Joshs

He only seems obscurantist because you don’t understand him. That’s the curse of great philosophy. It takes hard work to gain the rewards.

Yes, and Heidegger critiqued Husserlian phenomenology for harboring its own presuppositions at the very moment that it was invoking a return to the ‘t...

I think what we’re talking about here isn’t a dichotomy between something called science and something called philosophy , but a spectrum of explicati...

Scientific theories can and do in fact put into question presuppositions passed down through the history of philosophy. I suggest that it is mostly th...

Wittgenstein, like Heidegger, is substituting a practice theory for a cognitivist account. Thinking isn’t in the head, it is in the interactive perfor...

The use of magnets? Interesting.

One way researchers have attempted to simulate savant skills in neurotypicals is by applying powerful magnets to the brain to impede more rapid proces...

Incredible indeed , oh the horror of it all. No, I was just too lazy to spell out the kinds of differences between autistic and neuro-typical cognitio...

Indeed.

One doesn’t simply passively observe such patterns, but actively engages with them by moving one’s eyes and head to intervene and enhance the action i...

My condo is carpeted so I can do most things on the floor rather than on chairs. I eat dinner, watch tv and internet , and often sleep on the floor. T...

I’ll just say that the passages Antony had us read offers an alternative to the realist thinking implied by the idea of an object in itself.

That there is nothing in the world ‘caputured’ by a word doesn’t mean that the word’s meaning isnt of the world. We could instead say that the use of ...

A sensation, as a figure against a background , enacts a change in that background, a new dimension of sense. I take ’s analysis of word symbols as al...

If I recognize a visual pattern as a a unitary object of some sort , I am construing it conceptually. Does this mean that the elements of the image ar...

All perception is conceptual. This means that we don’t hear acoustic frequencies, we hear the train whistle. Furthermore the meaning of that train whi...

Well, in me you have a kindred spirit, but you will be hard-pressed to find more than a tiny handful of contributors to this forum who endorse anythin...

Yes, this is what they call philosophy. I’m glad you are able to draw from your own experience but there are now things called ‘books’, and quite a lo...

If we truly live in the moment, we would experience absolutely nothing. A single experienced moment of time has three parts. It consists of the immedi...

It’s true that most philosophers make qualitative distinctions between human and non-human mental processes. For instance, Joseph Rouse, who embraces ...

Thanks. Looking forward to it.

I take it Richard Rorty’s book ‘Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature’ didn’t leave much of an impression on you.

I think whether and how living and non-living processes can be integrated within a single overarching framework is secondary to the kind of model we a...

If we compare Pattee’s take on the autonomy of self against its world (‘epistemic cut’) with Thompson’s concept of embodied autonomy as ‘operational c...

What writers like Thompson, Barad and Deleuze mean by ‘material’ is quite different than the way it is meant in causal reductionism. Materiality has t...

Reduction to what? Causal determinism? That’s not what one is left with in Barad’s model , any more than it forms the basis of Thompson’s model of con...

What I’m calling practice theory isn’t restricted to Barad’s work. It includes the projects of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, phenomenology , hermeneutics, ...

I think the hard problem comes down to the seeming chasm between what we think of as feeling and the way that empiricism treats objects other than min...

What is it in my description that evokes the notion of psyche for you? Is it the word ‘agent’? I know it’s difficult not to associate agency with cons...

Well, he’s got it partly right in talking about a network of interacting agents. But he needs to jettison the Cartesian anthropcentrism. Agency isn’t ...

That’s what pragmatist-hermeneutical and poststructural models of practice are for. For Hegel and Marx the dialectic totalizes historical becoming. In...

Hmm, you might try his lecture course on Heidegger from the mid ‘60’s: ‘Heidegger: The Question of Being and History’ He keeps the play on language to...

Yes he did. He would never argue that the implications of mathematics are “irrelevant to the real world”. Rather, the implications of formal systems c...

I have to disagree here. I’ve read and published on Derrida, and see his most substantive contribution to philosophy as recognizing where Heidegger st...

What if in place of Kant’s Transcendental categories we substituted normative social practices? Doesn’t that stay true to Kant’s insight concerning th...

What is true is true in relation to a normed pattern. Perception, as pattern recognition, is conceptually based. This means that expectations guide re...

“Anything goes” is also the common strawman argument against a logical pluralism that is taken disparagingly to imply a ‘relativism’ or or ‘nihilism’,...

This is from his public webpage:

It’s true that the Pittsburgh school is well versed in Hegel, but I would argue that in embracing Hegel, hermeneutics, and other Continental strands o...

I agree with you about Husserl and phenomenology. I think Rorty misread them. I see Husserl’s and Sartre’s work as very much indebted to Hegelianism. ...

My take aligns somewhat with that of Rorty, who argues that analytic philosophy doesn’t go any further than Kantian modes of metaphysics, which is why...

That might come as news to Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Dilthey, Nietzsche and Bergson. On the other hand, it would be accurate to call Husserl the...

I noticed that you have a strong interest in the work of Ayn Rand. Do you think that her ideas on selfhood are compatible with those of Merleau-Ponty?

You’re missing Rorty’s point. He believes that the goal of science isnt to arrive at the way things truly are, but to enhance social solidarity. For R...

Christ, you sound like a joyless unimaginative old man. Reasonableness is entirely overrated. Here’s a little secret. Whatever works in person’s life ...

This quote amounts to no more than confusing a personal preference for a profound insight. He falls into a common misapprehension of those with a tale...

One person’s illusion is another’s emancipation. Could be that a bit more diversion and fantasy might actually enhance your life. Perhaps it will even...

Are you saying that philosophy is obvious and science is not? And that philosophy’s role is subservient to the facts that science discovers?

I have always thought of Analytic philosophy as a way of interpreting an era of Continental philosophy via a range of stylistic moves. It is not as th...

Years ago a sharp cultural divide distinguished approaches to philosophy in the English speaking world from those in Europe , dubbed the Analytic-Cont...