> On Oct 20, 2016, at 10:23 AM, Søren Brier <[email protected]> wrote: > > I can find no easy way from phenomenology alone - not even from Peirce’s > triadic phaneroscophy - to the reality of an outer world and other embodied > conscious subjects. I do not think Peirce solves this problem. Do you?
When you say to the reality of the outer world do you mean in terms of proof? After all in one sense Peirce’s phaneroscopy handles this well. It appears as real and we can not doubt. Which in a certain sense seems completely satisfactory. But this is because Peirce rejects the Cartesian tendencies in Husserl. (I’d add that Heidegger makes a similar move against Descartes and Husserl in Being and Time to deny that denying the real world can even be posed) If that’s not what you mean (and forgive me - I’ve not had time to read the list for a while) then doesn’t Peirce’s notion of continuity solve it? That is how the inside and outside are approached asymptotically letting us move from mind like to matter like and back? Now if we want to say that the outer world aren’t just objects but conscious objects then we have to unpack what we mean. Again I think Peirce’s notion of growth of signs handles this without all the confusion that I think we sometimes get in how Levinas, Derrida, Marion or others. There’s a reason why post-Husserlian phenomenology goes in that direction (even among those who consider themselves more Husserlian than Heideggarian). While I might be wrong I a big part of the problem is in conceiving phenomenology too statically rather than as process. Trying to explain process in terms of stasis is inherently problematic and creates artificial problems. Peirce avoids most of that IMO. > On Oct 20, 2016, at 9:53 AM, Jeffrey Brian Downard <[email protected]> > wrote: > > Husserl, for example, is working towards the same sort of end in his > phenomenological theory, but his mathematical reflections are overly guided > by ideas drawn from arithmetic and metrical geometries--and he misses real > insights about the character of the continuous and discrete features in our > observations can be drawn from graph theory and topology. As such, he (and > Heidegger following him) simply do not provide the kind of phenomenological > analysis of the elemental formal and material features of experience that is > really needed. This seems completely right, although I’d argue Heidegger in his late period is trying to do that. It’s just that he adopts a very unhelpful quasi-mystical and poetic language to do this. I think the big move Heidegger makes from Husserl is to move towards a more dynamic conception of phenomenology. But most phenomenology is still trapped in a language that’s quite static. Heidegger starts going beyond this (although not far enough) but I do think he also gets at some of the issues you raise. It’s just that his language ends up being less helpful. I’d actually say that while Peirce does do something like phenomenology even in his thought the distinction between inside and outside seems pretty blurry. So you get comments like consciousness is his swerve as seen from the inside. Or that appeal to a mathematical graph of continuity to explain how the inside and outside are connected. I’m not sure he’s able to do what I take you criticism of post-Husserlian phenomenology entails. Rather he suggests that because of continuity it’s just not a problem. (I’d add that the externalism of both Heidegger and Peirce also make a lot of traditional problems of inside/outside less of an issue)
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