I think about reality in three different ways: the noumenal, the phenomenal, and the conventional. The first two, of course, come from Kant, and I basically define them the same way he does. Noumenal reality is how things in themselves really are, independent of our experience of them, and as I said in my epistemology post I’m not sure we can ever know if we’ve figured out what noumenal reality is like. I think it exists, which is why I include it as a kind of reality, but since I can’t make any definite claims about it I will leave it at that.

Phenomenal reality is more interesting. This is reality as we understand it, as close as we can come to the noumenal with the tools we have. All phenomenal claims have to be taken with a grain of salt because they might not be noumenal and are therefore subject to change, but that’s okay. It makes the quest interesting.

The final type of reality is not Kantian. I’ve decided to call it conventional because of a different sort of reality split made by Buddhist metaphysicians: conventional vs. ultimate. In Buddhism, ultimate reality is unchanging, indivisible, does not depend on anything else for its nature, and we can know it. It also technically doesn’t exist. This is the doctrine of emptiness, emphasized by Mahayana Buddhism. Conventional reality, on the other hand, is what we experience in everyday life. It is holistic rather than reductionistic, and the fact that it doesn’t actually exist, at an ultimate level, doesn’t make a difference to us in how we live our lives.

I took conventional reality as something separate from phenomenal reality because experience is so central to my philosophy. I think it’s important to acknowledge that in everyday life we don’t typically think much about metaphysics (unless you’re me) and we don’t need to. There is a lot of metaphor in conventional reality, along with what Buddhists call convenient fictions, which are things that don’t truly exist but that make it easier to communicate and get around in the world. Some examples of this for me are holism, mind/body dualism, fate, and the self.

Yes, indeed, I don’t believe that the self exists. Many people recoil against the idea that there is no self, thinking that it would invalidate their entire lives or that the existence of the self is obvious. Why even question it, especially if I’m basing everything on experience?

In fact, experience is what makes me question the self. What I’m talking about here is an essential kind of self, something definite that I could draw a line around, separating Me from You and everything else. I can’t figure out what this would be. It’s not my body, because if I lost parts of my body I would still be me. It’s not my personality, because my personality has changed throughout my life and I’m still me. It’s not my memory, because people who lose their memory through amnesia or Alzheimer’s are still themselves. It’s not my consciousness, because when I’m in a dreamless sleep or I’ve passed out, I’m still me. In the end, I think that it’s an aggregate of things, and as long as there are enough of these things present — body, personality, memory, history, consciousness, emotions, perceptions, other people’s impressions of you, etc. — then the self exists conventionally. A conventional self is good enough for me.

As for my ideas about phenomenal reality, they began as a reaction against Catholic doctrine. I’ve always been empirically-minded, which didn’t bode well for my religion. Some people claim to have had religious experiences, such as seeing Jesus standing at the altar in my hometown church or feeling some kind of otherworldly presence, but no matter how much I desired to have such experiences, I never did. My experience has always been very much of this world. Therefore I believe that the world is real, that it is wholly material, and that it is a lot more impressive than any kind of spiritual or supernatural world would be.

Speaking more philosophically, I react against a Platonic view of metaphysics. The idea that this world is a shadow of a better or more real reality bothers me, whether it’s heaven or the forms; it devalues what we have, and I can’t find evidence for it. One thing I like about Plato is that he acknowledges the reality of ideas, but I don’t think that ideas are anything extra-real or absolute. They exist between thinking beings, not on their own, so they have an abstract sort of reality that is still rooted in and dependent on the material.

Such materialism seems to lead to a deterministic worldview, and for a while I was a hard determinist, but I’ve decided that this isn’t necessary. Some things about my experience feel random and quantum indeterminacy supports that idea. I’ve decided that there are causes operating in the world with various strengths, and there are so many competing with each other that sometimes chance decides which one will manifest in an effect. There are also some beings that have such developed awareness that they notice causes and can influence things to create an effect. I consider these beings to be free, and I’ll talk about that some more in my post about ethics.

All the kinds of absolutism I reject seems to comfort people, but they just bother me. What’s so great about having an essential self? All the work is done for you. There’s no becoming. It’s much more fun to be your own creator. And what’s so impressive about this imperfect world being created by an absolutely powerful, absolutely intelligent being? Surely such a being could have done better. But a world like this created by chance, indifferent chance, molding mere material? That is impressive. It might not have even existed had some other cause won out in the distant past, yet here we are. That is something to celebrate.

As such we must construct a subjective ethics.  This escapes relativism in that we are all united by our finitude.  Concerning morality, being finite we also lose the ability to justify violence to the other as there is no ultimate foundation on which to justify such actions.  In a broader ethical sense, there are many techniques to achieve happiness. I personally like Russell suggestion that we not be self-absorbed and have wide interests to prevent unhappiness. James religion of healthy mindedness is one technique proven to work for others.

Reality also is a subjective, mutable concept we each construct from the objective set of objects and concepts we encounter in the world and is derived from what we are most intimately connected to and find most interesting. For instance I advocate mathematical realism. This is explained by my being a mathematician and as such am interested in the subject and it is intimately connected to my life.

My epistemic views are largely from pragmatism. Through the process of inquiry outlined by John Dewey, we come to gain knowledge.  Essentially we enter a situation that is in some respect indeterminate.  By actively changing the situation through the manipulation of its elements we transform the situation into one where we have a basis for practical action.

The most influential philosophers for me have been William James, John Dewey, Gianni Vattimo, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Martin Heidegger.

The particular sub-fields that most interest me are existentialism and the philosophy of mathematics and logic.

Specifically within this I am interested in the ontological status of mathematical objects and what the meaning of being is.

The philosophical methods I will mostly rely on are logical analysis of an argument, phenomenology, and explication of meaning, which I have all tried now.  I have been told repeatedly that I am very analytic in thought and these methods will probably be most effective for me.

My new map of philosophy puts me in my geographical location within the subject connected to those subfields I find most interesting. You can view it as a pdf here: my-second-philosophy-map1.

Academic philosophy is currently geographically differentiated (western-analytical, western-continental, Asian, African, Latin American, etc.). I believe that it will remain that way for a while though as time progresses these titles, like African and Latin American, will loose there significance.  They will do this as the philosophy is studied more wide spread through globalization and all that stuff. My reasoning behind this is to consider the title Asian philosophy.  Certainly these philosophies originated in Asia but as they have become more accessible for study they  for one have been more widely studied and along with this adopted by some western thinkers.  I don’t see the geographical origin of a philosophy as having a significant effect on its viability or meaningfulness to others. The spread of ideas is a great thing.

The only thing I would like to see happen in the future is that philosophy be more widely studied and that it be more accessible at a younger age.

Philosophy has become the medium through which I experience the world. I seem to weight all that happens upon me as well as all that do onto the world with significance in the framework that my philosophical views, and those of others has provided.  I will strive in the future to continue developing these theories in the hopes that i can make them more meaningful to me. I am very grateful I had the opportunity to study philosophy and I recognize the very positive effect it has had on my life.

“So, Jillian,” he said, all business but for the friendly upturned corner of his graying mustache, “what do you know?”

Under normal circumstances I might have broken out a philosophy joke, but I had a feeling that he meant it as a form of greeting, the same way my father used to mean it. Still, being me, I couldn’t resist saying airily, “Oh, nothing certain.”

“You must know something– what day is it?”

I figured that jug band practice was not the place for epistemological skepticism. “Monday.”

“There you go,” he said with a grin. “You know one thing.”

The temptation to say “now all I need is the existence of God and I’ll be good to go” was nearly overwhelming, but I resisted it with a laugh. For these two hours I was supposed to be a musician, not a philosopher, though I found the boundaries hard to maintain when such questions jumped out at me everywhere I turned.

Epistemology has never been my main focus in philosophy, but for some reason that simple question has stuck in my mind. What do I know?

The best place to start in figuring this out is with the definition of knowledge, which is often stated to be justified, true belief. To begin analyzing this, however, I have to first define truth. This is often defined as correspondence with reality. I like this definition of truth, so I’m going to use it, yet I run into a problem: while I think that truth is correspondence with reality, I’m skeptical about our ability to ever reach this correspondence, and if we do reach it I’m not sure we will be able to tell that we have. This is similar to (but more skeptical and hesitant than) Kant’s claims about the noumenal realm, which say that we cannot know what things are like in themselves. I like where he was going with this, but I wouldn’t claim there are things that cannot ultimately be known. It’s our ability to know that I tend to question, with our faulty senses and our fallible minds. If it is the case that we may never know if we’ve reached the truth, how can we have justified, true beliefs? Can we have knowledge at all?

Taking the truth requirement out of the definition leaves justified belief, and I decided that this works for me. It’s enough to hold a belief and be able to justify it; if I decide later on that what I knew in the past was not true, that doesn’t mean that at the time I didn’t really know. This makes knowing into something like an emotional state, but the justification part is what makes it different from and therefore more useful than plain belief.

The next term to look at, then, is justification. For some reason I feel that I understand Vedic epistemology more than I do most Western epistemology, so for this I use the pramanas (means of knowledge) from the Samkhya-Yoga schools of Vedic thought. The Vedas are the main religious and philosophical texts in Hindu traditions, and there are six schools that hold the Vedas as authoritative. Samkhya and Yoga are two of these schools that share most of their metaphysical and epistemological ideas. They say that there are three means of knowledge: perception, inference, and verbal testimony. Perception is what is directly experienced, inference is connections made based on these experiences, and verbal testimony is what is heard or read, which must be verified by perception and inference. In a Western context, this makes me an empiricist because I think that knowledge must be justified by sense experience in the end. This gets us as close as we can be to correspondence with reality.

Because of this empiricism, I disagree with theories like that of Socrates in Meno about people having knowledge before birth. People are born with instincts, of course, which comes along with having a body, but instincts aren’t the same as knowing. Through experience we gain self-awareness and consciousness, and when we have these we can gain knowledge.

As for the content of what I know, that belongs in another post.

Genesis

In the beginning, I was Roman Catholic. Both of my parents come from Catholic families and were happy about that, so we went to mass every week and I attended about twelve years of catechism school. I went through various periods of piety with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Sometimes I spent months with a set of rosary beads in my pocket and a scratchy wool scapular around my neck, and sometimes I purposely spent my hours in church sitting while everyone else stood, thinking about my mildly sinful high fantasy novel while everyone else prayed. When I look back I realize that the problem was that I never thought any of it made any sense, but at the time I was convinced that if I kept trying, kept repeating, kept pretending, I would eventually understand. Then God would forgive my years of asking uncomfortable questions. Or, more likely, Mary would intervene on my behalf. I’ve always identified with Mary much more than with God or Jesus.

When I was in high school I was Confirmed. The whole thing oscillated between deeply moving and deeply cultish; I chose my Catholic name, Cecilia, for the patron saint of musicians, and an abbot put oil on my forehead so I could become a soldier of God. I’ve always been a pacifist, so to have my teachers tell me that it was time to fight, even metaphorically, bothered me a lot. It only took an intro to philosophy course and a good friend who was a skeptic to change me from devoted Catholic to comfortable atheist. I continued going to church to please my mother for a year or so, secure in the knowledge that once I left for college I would no longer have to endure that weekly dose of boredom and guilt.

Exodus

That high school philosophy course changed many things for me. As I said in my post about the classes I’ve taken, it included Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Montaigne, Voltaire, Machiavelli, and Emerson. A motley bunch, to be sure, but for a curious and confused teenager it was very effective. Seneca and Emerson were my favorites. I’ve read “Self-Reliance” at least three times now (not counting the first time when I fell asleep every other paragraph because it was so difficult to understand) and even though I’ve never quite believed the transcendental metaphysics, it sends chills down my spine every time. It showed my high school self that coming up with my own philosophy was okay– no, essential– and it helped me defy my upbringing and become the token cynical materialist of the class, which was a position I thoroughly enjoyed. My uncle died that year, and that class also helped me find a new way to deal with death. I wrote an essay that seems rather existential now, concerning mortality and how we should seize this life, our only opportunity, and live it well.

All was good during my first year at college, because I enjoyed the academic life and because I was free to do my own thing without worrying as much about disappointing my parents. By my second year, however, having no close friends on campus was starting to get to me. I was used to solitude, but this was a bit extreme with my family being six hours away. I also started wondering about my purpose in life. Everything up to that point had led to college, but what was next? I had never thought about it seriously. I couldn’t come up with any ideas. I started wondering why I was here, why I was working so hard, and, ultimately, what I was living for, which turned into a full-fledged existential crisis. That year three SLU students died, including one who lived across the hall and one who was a friend, and then my grandfather died. Life felt very temporary. The question of my meaning became ever-present and ever more distressing.

I lost interest in most of my classes, especially my critical literature ones, and I basically lost the ability to write, which had been my greatest strength throughout my life. There was some kind of psychological block I had built up and couldn’t get around. During my sophomore and junior years I seriously considered taking a medical withdrawal from the university or simply dropping out.

Revelation

Bleak as this sounds, I found rays of hope in making some good friends, on the internet and on campus, and in deciding to try a new field. Peace studies and philosophy of science hinted at the same sorts of questions I’d considered in my high school philosophy class, and I started to wonder why I hadn’t taken more philosophy. I took a class on science and religion, which has always been an interesting issue for me, and because of that course I hesitated so long on my paperwork for leaving school that I just never went through with it.

Metaphysical questions consumed me and I decided to follow them where they led, which gave me at least a temporary purpose for life and a definite purpose for my education. I dedicated the remainder of my time at SLU to philosophy. I finally got to learn about existentialism, which had hovered in the periphery of my intellectual vision for many years. It sucked me in as I had expected that it would. I read and generally understood difficult things by people like Descartes, Plato, and Kant, giving me a sense of accomplishment, and I could write about them, giving me a sense that I was capable of being a scholar again. I very quickly began coming up with my own tentative theories and finding new questions to ask. I discovered Buddhism, the metaphysics of which fascinate me, just this semester, and I’m including pieces of it in my thinking already. My ideas haven’t changed a whole lot since my de-conversion in high school, but I have become much better at articulating and supporting them with my own words and with the words of others. Now philosophy questions are everywhere. I couldn’t escape even if I wanted to– but why would I?

For ethics this semester I read “Self-Reliance” again, and my inner English major is pleased with the way things have come full circle. I’m hoping that, despite the fact that I still don’t agree with the metaphysics, Emerson will help me figure out where I’m going next.

I have been quite anxious about next year, some conflicting relationship issues with other people and just have a lot of stuff going on. Now when I’ve been getting bogged down I stop myself and try not to think about myself, i.e. not be self absorbed.  In general it calms me down and is relaxing.

But maybe by doing this I am simply avoiding my problems.

I feel like Sartre and his crew would say anxiety about the future is good in so far as it forces me to consider my options and make authentic choices.  I don’t want to trade anxiety and authenticity for relaxation and bad faith, but is that what I am doing?

Life is complicated.

In Existentialism we took turns facilitating the class and part of this was to give a conceptual analysis of something from the reading.

In Pragmatism I distinctly remember comparing the theories of different pragmatists descriptively.

The four methods completely new to me are phenomenology, deconstruction, philosopher as public intellectual, and integrating philosophy with other experiences.  I have a familiarity with what the first three involve but have never considered the last.  I have used it though in the decision making process, seeing how each option looks when viewed from various ethical systems.

I have attempted a phenomenological analysis of progress. I’m not positive what I came up with was strictly phenomenology but it was a first attempt.

Deconstruction seems like it would be very useful though difficult and a lot of work.

I think in the future maybe when I am older I will take it upon myself to be a philosopher as a public intellectual, writing in to papers (if they still exist) and probably doing some blogging (I’ve already started!).

As far as my personal techniques go I am a big fan of the logical analysis of argument.  I have recently tried a symbolization of an argument using the skills I picked up in learning relational predicate logic.  It was difficult and took a while.  I hope that my symbolization was close enough to the original argument that I didn’t significantly change anything.  The largest problem for me was choosing my words carefully when I tried to draw out the essence of the argument.

Philosophy being around for as long as it has with all these time tested methods, its surprising that there is so much left in the field of philosophy to accomplish. Though in fairness the field has produced much knowledge no longer called philosophy. I do wonder though if we firstly we could create a new technique and secondly if we could create one that would be more able than the rest to solve some of these lingering problems.