Joshs

I will say this about Husserl’s concepts. Many of his terms fly in the face of conventional understandings. For instance , his use of soul, spirit , e...

Well , profundity and importance tend to be synonymous with a certain notion of difficulty , dont they? When the light bulb goes on and there’s a ‘eur...

I don’t think prose style can be separated from the content of one’s ideas. I can’t imagine Husserl writing his phenomenology in any other way , witho...

That’s a toughie. I can’t stand Russell, and am allergic to most analytic approaches to philosophy in general. To me they come across as terribly thin...

There’s that word ‘clear’ again. I’m still not sure what it’s supposed to mean, other that that you understand someone’s prose. With regard to Popper,...

To be fair , if your only exposure to ‘postmodern philosophy’ is Sokal’s book, you really need to read primary sources , or at least notable interpret...

What Popper specifically did not understand was the idea behind the paradigm, that worldviews, scientific and otherwise, function as integrated gestal...

That explains why Popper never understood Kuhn.

Tell you what. You give me a list of who you consider to be leading suspects for unreadable philosophy , and I will summarize, simplify, and link thei...

What makes an idea ‘simple’? The fact that you understand it? Isn’t that circular? If someone tries their best to simply their philosophy and you stil...

No he’s not. Possibly you give up too easily and end up blaming the writer for your own conceptual struggles? Actually , we can blame Anglo-American c...

This is silly. Of course one can simplify Kant for today’s laymen. The man wrote 200 years ago. His ideas have been assimilated into the mainstream by...

Here are alternatives from those who reject idealism. Maybe you can agree with the gist of their arguments. From Evan Thompson: “Many philosophers hav...

I think the key issue here isn’t materiality or objectness but relative stability. The question is, how does a position like Heidegger’s, which claims...

There’s a good section about the self in the Stanford Encyclopedia’s article about Nietzsche. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche/ “…the beli...

Imagine that every moment of time things changed. Yeah, you reply, I already get that. So what? What does this have to do with mathematics? No, I mean...

The basis for this commonality is a reciprocal causality operating between organism and environment . Since other organisms belong to each organism’s ...

One must make certain assumptions about this something: namely that it stays put as what it is, that it is res extensia, that it has duration. But not...

But there must first be a peculiar way of thinking about stuff before it makes sense to calculate and measure. We must assume stuff is objectively sel...

One can agree that in very general terms higher animals perceive pretty much the same persistent features of the environment as we do without having t...

I haven’t read up on this , but if your dog watches you attach something to the side of an object he can’t directly see, will he know that there is an...

Yes, that’s pretty much what I mean. I think the issue here is that the later Wittgenstein seems to be wanting to radicalize the notion of context suc...

What animals ( and humans) ‘sense’ , once we have removed all the higher level constructions that make phenomena appear for us as self-persisting thin...

The interesting thing is that materiality is already ‘conceptual’ through and through in that the very notion of an empirical object is a complex perc...

I see Heidegger’s approach here as overlapping Wittgenstein’s. Heidegger explains that in taking something to be the case in a propositional judgement...

Well, there’s metaphysical , or ‘naive’ realism , which tends to be linked with Enlightenment associationism, and then there’s representational realis...

But how do we change ourselves in such a way that we don’t end up simply regurgitating variations on old themes? We can’t simply deign to change ourse...

Good question. On the one hand, Nietzsche stressed the plural and differentiated nature of psychic drives. On the other hand , he seemed to suggest th...

My favorite thinkers say self is not an entity , not a specific content , but a relation. We often use the word ‘self’ to talk about a unified multipl...

It gets complicated for Nietzsche when you try and parse what ‘my will’ refers to. Nietzsche rejects the r idea of a unitary self or thinking ‘I’. He ...

The thing about notions like ‘inborn’ and ‘instinctual’ is that they don’t differentiate between whole hog pre-formed contents and a capacity to learn...

No, he’s a perceiving organism. Most of what perceive doesn’t come directly fro the world but from our expectations. See Noe and O’Reagan’s work on vi...

I love these illusions. But they have much less to do with geometry than they do with how we use our background knowledge of perspective to fill in sh...

No, but my sense of its usefulness changes. Logical propositions have to do with things being the case or not. So they presuppose that the things we a...

But then we have to wade into the messiness of ‘use’. The cat is on the mat is no less complicated than the sense of any particular word. How is it be...

Did you read the Wittgenstein quote? Do you understand what he’s trying to say?

I would argue that semblances account for ALL of what we take as objective nature. Without the work of semblance there would be no natural world of re...

They made a good starting point, but reified the issue in terms of objective causation. The phenomenologists made much ore headway here , which is why...

Hi there. Here’s a bunch of Gendlin quotes pertinent to the topic: “ The higher animals live quite complex lives without culture. Culture does not cre...

I don’t think the solution you have in mind has anything to do with what Wittgenstein was trying to illustrate here. We don’t have to drop the law of ...

e and like are less numbers than they are recursive processes. We made up the process. To be more precise, all our mathematics is parasitic on our not...

Except that Wittgenstein rejected the idea that words represent reality and maps represent territories.

And what Wittgenstein saw , and Turing and Dennett did not , was that the computer’s actions mean nothing without an interpreter.

I think this Atlantic piece does a pretty good job of identifiying the major ideologies involved: https://amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/619012/

What a coincidence. I was just reading a review of a compilation of essays by Devitt, which concluded: ‘Putting Metaphysics First is a nicely written ...

Do you have any significant problems with the following , or are you in general agreement with its sentiments? ‘ of the most commonsense, and scientif...

I agree. But notice you used the word ‘expand’ . The child isnt just a continuation of self as if the self were some sort of fixed content that everyt...

He believed the self was a society of competing drives. This multiplicity could be harmonized from time to time by a dominating drive.

What percentage of people would attempt to help a loved one, let’s say their own child, before helping themselves? Why do you think this is? Could it ...

Nietzsche also said there was no such thing as a unitary self.