does any of this erudite palaver have any bearing on religion and suffering?

Husserl argued that philosophy needed to ask the basic questions about what lies in the presuppositions of science and the "naturalistic attitude". To look this deeply into the essential givenness of the world, one had to suspend of "bracket" knowledge claims that otherwise dominate ideas. — Astrophel

:clap:

consider the standard truth tables taught in logic classes, and see how abstract they, referring to propositional values only. What happened to actual world?? It simply does not matter, which is why ango american philosophy collapsed in on itself. — Astrophel

:clap:

Reason cannot, keep in mind, understand what it is, cannot "get behind" itself (Wittgenstein). for this would take a pov outside outside of logic itself and this cannot be "conceived". — Astrophel

'The eye cannot see itself, nor the hand grasp itself', says the Upaniṣad.

It depends on how reason is conceived. Reason for the ancients and medievals is ecstatic and transcendent, "the Logos is without beginning and end." Often today it is not much more than computation. How it is conceived will determine its limits. Is reason something we do inside "language games?" Is it just "rule following?" Or is it a more expansive ground for both? Does reason have desires and ends? — Count Timothy von Icarus

:clap: In the ancient world, reason qua logos was that which animated the Cosmos. But then this becomes subsumed by theology as the literal 'word of God', which is what 'logos' came to mean. And this is what was said to be 'foolishness to the Greeks'. This tension, between reason and faith, has existed in Christianity ever since. We're still suffering from it, although there are those who say it can be reconciled. (Aquinas would be one, but notice that Luther was scornful of Aquinas' regard for Aristotle, and the mystical elements of Christianity, infused with Platonism, often flirts with or is accused of heresy by fideist Christians.)

Something should be said about the Buddhist approach to the question posed in the OP. It is often said in modern Buddhist circles, that the Buddha only teaches the cause of suffering and its end. While this has been questioned (ref) it is still true that Buddhism is almost uniquely focussed on the question of the nature of suffering and its cause. The 'Four Noble Truths' of Buddhism begin with the observation that embodied existence is dukkha, a word that is usually translated as 'suffering' or 'stressful'. But, the Four Truths go on to say, there is a cause to this suffering, and a way to the end of suffering (often overlooked by those critical of Buddhism's purported 'pessimism'.)

The philosophical point that should be made, is that the question 'what is the cause of dukkha' generates quite a different problematic to 'what is the origin of everything' which is implied by the Biblical belief that God created the world. Buddhism basically says that the cause of suffering is not some evil Gnostic demiurge that wants to torture mankind, or an indifferent God who lets the innocent suffer for no reason. No, the cause of suffering can be found within oneself, in the form of the constant desire (trishna, thirst, clinging) - to be or to become, to possess and to retain, to cling to the transitory and ephemeral as if they were lasting and satisfying, when by their very nature, they are not. That of course is a very deep and difficult thing to penetrate, as the desire to be and to become is engrained in us by the entire history of biological existence. It nevertheless is the 'cause of sorrow' as the Buddha teaches it, radical though that might be (and it is radical).

It is of course true that Buddhism situates the 'problem of suffering' against a background of the endless caravan of birth and death ('saṃsāra'), which is quite alien to Western cultural traditions (at least since the early Christian era.) Regardless, the Buddha's teaching is now part of global culture, and the perspectives it provides can be brought to bear on the question of 'religion and suffering'.