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Joshs

['Member']Joined: December 04, 2017 at 22:11Last active: February 25, 2026 at 00:3011 discussions6687 comments
Location: Chicago

Bio

I am an independent writer in philosophy and psychology. My research focuses on the radically temporal thinking of Derrida, Heidegger and Eugene Gendlin, and their critical relationship to embodied, enactive approaches influenced by Merleau-Ponty, particularly regarding the interpretation of affectivity, temporality and intersubjectivity.

Favourite Philosopher

Derrida, Heidegger, Husserl, Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, Eugene Gendlin, Deleuze, Gergen, Wittgenstein, Joseph Rouse

Discussions (11)

Comments

In: Michel Bitbol: The Primacy of Consciousness  — view comment
So would Western philosophers like Spinoza, Plotinus and Nicholas of Cusa.
February 23, 2026 at 15:13
In: Michel Bitbol: The Primacy of Consciousness  — view comment
What you say may be true of Eastern practices, but I think Tom makes a good point with regard to the phenomenological vantages of Husserl and Merleau-...
February 21, 2026 at 15:01
In: Intelligibility Unlikely Through Naturalism  — view comment
Ok, so if Braver, Kierkegaard and Levinas dont work for you, maybe the left Sellarsians of the Pittsburgh school are more compatible. For John McDowel...
February 16, 2026 at 18:56
In: Intelligibility Unlikely Through Naturalism  — view comment
Braver is taking his cue from Kierkegaard and Levinas. For them, recalcitrance is not a brute, uninterpreted Given pushing back from outside all conce...
February 16, 2026 at 15:46
In: Intelligibility Unlikely Through Naturalism  — view comment
What it means to succeed or fail, to be true or false, correct or incorrect, depends on qualitative systems of criteria. Such criteria define the basi...
February 16, 2026 at 14:51
In: Wittgenstein's Toolbox  — view comment
For Wittgenstein, even mathematical propositions derive their special status from their role in our practices. They are rules of grammar within certai...
February 16, 2026 at 04:12
In: Intelligibility Unlikely Through Naturalism  — view comment
Give it a try. What vocabulary can you come up with to talk about the objective pole that doesn’t already imply a contribution from the subjective pol...
February 15, 2026 at 21:32
In: Intelligibility Unlikely Through Naturalism  — view comment
I wonder what you might make of Lee Braver’s ‘middle way’ which he calls transgressive realism.
February 15, 2026 at 03:01
In: Intelligibility Unlikely Through Naturalism  — view comment
Yes, phenomenologists as well as postmodernists would agree that there is a world impinging on us in ways that cannot be swallowed up by our concepts ...
February 15, 2026 at 02:37
In: Intelligibility Unlikely Through Naturalism  — view comment
This sounds more pre-Kantian than post-Kantian to me. Claiming that reality can force its revision” is classic critical realism. It presupposes a rela...
February 15, 2026 at 00:51
In: Intelligibility Unlikely Through Naturalism  — view comment
If you remove all of the idealizations that minds impose on the world of appearances, there is not much to say about the nature of what is mind-indepe...
February 15, 2026 at 00:44
In: Intelligibility Unlikely Through Naturalism  — view comment
Merleau-Ponty would say we constitute the ideal circle in stages. First, within shared, intersubjective embodied experience, we constitute stable form...
February 15, 2026 at 00:30
In: Wittgenstein's Toolbox  — view comment
I’d go along with this, as long as we’re careful not to treat as a division of labor the fact that cognitive science “is entitled to investigate the c...
February 13, 2026 at 21:06
In: "My Truth"  — view comment
Both Dickens and Brontë are considered Romantic writers. This is not just because they happened to be working in the same time period, but because the...
February 12, 2026 at 22:01
In: "My Truth"  — view comment
What do you think of the idea that truth evolves via transitions in cultural norms and knowledge. For instance, Hegel argues that truth develops throu...
February 12, 2026 at 19:23
In: "My Truth"  — view comment
Wasn’t rhetoric considered one of the highest arts by the Greeks?
February 12, 2026 at 17:58
In: "My Truth"  — view comment
Can two competing beliefs both be right? Is demanding a one-size-fits-all truth the sign of maturity or a kind of childish tantrum in the face of pers...
February 11, 2026 at 20:36
In: "My Truth"  — view comment
You claim that Kuhn avoids “true” simply because a theory is not a truth but a “best possibility,” and that the scientific method licenses us to treat...
February 11, 2026 at 04:04
In: "My Truth"  — view comment
From a Kuhnian vantage, the continuity you emphasize can’t be understood as neutral continuity. You say anomalies are “inevitably described in the old...
February 11, 2026 at 03:45
In: Is Objective Morality Even Possible from a Secular Framework?  — view comment
Or in hermeneutic historical life, or phenomenological intentionality, or poststructural becoming.
February 10, 2026 at 23:22
In: "My Truth"  — view comment
Kuhn’s skepticism about capital-T Truth is not grounded simply in human finitude, as if better epistemic access would solve the problem. It is grounde...
February 10, 2026 at 19:50
In: "My Truth"  — view comment
If I say my truth about my own gender is unique to me, is that an opinion or true?
February 10, 2026 at 19:25
In: "My Truth"  — view comment
Let me quote Thomas Kuhn:
February 10, 2026 at 19:09
In: "My Truth"  — view comment
I am in complete agreement, and that was the point I was making. Science works, not because it is truth with a capital T, but because it allows us to ...
February 10, 2026 at 19:05
In: "My Truth"  — view comment
Would you agree that none of us will ever experience truth with a capital ‘T’, that naive metaphysical sort of truth that was so popular a century or ...
February 10, 2026 at 18:38
In: "My Truth"  — view comment
Have you asked anyone whether their feelings about an issue have changed and what made them change? What if they respond that their feelings express t...
February 10, 2026 at 15:04
In: "My Truth"  — view comment
Except that I would argue that the kind of truth you would claim to be beyond mere feelings or opinions is an abstraction derived from those feelings ...
February 10, 2026 at 01:36
In: Michel Bitbol: The Primacy of Consciousness  — view comment
For Bitbol and other phenomenologists we are not objects separate from other objects. Consciousness is the site of subject-object interaction. The sub...
February 09, 2026 at 22:05
In: Intelligibility Unlikely Through Naturalism  — view comment
You might get in trouble for that claim, but I can’t say I disagree.
February 09, 2026 at 20:48
In: "My Truth"  — view comment
I’ve never met two gay people who construe what it means to be gay , or what it means to be mistaken about gayness, in exactly the same way.
February 09, 2026 at 20:47
In: "My Truth"  — view comment
We definitely don’t have “our truths” in law, since its grounding basis assumes strict normative precedent. But we do in our personal relationships. T...
February 09, 2026 at 20:45
In: Wittgenstein's Toolbox  — view comment
What specific philosophical traditions (it would be helpful if you could name some names) are you drawing from in arriving at these conclusions? I’m a...
February 09, 2026 at 16:11
In: "My Truth"  — view comment
Our shared reality isnt going to help you figure out why your perspective doesnt jibe precisely with those whose reality you share. Group consensus ca...
February 09, 2026 at 01:20
In: "My Truth"  — view comment
Wouldnt Wittgenstein treat the phrase ‘my truth’ as staking out a position within a language game? Rather than treating “truth” as a concept with a fi...
February 08, 2026 at 15:22
In: Wittgenstein's Toolbox  — view comment
He was also talking to those he was more positively inclined toward, such as Kierkegaard and James.
February 08, 2026 at 05:19
In: Wittgenstein's Toolbox  — view comment
What does your list look like?
February 08, 2026 at 05:11
In: Wittgenstein's Toolbox  — view comment
Chuckles are more useful if I know what you’re chuckling about. Pay careful attention to the family resemblances within each cluster, then run it thro...
February 08, 2026 at 05:03
In: Wittgenstein's Toolbox  — view comment
Who is he talking to in the Philosophical Investigations?
February 08, 2026 at 05:01
In: Wittgenstein's Toolbox  — view comment
My question is what you think about Kant, Hegel, Schelling, hermeneutics, phenomenology, enactivism and post-structuralism, because you won’t be able ...
February 08, 2026 at 04:41
In: Wittgenstein's Toolbox  — view comment
The relationship between Wittgenstein and phenomenology isn’t one-way, as though his grammatical approach is a corrective to their methods. Phenomenol...
February 08, 2026 at 00:09
In: Wittgenstein's Toolbox  — view comment
Wittgenstein’s focus was on how we understand each other through language , and how we then use that language when we are alone with our thoughts. Phe...
February 07, 2026 at 14:59
In: Intelligibility Unlikely Through Naturalism  — view comment
There are promising signs that mainstream neuropsychological approaches are starting to nibble at the edges of phenomenology. The popular free-energy ...
February 07, 2026 at 02:41
In: Intelligibility Unlikely Through Naturalism  — view comment
The critique of naturalism emanating from phenomenology is, as has been mentioned, quite different from Hart’s objections to it. For instance, Merleau...
February 07, 2026 at 01:16
In: Wittgenstein's Toolbox  — view comment
But is this absence of criteria for a word ever a thing for Wittgenstein except when we look for causes and explanations? Are criteria a precondition ...
February 06, 2026 at 15:08
In: Wittgenstein's Toolbox  — view comment
You’re interpreting what Wittgenstein is doing as a behaviorist reduction, which treats outward regularities as suffficient and ignores inner causes. ...
February 06, 2026 at 14:46
In: JTB+U and the Grammar of Knowing: Justification, Understanding, and Hinges (Paper Based Thread)  — view comment
I suspect that what’s at stake here is, at least in relation to Wittgenstein, is to what extent we treat understanding and reason in terms of adequati...
February 04, 2026 at 21:33
In: JTB+U and the Grammar of Knowing: Justification, Understanding, and Hinges (Paper Based Thread)  — view comment
It isnt a skepticism. It avoids skepticism by showing that, as you say, ‘authority doesn’t come from some interpretation behind the rule, like rails l...
February 04, 2026 at 21:17
In: JTB+U and the Grammar of Knowing: Justification, Understanding, and Hinges (Paper Based Thread)  — view comment
Wittgenstein contrasts situations where words are doing something with those where language goes on holiday, sits idle, like when we look to consult p...
February 04, 2026 at 19:25
In: JTB+U and the Grammar of Knowing: Justification, Understanding, and Hinges (Paper Based Thread)  — view comment
But is this comparable to saying “improvement talk is meaningful when we notice how the word is actually being used in a current context. A word loses...
February 04, 2026 at 15:02
In: JTB+U and the Grammar of Knowing: Justification, Understanding, and Hinges (Paper Based Thread)  — view comment
I agree with the overall direction of your response, but it seems to over-intellectualize in places, explaining where it only needs to describe. Rathe...
February 04, 2026 at 02:40
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