Combining Philosophers

Ideas for Lynch,MP/Glasgow,JM, Edmund Husserl and Alfred R. Mele

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4 ideas

7. Existence / D. Theories of Reality / 3. Reality
The World is all experiencable objects [Husserl]
     Full Idea: The World is the totality of objects that can be known through experience.
     From: Edmund Husserl (Ideas: intro to pure phenomenology [1913], I.1.001)
     A reaction: I think this is the 'Nature' which has to be 'bracketed', when pursuing Phenomenology. It sounds like anti-realist empiricism, which has no place for unobservables.
7. Existence / D. Theories of Reality / 4. Anti-realism
Absolute reality is an absurdity [Husserl]
     Full Idea: An absolute reality is just as valid as a round square.
     From: Edmund Husserl (Ideas: intro to pure phenomenology [1913], II.3.055)
     A reaction: Husserl distances himself from 'Berkeleyian' idealism, but his discussion keeps flirting with, perhaps in some sort of have-your-cake-and-eat-it Hegelian way. Perhaps it is close to Dummett's Anti-Realism.
7. Existence / D. Theories of Reality / 6. Physicalism
Nonreductive materialism says upper 'levels' depend on lower, but don't 'reduce' [Lynch/Glasgow]
     Full Idea: The root intuition behind nonreductive materialism is that reality is composed of ontologically distinct layers or levels. …The upper levels depend on the physical without reducing to it.
     From: Lynch,MP/Glasgow,JM (The Impossibility of Superdupervenience [2003], B)
     A reaction: A nice clear statement of a view which I take to be false. This relationship is the sort of thing that drives people fishing for an account of it to use the word 'supervenience', which just says two things seem to hang out together. Fluffy materialism.
The hallmark of physicalism is that each causal power has a base causal power under it [Lynch/Glasgow]
     Full Idea: Jessica Wilson (1999) says what makes physicalist accounts different from emergentism etc. is that each individual causal power associated with a supervenient property is numerically identical with a causal power associated with its base property.
     From: Lynch,MP/Glasgow,JM (The Impossibility of Superdupervenience [2003], n 11)
     A reaction: Hence the key thought in so-called (serious, rather than self-evident) 'emergentism' is so-called 'downward causation', which I take to be an idle daydream.