Which is First?

Please start another thread with your new approach to phenomenology. I’ll overlook the fact that since you haven’t yet devised this approach, it’s impossible that it is one that I am not aware of - y’know, because it doesn’t exist yet.

guess ya missed the point.

well, you probably are just pretending to have missed the point out of some misguided sense of pride. you probably get it and fundamentally agree, but it’s too late to admit that now, huh?

Please stick to the topic. I am not the topic.

what you said is, though.

To answer the question I allready have to make a valuejudgement, so Ethics it is.

I think i could do without all the rest, if i’d only know how to act.

Or maybe not without logic, as i’d be difficult to study anything without logic.

Yeah, i dunno,maybe logic is first. Can i chose two disciplines to be first?

Off-topic here but having seen the posts moved to the Rant house, and assuming nothing has been completely removed, a one-month ban seems excessive, to say the least.

Maybe this is cheap, but… pyschology. The integration of all these fields. Generalists are underrated. Specialists are typically too political.

Faust, that you denigrate ontology, epistemology, and phenomenology to the degree you do suggests to me that you think it’s important to first know exactly what the best approach is to those subjects, and then you can grapple with the open questions. No?

earth, fire, water, air, aether

I wonder if there’s a connection. :-k

anon - thew first thing I did was to answer this question - I asked the epistemic questions first. And that is my answer. Epistemology is first.

Ok then!

That was a bad edit, but you got the point, I guess. I don’t think you can rightly decide how to act until you’ve figured out if there are evil demons trying to lure you from God, or gods trying to lure you from evil demons. In that, I’ll give Descartes credit.

Likewise, I don’t think you need to get very fancy about what exists and what does not to make some basic decisions about the value of what you think you know is (that is, by the way, my definition of philosophy - the art of valuing what you think you know). And almost no one studies logic first - it’s not really necessary - commonsense suffices in life and at first, in philosophy - I’d be shocked if anyone here disagrees, as only a handful of members here know the first thing about it.

Phenomenology doesn’t even belong on the list, and you wouldn’t find it on such a list anywhere but in an article about phenomenology, which is where I found it.

I’d say the (awareness of) awareness is the first material we need to start any “study” because we can’t have incoming information if we are not aware enough.

Then, the study of the nature of the awareness is the first study because we can’t focus and compare different target item/zone in our field of awareness unless we are well aware and familiar with how awareness change in its density, form, etc.
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After that, we can study the nature of perspectives, which is the focused vector of awareness and combination of them and their relations.
This may include some of “logic (in the narrower, academic sense)”.
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Now, I don’t know where do these fit in the traditional classification.
I’ve told it’s psychology, but I don’t think so.
Some of them have been treated by “mystics”, but I don’t really like religious contamination and I think we can deal with these in the manner we can treat geometry and mechanical things.

And finally, if someone thinks it’s not “philosophy”, I don’t really care, as I don’t care about naming, so much.
I don’t consider myself to be a philosopher or philosophy oriented person, either.
It’s just some of my interests happened to be related to things philosophy has been dealing with.

Without a foundation for what is, I don’t think you can start any other philosophical disciplines, and if you do, you’re neglecting some serious assumptions about your theory. I like to think that Nietzsche was right when he put psychology above all, but that was based on a metaphysical assumption on the nature of reality and our standing in relation to it. He then made an epistemological assumption about our capacity to know, and finally arrived at a conclusion for how philosophy and philosophers ought to proceed.

I don’t know though. A good argument can be made that it’s silly to think you can undertake strictly epistemological, metaphysical, ethical, etc, approaches in philosophy. They seem dependent on eachother to me…then again, am i not basing that seeming on an assumption about the nature of each discipline?

This is a difficult question.

I think it’s a difficult question, the answer to which doesn’t necessarily matter. And I would agree with you that you cannot study these fields thoroughly in isolation from each other, anymore than you can study a branch of science by itself.

I think the choice you make about this list describes your philosophy more than it describes philosophy.

Doesn’t this presuppose a desire to “rightly” choose your actions – ethics first?

I’d say ethics, myself. The apparent differences between how one ‘ought to’ act as opposed to what natural urges he experiences would seem ample grounds to pursue every other one of those categories. Also, I tend to think that nearly all philosophy ultimately speaks to some moral or ethical doctrine. We pursue knowledge, wisdom, ‘virtue’, what have you, because we wish to understand life and how we ought to regard our condition and experiences therein.

How it worked for me historically (At least as I best remember).

  1. Self first - Ontology
  2. Non Self – Phenomenology
  3. Women – Sex – Compromise – Ethics
  4. Self Reflection – Epistemology
  5. Desire for consistency – Logic

How should it work? Don’t know.

I consider ontology and ethics most important, and probably ontology over ethics. By no means, however, would I study ontology or ethics without regard for logic, epistemology, or phenomenology. They are all, to a large extent, necessarily interrelated. It’s just that ultimately I see logic as little more than a tool and epistemology as offering a healthy dose of skepticism. I wouldn’t be concerned with logic or epistemology if they were not useful for thinking about other subjects. Phenomenology can be pretty rad, but it’s not my favorite.

No one area is more “philosophical” than any other. It’s probably best to say that philosophy is the intersection between all these major areas.

statik -

It may, but the desire alone is not the study of ethics.

Which is why I put it last. I consider philosophy an eliminative practise. This may mean that we actually agree. To me, primacy goes to epistemology, because it is in epistemology that there is the most to eliminate. In my case, it was both the demon and the god.

To me it seems we must begin with ontology - for the rest lack any real footing or intelligible foundation without being as such, without something, some existential medium in and through which the rest can take place.

The rest (phenomenology, epistemology, logic. ethics) are the many facets, states, and faces of a single fact of being.

The real is simply that which is, apart from our individual or collective interpretations of it.