Let's Look at it Objectively: Why Phenomenology Cannot be Naturalised

good morning well I'm delighted to introduce Dermot Morin who is professor of philosophy at University College Dublin he works in several areas of philosophy including of course phenomenology and he's published a number of very important books and articles but he's just finished a book on versailles last manuscript crisis of European sciences which will be published by CEP next year and today he's gonna convince David happy Nova's phenomenology cannot be naturalized yes sir thank you very much Matthew and thank you to Harvey and all the people that Yui for inviting me for having such a nice conference actually it's going very well so enjoying it I was thinking of that phrase let's look at it objectively and I was thinking that sort of summarizes exactly the problem how we from our own subjective point of view can adopt an objective point of view and you know any objective point of view that's arrived at has to be one constituted out of and from our subjective basis and I take that to be really what a transcendental idealism is trying to accomplish some way of building an account of an object of viewing that is related to our subjective viewing so I'll talk a little bit more about that but I wanted to get straight into what I take transcendental idealism to me and as Matthew said I've been working on the crisis so a lot of my quotations are taken from the crisis which is who serves last work now in the crisis as you can see from this quotation postural interprets his entire historical development in terms of transcendental phenomenology claiming that he had made the first breakthrough two transcendental phenomenology already in the logical investigation no pointer on it whereas in fact the usual view what I would call the English view of Hazara which is sort of the Barry Smith Peter Symons and Kevin Mulligan view is that hoster was a logical for realist in the logical investigations and then slip back into being transcendental idealist in his later career those are of himself thought that he had made the breakthrough to the transcendental idealist in sight right at the beginning of his career in 1898 as he says here that the correlation between world and the subject of manners of givenness never revoked philosophical wonder in spite of the fact that had made itself felt even in pre Socratic philosophy and among the Sophists that is how the subject can arrive at objectivity though here only is a motive for for sceptical argumentation this correlation never aroused philosophical interest of its own which could have made it the object of an appropriate scientific attitude a contemporary French philosopher Quentin mayor mayor sue talks about this as correlationism and he thinks of this as coming from cut there's a what I take to become summary claim of hoodstarz regarding this correlation isn't coming from his 1917 or an over an address to freiburg university to every object there corresponds an ideally closed system of truths that are true other and on the other hand an ideal system of possible cognitive processes by virtue of which the object and the truths about it would be given to any cognitive subject so you have two sets of ideal truths the the possible ways the object can appear and the possible ways the subject can relate to the object so I think that's what phenomenology is trying to track and as I say more about it because I get further into it in transcendental idealism it's not enough to say that there are a priori conditions if you like for the possibility of experience but that these a priori conditions are somehow related to an ego and that the ego is if you like the constituting source for all our experience this is a very strong claim and Lister makes it all through this career but I suppose specially in the Cartesian meditations because those are things that Descartes rather than Kant is the founder of transcendental philosophy but I say something about that what's interesting here in this phrase the ego cause himself or himself so to speak in the unity of a history is related to what we were talking about or what Rudolf was talking about yesterday that that experiences obviously build on experiences and the way the human self evolves in terms I always think with like a snowball as it goes through life it accumulates experiences that Conditioner them and accrue to it as habitual ''tis or whatever a sister would say and makes it into the sort of self that it becomes in other words the history of it belongs to its own nature and we have to think of that very peculiar kind of self formation as a kind of clue to the notion of constitution of objects in general for her sorry says there the constitution of the ego contains all the Constitution's of all the objectivity is existing for him whether imminent or transcendent ideal or real so nature the cultural world and so on have a certain kind of content for me because of the manner in which I bring them into play the whole quotation correlating with the idea that there is a kind of subjective Constitution of everything in the manner in which the subject constitutes itself there is also the idea that the world is given to me in a certain kind of constant in a certain manner which is not that of understanding an object but as having a kind of horizontal consciousness rostral speaks about world consciousness and hoster criticizes Kant for thinking that we didn't have this experience of world consciousness so the sir says here I'm continually conscious of individual things in the world as things that interest remove me and so on but in doing so I also have consciousness of the world itself as that in which I am although is not there as a thing nor does it affect me as things do if I were not conscious of the world as world without it becoming capable of becoming objective in the manner of an object how could I survey the world reflectively and put knowledge of the world into play thus lifting myself above straightforward life okay how is that I each of us constantly has world consciousness and that becomes a very crucial part of the later phenomenology of HO cero the sense that I have of not just being present before object if you like but are having an indefinite horizon both in terms of the physical one and the mental one the temporal one and the sort of meaning horizons which are there for me but not as objects so it's it's I think of transcendental idealism as as as raising this issue of how I constitute everything in the world I mean right now I am me I'm constituting everyone in this room as a human being right and I'm different from the physical objects that they're sitting on and so on that I'm doing a very a very rich and complex set of constitutional differentiations of things and it and it's me who's doing it and I can go wrong and doing it and so on and I can have pathologies that prevent me doing it in a certain way but there is way I mean I saw so a program about people in Berlin who thought they were vampires genuinely thought they were vampires and one of those being interviewed and she was saying well when you are on the subway you see people I see lumps of meat and and I thought that was actually very interesting constitutional attitude that the vampire takes if you like so and that transcendental idealism of course has to set it resolutely and hazards always set itself resolutely against naturalism I think the letter was quoted yesterday who serves letter to record that we are that host our rights to recur to say that the neocon teens and the phenomenologist Tsar in are in agreement against the common enemy of our time which is naturalism Roy would sellers are just giving us hotels definition of naturalism is that is really a kind of physicalism that the Nino naturalist sees nothing but nature and first of all physical nature he speaks in times of physical istic man listen and it's interesting he gives especially in the crisis a historical account of the evolution of naturalism and in this account of the evolution of modern philosophy he thinks that as he says here what's significant is not the usual contrast between empiricism and rationalism but that they both bore him to a kind of naturalist physicalism right this is true of the other sciences of the modern period in the crisis so Searle here by the way it's very interesting comments that what he means by physicalism is a certain and stance taken by people who interpret modern physics in a particular way I've interesting me he excludes here the Vienna circle logical positivists from from being physicalists in the sense that he's talking about I think he recognizes they're more complex position but that's another matter typically postural thinks of naturalism as thinking of human beings as physical objects in space and time there's a typical quotation there looks at man is filled out an extension that's considered the world in general only as nature in the broader sense the duration is taken to the objectives duration and so on and the mind is thought of why not exactly shaped like the body but as a coexistence of psychic data right a streaming of psychic data and this is what host our own attributes to Locke he thinks that the naturalistic physicalism of hobbes for example gets construed in a psychological way by Locke which thinks of the soul as he says there is something self-contained and real as a body a it's taken as an isolated place and writing tablets he often uses that tabula rasa our reference to say that that is how the psychic has been thought to be within naturalism and now I skip through this he thinks of Hume not just as a great naturalist but also as actually pushing naturalism to its conclusion and turning it into a transcendentalism I'm going to skip beyond that time but he also thinks of cat as a naturalist for various reasons that we can go into but primarily and he was criticizing various people in Ken's time or afterwards who interpreted count as thinking that the conditions of the possibility of experience were conditions that happened to be due to our human condition what he calls anthropology zhem as a view that space and time and the conditions of causality and and saw the categories they are our human way of knowing the problem about that is it ends up as a kind of psychologist mo so I've been saying this is already illogical investigations poster himself pushes a view of Congress should probably closer to what we now have and that Kant is not talking just about the limits of human knowledge what about the limits on any kind of knowledge at all there's some argument about this which has two sources sensibility and understanding something like that but those are regards even his own teachers brentano and especially the psychologists volton and Brentano he regards them as having great insights regarding intentionality but misunderstanding what they thought about intentionality because they couldn't let go of the inner concept of the mind tabula rasa concept of the mind mind as a stream for experiences and so on and they missed out on this understanding of intentionality brentano's discovery of intentionality never led him to see it as a complex of performances which include a sedimented history in the currently constituted intentional unity and it's more current matters of of giving us a history that one can always uncover following a strict method that is that the real core dose or the real insight in a brentano's descriptive psychology was the manner of intentional Constitution and modes of givenness that of things that we experience which are layered in complex ways that can be uncovered can uncover these different layers of Constitution according to a method I skip beyond that Husserl is very aware that the real danger is this naturalism that begins as physicalism nether is this sort of second element which is the control of the psychic in naturalistic terms of physical istic terms if not as physical then as some kind of our appendage to the physical he talks about this in terms of modern science and the splitting off of subjective relative properties from primary properties and so on and the whole science of psychology as being set up from what was left over from physics and the physical sciences and that already made it compromised but he thinks here that you have to overcome psychologists have an objective ism and especially what he calls this sensualism with regard to consciousness with naturalization and this happy done unless we really rethink the nature of consciousness it can't be understood in any kind of sensual istic manner there was a simple stream of experiences what sort of things that the problem that what matters was done it has falsely objectified and absolute eyes the world this is reification for Dina Kuhn of the world and its absolute ization these are this is what's happened through matchless we think of the world is something that's very in itself that is there prior to us being there right and if we think of it very much in that naturalistic way we miss it we miss the sense of how we've done in terms of the constituting of the world and this is a real key to the losers later understanding of phenomenology as trying to explore the manner in which human beings for our experience that we have to recognize that our human experience in the world is not of the world of science in ordinary life we have nothing whatsoever to do with objects of nature as understood in that sense of objects of natural science what we take as things our pictures do statues gardens houses tables and so on value objects use objects they are not the objects that can be found in natural sight I mean this is the directly opposite view that who Searle takes to that of the vienna circle manifesto that water proposed when he was calmer thee the scientific conception of the world isn't shaft like a belt of fossil that the very title in the vienna circle manifesto was a kind of attempt to get people to replace this conception of the world with the natural scientific conception of the world we here they're often in the members of materialism that we want to teach people not to say there's a rainbow but there's you know light refracted that 45-degree angle through you know moisture or whatever and hoster is making the point that we don't live in the world of science we live in the life world which has its own categorical structures the body is familiar to us in the life world our actual bodies not bodies in the sense of physics the same is true of causality and spacesuit Emperor infinity these categorical features of the life world have the same names but are not concerned so to speak with the theoretical idealizations and sub structures of the janitor and the physicist I think that's very important that they have the same name so we both we talk about time and the some time the physicist talks about time and the physicist has mathematical equations for working out how time is to be represented within the mathematical physics when our sense of time passing and our sense of past and future and history and the continuation of the past into the present and so on that is what is involved in the life work and in his late years hoster became interested in the work of Lady Brule who was trying to document the concepts of causation spatiality and temporality that for example primitive people's had on the grounds that he thought that there were kind of categorical frameworks that were structuring different peoples within the life and it is if you like kind of closer what hussar is talking about here is what in the contemporary world people talk about terms of things like full physics that that people have a conception you know Elizabeth spell key is a psychologist who studies what children think about objects when you throw them you know do small children think that when you throw an object the object distends or changes shape you know or do they think that they follow natural trajectories and virus to tedium physics if you like this is a kind of natural in quote there is a sort of intuitive understanding of the causal interactions in the world that very small children have that evolved in various ways and that can be trained and marshaled in various ways depending on scientific education and so on but it is it is the way of the life world and those sort of things that if phenomenology has to understand that first because he thinks of naturalistic physics as a car as a construction based on that and it's the forgotten list of that original life world that makes us think as many people interpret unconscious saying that's a Newtonian framework of space and time is precisely that which is captured within our sensibility so that that's that's for those our own mistakes so there's a whole set of things that are wrong with naturalism according to who serve just summarizing what we've been saying somewhere in various parts of them what we said so far and it misunderstands the flow of conscious experiences and especially what I just call here the non real parts of those experiences it's a really crucial part of Posterous phenomenology all along that you can part lived experiences into their parts but the parts constitute not just if you like the temporal matific all of material parts of an over over thought you know thinking that it's going to rain well obviously you know some representation of rain and some sense must be in that thought but there's also the non real parts of the thought these are the universals that that wouldn't cease when one sees when one things rain you know you don't think this set of drops but you think rain in general so there's kind of a non real categorical framework of some kind that is nested on or built in some respect on the material part and the psychology things can't understand them misunderstands them hence psychologism nor can it understand if you like the retentions and pretensions and other horizon of features of the experience that i was mentioning earlier on that there is always an element of things that that are not part of what we currently presented in front of us there are for example the physical perception there's always the other sides of the object we don't see but which are given in some kind of code intended empty present presenting so we don't know I I don't know actually what wonder what color the underside of the desk is I can imagine it being the same color or a containment of my imagination as a different color but I present the underside of the amount of the desk as having an underside and having a corner and it's that kind of empty intending that belongs to the horizon aspects of our experience that are real in one sense of real that are really present but not if you like at the fore of our experience the reification of the ego is a really crucial point in the in the slightly later Husserl that he things that I'd known who get to why Descartes discovered transcendental phenomenology by finding the absolute I mean if you think of the de cartes project it was to find the absolutely first truth and finding something that is true that turns out to be the most inner subjective certainty I which now becomes a model for all truth whatsoever this is if you like an a brilliant transcendental insight according to pusseh but they card himself immediately lost this transcendental insight when he treated the ego as a substance of thinking substance and he immediately if you like positive as I there veldt a little tag end of the world rather than seeing it as a condition for the possibility of world now world itself that's misunderstood in naturalism for all kinds of reasons largely to do with that it thinks that the primarily from the primary world is the world is picked up by physics you can get that all the time rather than recognizing for example the that the world that's given to us is the world that is a communal world naturalism for most around this is an important feature missus this understanding of collective social world kind of stuff that John Searle talks about in his own you know his way of understanding the constitution of the social world that world is the world from which we primarily begin and among the things have happened within that world is that there are scientists who have a view of nature and so on so that that this is an important feature historically in terms of the understanding of naturalism in westeros time one of the interesting things about the naturalism debate as it took place in Germany in the 1920s that a lot of it was not about physicalism but was about the role the relationship between the Natural Sciences of the human sciences and whether the human sciences can be brought within the scope of the Natural Sciences or whether they had their own methodology one that recognizes the peculiarities of the kinds of objects that social life presents before us this is a quote has already been referred to by Dan Zahavi is that naturalism according to ELISA in the 1911 philosophy is a rigorous science one article involves if he says the naturalization of consciousness including all the intentionally eminent Givens of consciousness and on the other hand a naturalization of idea the naturalization of normativity if you like and the ideal and the naturalization of consciousness itself these are the features of naturalism that we've already seen now visceral is not only things of naturalism and a cluster of ideas that have a particular historical shape and an envelop evolved in a particular way but he thinks that you know it misses of what is essentially the the full concrete experience that human beings have a universal determination of spirits through merely natural dependencies is unthinkable we heard about these dependencies yesterday from from Rudolf mermaid as a reduction to something like physical nature subjects cannot be dissolved into nature for in that case what gives nature it's very sense would be missing so I mean this this is who sir has a very strong view that naturalism kind of Objectivism and physicalism misses the very nature of subjectivity and I mean this gets to a point that Husserl's transcendental idealism claims that the very concept of a being in itself or the world in itself is the product of a very specific attitude this attitude of trying to get objectivity as such those are things that was actually a breakthrough moment in Greek philosophy which led to science when through the skeptics the idea of what the world in itself was like as opposed to what the world of our experience is like there's the changing world of our experiences and then somehow beyond that world there must be the way the world is in itself well that very thinking of what a world in itself is like is a kind of constituted insight if you like which we then use as it's like a ruler's as a model for understanding our experience but just like a ruler it is a it's it's a it's a you know it is a very specific measure that cannot be said to be what's really out there in the sense of what we might think is what's really out there what's really out there is the life world and this is where most remains that move which i think is most interesting is that his transcendental explanation of the origins of naturalism is if you like that naturalism involves a kind of rigidify haitian of the natural attitude and I think it's actually one of those discoveries is this idea of the natural attitude that human beings have a natural sense of things being there before they got here and as having a certain temporal and spatial physical character and independence from them you know the idea that my car is still there when I'm not thinking about it and so on this belongs to the natural attitude and this natural attitude is if you are he thinks deeply embedded in human beings but it was chained by philosophy and science right his attitude of original natural life all other attitudes are accordingly related back to as we orientations father and that's an important point that the scientific attitude the scientific outlook felt how facile or however you want to think about it is a particular you know it's you can imagine as a kind of building built upon life in the natural attitude the danger is if we really replace the objects of the natural object with the scientifically constitutional objects this this this is a kind of category mistake that for who sir and that's what naturalism does naturalism then is a product of the natural attitude of our particular way of living in the world and thinking about it so Soho sort of view is that real science won't just you know we did affine the products of the science and replace the natural attitude with it but real science will recognize how it has to if you like coexist with the real world of human beings for example what's our top spot is often on the one hand science produces things like the Pythagorean theorem better truths that are identical across time on the other hand you know geometry is done by human beings who are finite and are carriers of this meaning he talks about the rule writing and so on but the dirt but that you know the product of science is the product of human beings getting in various forms of social combinations and that it really is a view that science is right in terms of what it does but always with regard to one of the restrictions of its method but the life world is if you like for for those are the underlying focus of what phenomenology is to be about and we come to recognize the life world under natural attitude so and somehow we're able to break with it it's true some as we have to be able to in some sense step outside of the natural attitude to recognize that it's running for us you know I think of it as being it's like what think compares it to Plato's cave you know that we're in Plato's cave us so natural attitude when people come back in and say look it's only shadows on the wall and it takes a huge deep of reorientation of attitude to recognize that so so the transcendental project if you like is for us to recognize the always on flowing natural attitude and that the Sciences are built on that natural attitude and that the natural attitude view of time space causality and so on carries over into the sciences huh now this is where it gets this is where of us our own self gets I think into some difficulties that he projects the possibility of a natural attitude reversal so that we can enter into what he calls the transcendental attitude and in the crisis he talks about this transcendental attitude as an attitude if you like above the pre givenness of the validity of the world he uses this word above the infinite complex whereby and concealment the were celebrities were always founded other validities and so on we go above naturally absorbed life and and I think there is some danger for who Cyril in thinking that it's possible for human beings I to think of the to take a stance on the natural attitude within which we are always all the time which is somehow free of that attitude which brackets it disrupts it and allows us us to focus on it and and and this is where I think it gets more complex enforcer he thinks that we skip on here we when we arrive at this transcendental attitude we now experience the world in a different so there is something which I think you don't find income the idea in host art of protocols transcendental experience now the world reveals itself as a kind of set of you know subjective accomplishments of various kind every existent of every kind becomes understandable as a product of transcendental subject to I think naively as the difference between watching a movie and being completely absorbed in it that's natural flowing life and watching it as a student of movies and saying that was a long tracking shot that was you know done there and look he's changed to fill the filter up there are the kind of things that a good fill student can immediately see while natural life is running on you you recognize how its put together how its constitution so for most of this is that the role of the transcendental attitude is to live a new kind of hyper reflex of life so we're aware of the accretions of our synthesis that we're that we're performing and the end of the manner in which we are understanding past and future Lucido talks about this I mean obviously we have an individual sense of past and future but he talks about how cultures have their own sense of their own past and they're on their own projected sense of a future so you know you you could become very aware of that where you think you are in history if you like and that that is that that it you know is part of how you understand overall the flowing of history you know Rorty talks about telling downbeat versus offbeat stories or whatever you could have different approaches to your own flowing history and so taking a certain stance on that allows you if you like it frees you from being trapped this is I mean for hoster this is all liberation so he wants to tell it a new story of the entire Constitution of the world out of my own consciousness now we run into this problem which finished with that we but that part of my Constitution and this is for Xhosa if you like is deepening of the Cartesian project when I realize that it's me it's I that that's it's my consciousness that that discloses the world to me I have to I can make a move in recognizing not just what my factual consciousness is if you like but to understand what a consciousness in general is by thinking through some kind of modifications of my own experience the notion of an ego in general if you like and through various kinds of modification I can constitute what other egos are now this we got to this yesterday there is a problem in hacer esto weather sorry whether we really can with the sense in which we can understand the presence of other rico's as being analogize ations and modifications of my only going clock and no sir i think gets blocked on the in addition his later work he tries to the cartesian meditation is later work to have a concept of the world as communally constituted by what he calls cooperating subjects together by transcendental intersubjectivity but right down at the heart of that intersubjectivity always seems to keep the ego my ego as being that which gives if you like recognition at very least two other Rico's as having a role Sartre talks about this quite well as that you know when you are in the park and gird the only one there you're kind of experiencing but then or not and the rises it arrives in and then for Sartre that's like as he puts it a hole in being that others a there is a meaning constituting source and I'm not in control and and this is initially for Sartre attractively but but you know in what Sarah you the presence of the other is not so much a threat like that but we recognize that there is a that that the the notion of an object of is itself the idea of well anyone could see that not just me but anyone to my place could see them and so we move from my own egoic life if you like to the life of anyone and that's as close as for surrogates to the idea of the Constitution with like objectivity that's no kind of object to objectively means that I can get a point above my experience to recognize this is the way I experience things this is my slant on the world and get from there to something like there are world there are slants on the world and then there must be if you like slants on the world that others can also access and therefore are not purely my subjective experience it's not that I think also things we get to I'm a God's eye position that's above all stances or attitudes but rather than we can invest the recognition that I can of attitudes about others can have my absolute can somehow share my stance or that I can alter my stance to that of the other and that this mutual interpenetration of stances if you like this cooperation or triangulation of stances is what gives you objectivity not there being a God's eye perspective that somehow mathematics or something gives us that tells us the way the world in itself is that allows us to transcend our stance so so I mean that's in brief I think I'm running out of time in brief I think that's what I've just outlined if you like what I take closer as transcendental idealism to be and also why it can't be a naturalism of any kind okay thank you okay thank you very much demo plenty of time for questions one issue of whether consciousness and I'm kind of sympathetic to the view that it can't but I'm still not feeling the pressure for why the naturalistic view can account for the world outside of consciousness I mean your argument as opposed that it seems to be that the naturalistic way of thinking emerges from pre-existing ways of thinking but it seems to me we can probably think that but think that the naturalistic view point is an improvement on our pre-existing ways thinking it at least as regards getting at the world as it is in and of itself which is obviously not always what we want to do but so I'm just not feeling but why can't we think yeah this mathematical physics emerges from our old ways of thinking about time but it's at least yeah I think there are some problems there I mean there are various ones that come to mind I mean there is a kind of translation problem that is whether things that are called time with in mathematical physics how they're to be translated onto what we think of this time in our experience you know the I think hosters view was that mathematical physical he was actually very good at that he was a mathematician originally and very close to the leading mathematicians of his day I think he thought that mathematics was such a specific formal method that its truths were of a formal kind so then even something like mathematical physics where you're talking about objects sliding down planes or whatever you have you'll reduce them to centers of gravity you know or lines of force or vectors of force or whatever and you have the truth that you discover within that framework and of course they're highly advanced and sophisticated and show us truths that are translatable into the into the everyday rather you know so you can you know I'm not talking about there's another thing that happens within the everyday realm is that our life world now has things like electricity and light electric light and so on in it fridges but we don't have to know how they work so you know to me like we're not we are not we've integrated if you like the products of science without necessarily integrating the formal frameworks that gave rise and I think the translation of the formal frameworks into the life world is actually very complicated and and those are warns about any straightforward replacement of life world ideas with scientific ones it's it's a more complex translation but still we might I think if every reason to say well I'm interested in the world as it is an end of itself outside consciousness that so I'm interested in that thinking out there whether it's whether it's not some too tight as we understand it okay no no but I mean you would say that but you have to bear in mind that you're accessing it through mathematics and language and ideologies that in one sense or another you and your culture have constructed a bit that's but there's something else is you result which is that in that case the world is available structures to a decent indeed yeah why do I think but the world is just the real world construction I think that Lister's view is that the natural attitude if you like and gives us concepts like a wheel you know that the concept real and really there is is it is a is a component part of the natural energy so of course people in the natural attitude thing that's the really real world answer to the scientific world but what's your question that the transcendental idealist in the end says the scientific world is constituted but the natural world we just think it's real I'm not sure about that I'm not sure about that I think what he thinks is that the real world it's like the the natural attitude has to has lived world correspond correlated to and the scientific world has the scientific world correlated to there is no world apart from some stance or attitude that's the that's the transcendental idealism if you I think it goes goes to the very notion of what a world is I mean I think that we were saying a little bit about this was very complicated is that world is a set of horizons I mean when we're speaking English right now I'm only drawing on certain words but there is a background of the English language itself but there are other words that are in the horizon that I could draw on in this and I'm relying on you having a shared horizon with me in this regard but those that you know you can ask Anna where is the rest of the English language when we're using these words to each other and I don't want to say it's just out there right that the words are just out there and I'm picking them right and I think that's the concept of horizon that if we even start with some notion like that we have to know that the notion of horizon isn't the kind of thing that's out there in the same sense of things is that I had some quotes about that so so what a world is you have to let go of what put them over call the ready-made world I mean that's that's the Putnam was very influenced by phosphorus crisis on that very point okay we've got about five or six questions I'd like to take as many as possible if you keep them fairly short that'd be great yes I mean Aeschylus I think God wants to come in on this so sorry if you want to come in on the same cosmic minute thank you because I must in some agreement with what they just say that has to do with it dispute among Brazilians so the distinction between the Cartesian way the transcendental reduction and the way through the light rules so I don't think one does who said a favor to conflate supernatural attitudes with naturalism sorry I think and then where the life was so I think that who souls especially in the crisis now you have read or reread the crisis more recently than I do but the way I think about it is that our natural attitude is naturalistic because so much influenced by science and so there is a real needs to rediscover life worlds and it's this rediscovery of the life world which is a world of experience we agree on that that is a precondition for the step to transfer mental the phenomenology so what is it that the life world's has that the naturalistic and the natural attitude don't have a certain awareness of the correlation so the step out of the naturalistic attitudes to the reason the discovery of the life worlds which is described in history in terms that are very similar to the existence of Tulsa and in silent science this is the decisive movements and then the life the alight world experienced its correlation etcetra etcetra is in need of a further scientific explanation which is what's transcendental phenomenology provides so so I would insist on the fact that to some extent we the life world's or the life the life world is something that has been covered up by naturalism and therefore the life in the light falls at the natural our natural life another say I mean there's a lot there that I have to comment which would go beyond time just very greatly I might might what I said was that for herself naturalism is related to what he calls the naturalistic attitude and he takes that to be if you like a rigid if ocation of the natural attitude we all have a natural attitude but through a certain kind of taking of the scientific approach some of us have sort of bought into you know science tells us what's real sellers has various formulations of them you know and III think I think I don't agree with you on one day and this is a matter of interpretation that the Cartesian way in the way in through the life world I've really come to the conclusion that the same thing actually and you said I was complaining but I actually I had a sort of moment of enlightenment when I realized that what Searle in the crisis gives a long history of modern philosophy from Descartes through to Kant and Hegel and then the Cartesian meditations he's just doing the Descartes bit in other words like it they're both historical genetic ways of entering into the transcendental knowledge but that's the point reaffirming the cerumen scholarship I was really intrigued at the Frank legal talk where you said something about the Soviets if your son trouble girl yeah it was about a governess possibility of the yeah I know that I need is great with that who stole was very complex but I wondered whether this was the point when I think I really got stuck in and said this is the this is the bit that I really wanted to disagree with yeah and whether you think Heidegger misunderstood Russo because you seem to understand is so much more sympathetically in terms of relationality a right I mean there's a big issue in hotel versus postal surgeon phenomenology that tend to Heidegger and merleau-ponty both sort of think of that you call it the relationality or or or the multiple the cooperating subjects of human beings together across history cost you you know the historical cultural world and the scientific world I mean that's that's the sort of like there are times that postural sounds like he was criticized for having produced a kind of transcendentally ego that was above all of that that was a that was the stance would could arrive at that was if you like an almost outside of history get a stance that gave you an understanding of how these things were done I think there isn't I think problem I think there are problems in hustlers old account I think that this is where the Cartesian element he he's really struck by the breakthrough to the recognition that he thinks he finds in Descartes that the entire world can only be arrived at once we have an understanding of the Khajiit Oh and so that canto is the building block for constituting the entire world the later the what happens I think is that this above nasai emphasize that because those are things that the transcendent latitude if you like is it these human beings to transcend and and you know a Heidegger makes transcendence the very core of human existence and so I think they're both trying to do this like the same thing here with that regard but they may interpret transcendence in different ways one might say that being out there in the world already is much more Heidegger e'en than a sir but that's a tall story for the future it would take at least two more questions Michelle and then you went on oh it's that anyone can see it that sounds like um say it's not dependent on any particular viewer you know the way this object is and not dependent on any particular of you or anyone else see it but then it seems like a really short step to it's not dependent the way it is is it dependent on anyone stating it and so you just remove the Constitution element completely and then you get this motion to object yeah I I don't think so I think he thinks that people who make that um I mean I think in the notion of objectivity I like to think of it in terms of not if you like measurement of something against criterion that sort of thing dependent and standing you standing there exact you know is my here as long as the one in Paris that kind of thing I was thinking of this and in terms of the way people decide what happened in a trial you take different witnesses and you hear different accounts and you put yourself in the minded person and you think well I was there what I think that's reasonable and so on and I you you were your constituting if you're familiar isn't quite into a traffic accident you're trying to constitute what happened but what happened is in the past and gone there is no object now that we can compare our accounts to but we we have standards of what we take to be the often is the most object of we have of the situation through some kind of cooperating and triangulating between people and with a sense of people saying you know no matter what I think about the situation if I put my own views aside I can imagine what you know anyone would feel like in that situation something like that so it's out of those kinds of activities that objectivity is produced but of course the pretense if you like even in the jury is that the judge and the jury can put aside all their personal lives and personal understandings and just think of an object and so we have that that's our kind of gold standard of objectivity but what the actual much mess your business of how we arrive at it by Co constituting it is something along the lines of what gusto will be described okay we can take one more then you had a quite so really and I think the key issue here DOMA I think you might agree me is that is the notion of the world I think that's what you bring up I just think that there be a real confusion if one talks about the world of science and the world it the world you're talking about as somehow being comparable and what would say one is true or not in the other an argue about that reckon position is the science has no world there isn't a world of science in the sense distinct from the world you're talking about because science treats objects they lose about things and describes things but it doesn't describe a world and I would say well you know it's in one sense especially you think about you know as the crisis goes on into the first division of being in time the key issue is what we mean by world unwary queue to think of a world as some kind of thing in which things are in mmm-hmm and so I don't think it's we should ever get in the present it's science times are truth about the world because I know everything science and anyway it's talking it's talking about whether the world in that sense and I was saying in the end although one would have to be more complex and I can say in a few seconds is that in the end scientists some of the human beings do another sentiment we talk about scientific world yeah and when that world isn't something that can be treated as a scientific object and I think that's are taken a interview this close to us I think those are slightly different to that because he doesn't want to just resolve science into a set of human practices there was a breakthrough moment in Western history with philosophy and science now that that produced the concept of the world in itself that is actually a kind of discovery of our you know Western scientific tradition but it has that it has that is a very special kind of ideal and and the rest what you're saying you know it's not a world in the sense of this world I mean the world didn't say any of this but the natural world we live in is for hosting always the personal world interpersonal that's the primary experience world and if you even think of it I mean I gave the example a minute ago of the jury but I was just talking something yesterday about the refereeing process which is at the very center of science you know that in the way object of truth or what stands as truth is determined by a kind of refereeing process which is you know replete with all of the complexities of the life work you know human beings exercising their judgments about what they think other human beings to be doing whether it's well done and badly done and so on all of the other factors have come into play there and and that that's in a way is that's the real world of science what people are actually doing on a day to day basis but the substructure or the heart of the intellectual framework that emerges out of that and what would we left them all out of completely is Foster and Heidegger a very complex account of how that framework gets applied as technology in the world that that is a really powerful transformative force so it's not just set to practices it has if you like a kind of projection into the life world which is transformative and indeed threatening to the life world ultimately for the CERN term but but at the same time you know the crisis of the European sizes that's why there's a crisis that we have to figure out how can we have these Sciences and continue the value Laden world that we want to live in that's the message

Channel: UWE Bristol

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Keywords: moran, uwe, bristol, university college dublin, philosophy

Id: L7iWZR4iAYw

Length: 61min 2sec (3662 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 08 2012