Which is First?

Exactly. It’s an epistemologically based opinion, arrived at through logic from some assumption about the relationship between the knower and known.

No, God’s there to see everything, so they don’t poof out of existence when you’re not looking.

I think it’s the wrong approach to prioritize these areas as if any of them could stand independently of the others. Work in any one of the areas almost necessarily involves beliefs/claims in other areas as well.

Does anyone honestly think they could do work in any of the areas without also using some system of logic?
Does anyone think they could do work in logic without relying on epistemic, phenomenological, ontological, beliefs and ideas?

Faust,

What if happens if two (or more) pathways conflict? Do you think there’s any way to resolve it other than resorting to personal preference?

Faust, the way I see it, you need a map of the world - just a basic layout - before you can start adding legends, scales, titles, North, and arguing about whether you’re reading the map right, or if the person who drew the map did it right, or if you should travel to some location, and how to get there, and whether you can get there, etc.

Ontology seeks to know beings and their being—what is.
Epistemology seeks to know knowledge—how we know.
Logic seeks to know valid reasoning—how to reason.
Ethics seeks to know right and wrong—how we should act.
Phenomenology seeks to know our experience—how we experience.

All these fields, therefore, presuppose that epistemology’s basic question has been answered. But the goal of epistemology, knowledge of knowledge, presupposes itself. Therefore, epistemology is absurd. And this is completely in order, since it is prior to logic!

I’d have to agree with Nah and Moreno. First is “awareness” or the “awareness of being aware”; without awared consciousness “things” can’t be posited. So phenomenology comes first.

Yeah, there’s a lot of holes in Nietzsche’s philosophy. I am now of the position he’s a noble liar or myth-maker.
He can’t berate Kant and like-minded philosophers for claiming to know “things in-themselves” then go on making truth statements.

Probably, but I don’t know what it is. I think you could philosopise for your entire life without ever once even think about this issue.

Saully -

Agreed.

That’s on reason I put “awareness” first.
I mean, we can’t “perceive”, “think”, or “study” without awareness.
And awareness of awareness (which gives a sot of “positive pattern matching” sensation/feeling) is the first evaluation, the first (presupposed) certainty, the first affirmation, the first “true”/“truth”, and thus first “knowledge/knowing”, so to say.
It’s the starting point of logic and study of anything.
And it’s the first attachment (a.k.a. love), in a way, too.

So, it seems that awareness (with the awareness of awareness) is the back born of “philo-sophy”, and the first foundation to base other hypothesis and thoughts and studies.

Or, from the other way around, to examine the awareness, we only need the awareness of awareness. We can eliminate all other studies and thoughts and logic (and pre-logic) used for them.

Does “phenomenology” sufficiently deal with awareness?

To me, the awareness “itself” is required, first.
And it’s like we need to open our eyes before to see things (=perception) and recognize objects (=cognition) and compare/evaluate them and study relations and more about the incoming information (=study of something, “somethingology”).
So, “phenomenology” being one of “study”, it may come later.

By observing how our awareness is, in the density, shape, focus, and so on, which isn’t necessarily easy nor evident for many, we can start to have the foundation of logic (in broader sense) in the sense of comparison/evaluation of focus of awareness.
With logic, we can study anything we are interested, attracted, as we know how to compare, measure, and evaluate in many ways, adopting different perspectives (focuses of awareness) as needed/preferred.

The rest depends on the motivation, desire, fear, etc of each person, associated with one’s preferences and beliefs, I’d say. It’s more or less tribal.
And which “study” (other than the study of awareness by awareness) should be prioritized would be dictated by the desired goal of the given person.

I was just thinking about this. If I had to choose from the list I’d choose ethics. You’ve got to act. You’ve been acting since you were born - even before. Once you start questioning your own and others’ actions, you start getting into the other stuff. You don’t dig a hole from the bottom up - you start at the top.

I agree with Anon, generally people seem to assume the possibility to know, and what is, even before they start to philosophize. It seems common sense more than philosophy.

A philosopher could of course backtrack these common sense assumptions, but possibly ends up again where he’s started. I suppose there can be some value in that, but to me morality seems to be where the real questions are at.

Being aware, or being aware of being aware, is not sufficient for practicing/studying phenomenology…
(Nah wasn’t talking about phenomenology when he said awareness is first.)

Just like knowing things doesn’t make you a student/philosopher of epistemology…

Agreed, it’s conjecture, but I figure the natural progression from desire to curiosity to study isn’t an outlandish notion.

I think we are on the same page, actually. Similar approach, but from different starting points. Epistemology just seems like a rough starting point to me because it seems like the most speculative. Hume alone really did a number on me, personally.

Now this I would love to know more about…

i think the philosophy of philosophy is first, kind of like what we’re doing here, you have to know what it is you’re doing before you do it, lol.

This raises a point about what is meant by “first”.

Chronologically in one’s lifetime, questions of ethics are going to come first. After that, it’s whatever you think is most relevant to such questions.

And once you’ve waded through them all, you can then decide which are more “fundamental” than the others, which leads to this:

I gave my version just as everyone else has, and we’re still no closer to any objective truth lol.

Maybe we could group together same-answers from different people and call that “their truth”.

This is why I found Faust’s response to my initial post interesting. I became interested in philosophy because of ethics, but immediately took to epistemology first in my own studies. I’m not exactly sure why that was the case, but it seems this approach isn’t all too uncommon.

From that perspective, it isn’t so much like digging a hole. The hole has been dug – that is what prompts our desire to understand it. So, perhaps it is more like examining a hole to see how it was dug before concentrating on why it was dug or what to do with it. In the same sense, I felt compelled to look at how we know in order to refine my understanding of what we claim to “know” and why.

Makes sense.

To be clear, what I meant by the hole analogy is that all you can do is start where you are. For me, that was ethics - and I bet it’s ethics for many, or even most. It’s the least abstract, and the most relevant to daily life (for most, I think). Therefore, it’s also what gets returned to again and again. It can even provide a litmus test of sorts for the quality of one’s views on epistemology, ontology, etc.

Maybe I can try to compare phenomenology perceived/interpreted by me and my preferences/attitudes.

Phenomenology <== vs
==> Awareness based study (I sometime call it “Perspective logic”)

P: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenol … losophy%29 <== vs
==> A: Focusing awareness phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=168136
“Perspective Logic” phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=169433

Phenomenology, in Husserl’s conception, is primarily concerned with the systematic reflection on and analysis of the structures of consciousness, and the phenomena which appear in acts of consciousness. <== vs
==> Awareness based study is mostly done with the perspective of information processing, and underlying geometry of focuses of awareness.

P: intentionality (often described as “aboutness”), the notion that consciousness is always consciousness of something. <== vs
==> A: Awareness can be focusless. It may focus on some area, direction, thing, etc.

P: though they have different structures and different ways of being “about” the object, an object is still constituted as the same identical object; <== vs
==> A: To the awareness, everything is considered as information. I don’t care so much IF there is real object or not. It appears as if there are physical (and possibly other) objects, but I simply treat/process information. Maybe it can be called infomationalism.

P: Husserl’s method entails the suspension of judgment while relying on the intuitive grasp of knowledge, free of presuppositions and intellectualizing. <== vs
==> A: For the awareness, everything is temporary/impermanent. All evaluation is conditional/limited/temporary and useful/practical only within the specific conditional perspective. There is no presupposition of permanent/absolute judgment.

P: The phenomenological method serves to momentarily erase the world of speculation by returning the subject to his or her primordial experience of the matter, whether the object of inquiry is a feeling, an idea, or a perception. <== vs
==> A: Awareness based approach goes even further, erasing all permanent/absolute flavored speculation/presumption (as much as possible) by seeing things in simple (in basic principle) yet complex (in structures and combination) information processing model.

P: According to Husserl the suspension of belief in what we ordinarily take for granted or infer by conjecture diminishes the power of what we customarily embrace as objective reality. <== vs
==> A: According to me, taking things for granted and embracing objective reality is s#%@# and i%$#@% (auto-censored to respect the taste of sensitive members).

P: According to Safranski (1998, 72), “[Husserl and his followers’] great ambition was to disregard anything that had until then been thought or said about consciousness or the world [while] on the lookout for a new way of letting the things [they investigated] approach them, without covering them up with what they already knew.” <== vs
==> A: I don’t have much ambition in this. I just have the personal and highly selfish desire to think and see things in the way I want. I do think it can be used by some other people, but I’m very sure that it cannot be used by very many people, at the same time.

The sense of first used in the list is “of primacy” - not chronologically first.

For me it’s both. In case it wasn’t clear.

Though that’s just my thoughts at the moment. I’ve never really considered the question before.