8 ideas
| 21238 | Later phenomenologists tried hard to incorporate social relationships [Bakewell] |
| Full Idea: Ever since Husserl, phenomenologists and existentialists had been trying to stretch the definition of existence to incorporate our social lives and relationships. | |
| From: Sarah Bakewell (At the Existentialist Café [2016], 08) | |
| A reaction: I see a parallel move in Wittgenstein's Private Language Argument. Husserl's later work seems to have been along those lines. Putnam's Twin Earth too. |
| 21237 | Phenomenology begins from the immediate, rather than from axioms and theories [Bakewell] |
| Full Idea: Traditional philosophy often started with abstract axioms or theories, but the German phenomenologists went straight for life as they experienced it, moment to moment. | |
| From: Sarah Bakewell (At the Existentialist Café [2016], 01) | |
| A reaction: Bakewell gives this as the gist of what Aron said to Sartre in 1933, providing the bridge from phenomenology to existentialism. The obvious thought is that everybody outside philosophy starts from immediate experience, so why is this philosophy? |
| 1556 | By nature people are close to one another, but culture drives them apart [Hippias] |
| Full Idea: I regard you all as relatives - by nature, not by convention. By nature like is akin to like, but convention is a tyrant over humankind and often constrains people to act contrary to nature. | |
| From: Hippias (fragments/reports [c.430 BCE]), quoted by Plato - Protagoras 337c8 |
| 3286 | An organism is conscious if and only if there is something it is like to be that organism [Nagel] |
| Full Idea: An organism only has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism. | |
| From: Thomas Nagel (What is it like to be a bat? [1974], p.166) | |
| A reaction: It is hard to argue with this, but one should push on and ask what features of its consciousness make it such that there is a 'what it is like'. What is it like to have a subconscious mind, or be deeply asleep, or drive while daydreaming? |
| 3288 | Can we describe our experiences to zombies? [Nagel] |
| Full Idea: The goal of an objective phenomenology would be to describe, at least in part, the subjective character of experiences in a form comprehensible to beings incapable of having those experiences. | |
| From: Thomas Nagel (What is it like to be a bat? [1974], p.179) | |
| A reaction: This seems a bizarre expectation. We can already explain visual experience to the blind up to a point, but no one is dreaming of an "objective phenomenology" which will give blind people total understanding, just by reading about it in braille. |
| 4883 | Nagel's title creates an impenetrable mystery, by ignoring a bat's ways that may not be "like" anything [Dennett on Nagel] |
| Full Idea: Nagel's title invites us to ignore all the different ways in which bats might accomplish their cunning feats without its "being like" anything for them. We create an impenetrable mystery for ourselves if we assume that Nagel's title makes sense. | |
| From: comment on Thomas Nagel (What is it like to be a bat? [1974]) by Daniel C. Dennett - Kinds of Minds Ch.6 | |
| A reaction: This could well be correct about bats, but the question applies to humans as well, and we can't deny that "what it is like" is a feature of some creatures' realities. On the fringes of our own consciousness there are mental events that are "like" nothing. |
| 3287 | We can't be objective about experience [Nagel] |
| Full Idea: If the subjective character of experience is fully comprehensible only from one point of view, then any shift to greater objectivity does not take us nearer to the real nature of the phenomenon: it takes us further away from it. | |
| From: Thomas Nagel (What is it like to be a bat? [1974], p.174) | |
| A reaction: We can, however, talk to one another about our subjectivity, and compare notes, and such 'inter-subjectivity' may be one approach to objectivity. We must concede Nagel's point, but we also miss something about a stone if we must remain outside of it. |
| 4989 | Physicalism should explain how subjective experience is possible, but not 'what it is like' [Kirk,R on Nagel] |
| Full Idea: A physicalist account of conscious experience must explain how it is possible for a physical system to be a conscious subject, but not 'what it is like' for some organism. | |
| From: comment on Thomas Nagel (What is it like to be a bat? [1974]) by Robert Kirk - Mind and Body §4.2 | |
| A reaction: You can't entirely evade Nagel's challenge. We are trying to discover the 'neural correlate of consciousness', which will explain why we are conscious, but we also want to know why we experience green for one wavelength, and red for another. |