There’s a massive difference between ‘having the idea’ and elaborating that idea into a complex and rational theoretical apparatus and situating it within a philosophical problematic. Often we don’t even realise that initial idea was ‘good’ until someone does the actual philosophical work. As pascal pointed out, Augustine had something like the idea cogito, but it was Descartes who was able to use that idea to completely revolutionise philosophy and how we think about the subject.

Dude, that is extremely my shit. I just got a bachelor's in psychology and philosophy and have been debating where exactly I want to go from here. I'm leaning towards therapy but I don't really love a lot of the more modern cbt-esque forms of it. My favorite class throughout college was without a doubt phenomenology, I feel like I've really integrated that perspective into my own thinking.

I'd love to hear whatever you have to say about your work; how you got into it, how you're applying the view in your cases, any advice you'd have for someone moving into their masters. I've debated trying to get into a program for Jungian/Depth psychology but the work you're doing sounds exciting.

> As I said in my original post, an organism has to reproduce. There are other factors but that one by itself is sufficient. Every organism from single celled life to plants to humans reproduces. The Earth doesn't generate baby Earths that go out into the solar system and compete for resources with the offspring of other planets.

organism: a whole with interdependent parts, likened to a living being. - "the upper strata of the American social organism"

>>> It isn't a coherent theory so you can't scientifically disprove it the way you could disprove a coherent (but wrong) scientific theory.

>> If a theory cannot be scientifically proven or disproven, does that mean that it is necessarily incorrect?

> Regarding your second question if a theory can't be objectively proven or disproven (i.e., it isn't falsifiable) then it isn't what I consider a theory.

theory:

• a supposition or a system of ideas intended to explain something, especially one based on general principles independent of the thing to be explained.

• a set of principles on which the practice of an activity is based.

• an idea used to account for a situation or justify a course of action.

The question was: If a theory cannot be scientifically proven or disproven, does that mean that it is necessarily incorrect?

> And the only method that I'm aware of with a track record for testing objective truth is science.

Were pre-historic/pre-scientific peoples (neanderthals, etc) unable to tell if someone was dead, as just one example?

I use phenomenology as the core of my therapeutic practice. I get to study Heidegger with a group of therapists who present cases using Heideggarian (existential/phenomenology) and psychoanalytic relational models.

This shit becomes alive when using it in practice and watching clients use key themes to integrate and move towards health. It’s pretty damn cool.

Exactly. Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, etc we’re all challenging the subject-object split and refuting through phenomenological exploration in several realms. Perhaps, Latour posed a new variation of this historical theme? Otherwise, it feels inaccurate.

As I said in my original post, an organism has to reproduce. There are other factors but that one by itself is sufficient. Every organism from single celled life to plants to humans reproduces. The Earth doesn't generate baby Earths that go out into the solar system and compete for resources with the offspring of other planets.

Regarding your second question if a theory can't be objectively proven or disproven (i.e., it isn't falsifiable) then it isn't what I consider a theory. It may be a metaphor or a literary device or something else but it isn't a theory. Note: this doesn't mean there has to be technology that we have at the current time that can falsify the theory. A good example is Einstein's theory of relativity. When he first created it the theory made predictions (e.g., that light from the sun would bend around Mercury) that couldn't be tested. Einstein and the world were lucky that technology became precise enough to measure the miniscule effects of a gravitational object on light shortly after Einstein published his work and experiments validated that Einstein's theories were correct.

Freudianism is another example of something that doesn't qualify as a theory because it isn't falsifiable. Kuhn and Popper first pointed this out using the Freudian example of Phobias and Reaction Formation. If the hypothesis is that a patient has a fear of intimacy and they are a virgin (demonstrate phobic behavior) that shows the hypothesis is correct according to Freudian theory. But if they go out and have sex with anything that moves that is reaction formation and also confirms the hypothesis. The hypothesis can't be proven wrong and hence the theory isn't scientific. That doesn't mean Freud wasn't brilliant, nor that he didn't make some important discoveries. The concept of the unconscious and that it could play a major role in human behavior was a major leap in psychology and virtually everyone accepts it now. But virtually no one doing experimental psychology takes Freudian theory seriously since Kuhn and Popper (many people in clinical psychology and the humanities unfortunately haven't embraced the scientific method). And yes, I think even the humanities can be done scientifically. I gave examples of one of my favorite bible scholars: Bart Ehrman (I forget if it was here or in another thread where I used Ehrman as an example) as someone who IMO clearly takes a scientific approach to his work. That also illustrates what I mean by science: not just the natural sciences and for something to be scientific doesn't mean it has to use every technique of science. Ehrman doesn't do experiments but he does rely on data, creates hypotheses, and tests them against the known facts.

And the only method that I'm aware of with a track record for testing objective truth is science. So if the Gaia concept inspires people or makes them think in new ways that's fine and I'm all for it. Just don't distort it by claiming it is a theory because it isn't... unless you want to distort the concept of theory to something that is essentially subjective to each individual. And if you want to do that I can't say it's wrong. There is no right or wrong when it comes to every day discourse. Lewis Carrol recognized that (Humpty Dumpty's speech) as did Wittgenstein and Chomsky. Natural language is context dependent and you can use theory in everyday speech anyway you want. But if you want to have serious discussions that are rigorous it seems to me that a definition of theory that most intellectuals would agree with is that it is falsifiable and is objective and that makes it science.

One last thing: I realize some people will quibble with the word "objective" and point out that no individual is completely objective. And I agree with that. That is why I think it is so important to distinguish science from pseudoscience. Because we all have biases we need processes that have demonstrated over time that they enable us to see beyond them and lead to objective truth. We'll never completely get there. But it is the striving via the use of practices such as peer review, rigorous definitions, and experiments that enable us to make progress toward it.

I see a lot of disagreements with this single quote from the entire article that hasn't quite grasped where Latour was coming from. Latour was aware of, and dismissive of, existing philosophical attempts to bridge the gap between subject and object because he denied there was any special need to bridge it in the first place. He further argued that modern attempts to solve this "problem" still kept the divide implicitly present.

Phenomenology? Solves the "problem" by reducing all experienced reality to the subjective pole and rejecting any independently objective reality. Scientific realism takes the opposite, equally problematic approach of reducing all experienced reality to the objective pole only. Hegel and Marx's dialectical solution posits a mediating process between subject and object but still treats them as ontologically distinct domains. I can't speak to non-modern philosophies like Buddhism.

Latour's solution? Simply, that there was no real need for a solution, because the question was not worth asking in the first place. Gaps between actors are innumerable, moreover, and positing this one alleged gap between subject and object as the most important one vastly overinflated its importance in contrast to all the other gaps between actors that might exist. The later, much less well-understood work of Latour - the "modes of existence" work mentioned in Harman's article - is an attempt to identify and explain the nature of some of these additional gaps and how actors overcome them.

EDIT TO ADD perhaps this quote from A.N: Whitehead, a huge influence on Latour, might help clarify where he coming from a bit better. This is taken from The Concept of Nature (1927, p. 30):

> What I am essentially protesting against is the bifurcation of nature into two systems of reality, which, in so far as they are real, are real in different senses. One reality would be the entities such as electrons which are the study of speculative physics. This would be the reality which is there for knowledge; although on this theory it is never known. For what is known is the other sort of reality, which is the byplay of the mind. Thus there would be two natures, one is the conjecture and the other is the dream.

Moral error theory is comprised of two parts: a denial of the existence of objective values, and a claim about the ways we attempt to make reference to objective values. Legal regimes and how morality relates to law are no different.

It reminds of this detail from a Neal Stephenson book I read called Anathem (the book is... fine). Ignoring the merits of the book as a whole, there is one funny detail that I think would be useful. In this world, there is an ancient order of logicians and mathematicians, each members of various sects with various roles to play in the continuity of society. The task of one of the sects was to analyze all new works and point out where the author thought they had an original idea only to be shown that it had been written about thousands of years prior. Does seem to be where we find ourselves often these days.

I think the misunderstanding that many people have is that Latour wasn't interested in "reconciling" anything. He argued instead that, most of the time, these supposedly massive distinctions between such domains don't actually exist - or that they don't matter, which, in Latour's heavily pragmatist-influenced philosophy, amounts to exactly the same thing.

I'd argue again that a lot of that has more to do with longtermism being a pretty PR-savvy movement than with any actual philosophical aversion. That is to say, I don't know how meaningful an argument it is to say they don't explicitly describe themselves as "pro-genocide" — even a lot of people actively perpetrating genocides wouldn't advertise themselves as genocide advocates. It's a pretty negative term that virtually nobody goes out of their way to be associated with. The problem is not that longtermists go around saying "We really ought to do more genociding," it's that longtermists go around arguing that essentially any present-day sacrifice short of human extinction is trivially easy to justify according to their deeply wonky assumptions about the future.

Which brings us to the next point. As you say, this is the kind of thing that has always posed a problem for utilitarianism, but I'd argue that there is a salient difference in the case of longtermism simply because the its ethical calculus is predicated on the kind of abject loonytoons gibberish that has to be forced onto utilitarians. In other words, while it may be possible to argue against both with "weird, unrealistic hypotheticals," the difference is that longtermism is specifically built around those very hypotheticals; the whole "digital people" thing from my prior post wasn't some weird thought I experiment I made up to put longtermists in a bind, it is a thing longtermists themselves bring up as part of their arguments.

And, to your final point, I'd generally agree, but I think it also encapsulates what's wrong with longtermism: it takes the implications of its "weird, hypothetical thought experiments" very seriously. Premises that others would hesitate to accept even for the sake of a purely theoretical or counterfactual debate, longtermists often treat as concrete assumptions on which to base our actual day-to-day ethical decisions. If you don't take the hypotheticals seriously, you can't take longtermism seriously. If you do take them seriously, longtermism is horrifying.

I love how /r/philosophy is just filled with posts like this where some guy you’ve never heard of is “challenging” something, or proposes some idea that’s been discussed ad nauseum for literally thousands of years. This is why I stopped at my masters after deep dives into ethics and phenomenology—philosophy is amazing, but it is no longer a productive field of study, despite the delusions of academics that it is.

Stoicism was already there as well as its ontology only includes one thing - the universe.

Unfortunately I think we have yet to understand the importance of philosophy in our society Ada whole

In the field of sociology, his ideas where original and new. While almost all great sociological theorists thought of the physical/material world as an environment that coexists with the social world of humans or as background noise with negligible influence, Latour came up with a theoretical framework that allowes us to incorporate the physical world, flora and fauna into the social construction of reality.

Edit: To make it a little bit clearer. Latour thought of all kind of things, like stones, keys, bacteria, doors and so on, as social actors that had to be taken into the equation. For him, they where as important as humans when it came to action and the questions why we act and why we act in a certain way.

> it demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of what the concept living organism means in Biology

Can you give one example that demonstrates this?

> It isn't a coherent theory so you can't scientifically disprove it the way you could disprove a coherent (but wrong) scientific theory.

If a theory cannot be scientifically proven or disproven, does that mean that it is necessarily incorrect?

graham harman is so annoying and I can’t pinpoint why

Exactly. This is hardly a “new” idea in philosophy, especially if one knows anything about eastern traditions or h*ll philosophy before the 19th century

Phenomenology. Husserl.

there is nothing new or useful in latour's work

Many people have done this, Lucretius, Marx, deleuze, Virginia woolf, etc.

Zen Buddhism enters the chat

Thanks for reading it so I don't have to!

It should not be. This publication is not a paid one.

I'm not that adept at Reddit but I think this will take you to it: https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/xuk9yk/comment/irsc9ui/?context=3