Monday, October 16, 2006

for philosophical cognitive science, thoroughly evolutionary in self-conception



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).

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Toward a good metagenealogy on the genesis of learning


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?

Thursday, October 5, 2006

“logos” of planetary evolution



"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.