enlightenment as love of learning

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So, I've been plodding onward toward that philosophical cognitive science (previous posting: October), going on many years now, as evolution of the literature vastly outpaces anyone's opportunities for mastering it.

I make philosophically informed choices (I hope, as any scholar must choose—philosophically or not—from the evolving library, no matter the degree of freedom won by income and talent), and I dare claim that I am attuned to the leading literature.

for philosophical cognitive science, thoroughly evolutionary in self-conception

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OK, so I was a little eccentric (more than a little) in my enthusiasm for Habermas' "The Language Game....," in my Oct. 15 posting. You can't tell from its beginning what it will become, but the essay looks like a career-culminating statement of his sense of mind in nature. It's an essay that I've hoped, for many years, he would write. He doesn't intend to fundamentally venture beyond his earlier work, but he shows (relative to his selection of engaging others) how his thinking relates to recent engagements with the issue of mind in nature, and that's exciting news for me. I did virtually nothing the past weekend, Oct. 14-15, (not counting necessities) except work through the latter half of his essay. I can't briefly represent what a milestone for me that working-through process was, but it proved to me the validity of what I'm doing (in obscurity, by choice), as a detailed commensurability of my project with where Habermas' thought brings him toward the end of his career. I showed this in terms of revising his discussion (conscientiously—which is necessarily tedious, as constructive editing is generally).

Toward a good metagenealogy on the genesis of learning

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Oct. 10

I just now read the last part of Habermas' new essay on free will, naturalism, etc., which was a very personal experience, as I've been searching to clarify a "genealogy" covering all those "conceptual levels" (p.42) for some time. I recognize (and, I believe, well appreciate) his view of the condition of inquiry now (early 21st century), and I ambitiously anticipate a "natural genealogy of the mind [that is fated to be] a self-referential project" (ibid.) that in no sense "fall[s] back into metaphysics." Dare I say I'm getting close?

“logos” of planetary evolution

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"Logos in humanity" is a relatively spontaneous exemplification of secular conciliation with religious thinking, associating to Habermas' March, 2006, lecture "Religion and the Public Sphere" (PDF).

My discussion presumes the reader's familiarity with Pope Benedict's lecture—so, outside that presumption, my chain of themes would probably seem ill-conceived. Actually, though, I'd defend the integrity of the spontaneity as draftwork in Appropriative thinking that's not spontaneous at all, associating to the hermeneutical care for the text exhibited by Heidegger's exercises in "poetic thinking," following his deconstruction of Logos in the neo-Platonic tradition of Latinate metaphysicalism whose Veritas caused "withdrawal of the gift" of Alétheia, i.e. (for evolutionary Time, true "postmodernity"): enowning Emergence.

Rawls, bioscience, Habermas

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A subscriber to the largely-sleeping Rawls group at Yahoo! indicated yesterday that he has an interest in "the use of Rawlsian justice as a normative framework for the distribution of biomedical benefits (e.g. healthcare, genetics, enhancement, etc.)," then kindly sent me a message indicating that "I have an essay in progress on Rawls (temporarily on hold); at some point I will submit some material for discussion."

I replied (in a less-formatted email that was otherwise identical):

Stefan Cojocaru,

Thanks for the note! I look forward to your essay.

Habermas and Derrida via Wikipedia

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Who knows how long a passage at Wikipedia will be allowed to persist; so, I've recorded the following. (Who wrote this rather amazing passage?)

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Habermas and Jacques Derrida, perhaps Europe's two most influential philosophers, engaged in somewhat acrimonious disputes beginning in the 1980s and culminated in a refusal of extended debate and talking past one another. Following Habermas's publication of "Beyond a Temporalized Philosophy of Origins: Derrida" (in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity), Derrida, citing Habermas as an example, remarked that, "those who have accused me of reducing philosophy to literature or logic to rhetoric ... have visibly and carefully avoided reading me" ("Is There a Philosophical Language?," p. 218, in Points...).