Comment by questionable_ju
3 days ago
I have to say my memory on the exact beliefs of Hume are murky. IIRC he did still think that human cognition starts with neutral input data and processes its way to the most abstract concepts. Heidegger inverts this. The context, the use, and the meaning are already embedded in all of your experiences. You don't have "neutral input data".
This is also what he means by "thrownness". Our being-in-the-world, in particular the way things have meaning to us and are intelligable, is conditional on our use and our social context. Not the other way around. We never logically arrive at our context, we were always already "thrown" into it.
I think it's actually quite a profound conceptual shift, which is why Heidegger is so popular. He's still an asshole for writing so obscurely, though.
Yeah Hume is an example of someone who had the bias of the myth of the given, even though you can uphold him as someone who skeptical of notions of truth; associations, traditions, accidental regularities, type of guy
Heck even Hegel and Heidegger were orthogonal (I believe? I'm not sure if Heidegger responded either favorably or not to Hegel - I think he wasn't really responding to him, more to the Greeks and Kant) to each other. That's weird.
And Sellars can say he rejects the Myth of the Given but inferentialist is very much not a phenomenological theory. Accepting that "nouns" are not some representation relation, not "some thing we have yet to achieve but has an end goal / we refine it", etc. still doesn't get you to Heidegger I feel, either.
Like, there are so many positions circling around Heidegger, but only Heidegger has a distinctly Heideggerian feel. Maybe I'm overcomplicating it though. I think it's because he's distinctly making a claim about the human experience, whereas all the philosophers I've listed, you can list aspects of them that get away from that (even Kant lol). They've been "naturalized" in some sense. You can't naturalize Hediegger, but then I'm not sure why his theories are better than say, idk, science. You can diagnose the common prejudices of thought through a lot of other philosophers
Philosophy informs and grounds science, they're perfectly complimentary. A lot of Wittgensteins work, Heideggers work, and later philosophy of mind underlies current neuroscience. You can't really investigate the nature of being like Heidegger was doing in a "scientific" way.
> A lot of Wittgensteins work, Heideggers work, and later philosophy of mind underlies current neuroscience.
Could you explain the specific neuroscience research programmes informed by these philosophers? I'm not an expert in neuroscience so I would not know. The only thing I know about neuroscience is like, the free-energy principle.
> You can't really investigate the nature of being like Heidegger was doing in a "scientific" way.
OK but I've acknowledged many philosophers and their contributions to general thought, even if they're not strictly "scientific". I was only following the conversation this way because neuroscience was brought up - normally I interpret Heidegger as responding to Western ontology and less through the phenomenonlogical/existential lens. Like, there's the phenomenological vehicle of criticism versus fully buying into it as a program to test cogsci or like any kind of test. I don't think Heidegger was merely saying "you guys are too abstract and heady and you should live in the moment", for example, he had specific claims he was making. Heidegger was definitely making specific claims about the world, otherwise you could dismiss him as art, which is not right, either. The issue is is that he's opaque :/