[meteorite-list] Irons DON'T form Fusion Crust's - yes they DO

From: Matthias Bärmann <majbaermann_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2007 00:32:04 +0100
Message-ID: <001c01c7350f$895662b0$0200a8c0_at_ibmtp23>

Hello Thaddeus & list,



I agree absolutely, my oppositional use of "phenomenoligical" and "scientific" was meant in a more daily-life-sense and not in a philosophical manner.



It's clear that the above mentioned opposition is included in phenomenology itself. It's the merit of Merleau-Ponty that he postulated, against his forfathers Heidegger and Husserl, a "field", a relationship, oscillating between body and mind, empirism and intellectualism, with the "Leib" (in German translation, unfortunately there's no equivalent in English) as a mediator between body and mind.



The problem, and the main aspect of criticism of phenomenology is the fact, that Husserl as well as Heidegger as well as Merleau-Ponty underlined the necessity of experience - Husserl: tending towards "die Sachen selbst" (things themselves) - , but failed in establishing a real pragmatic dimension. The abyss between experience and science remained unbridged - even in the case Merleau-Ponty, who went as far as western philosophy/science allowed him to go, and who clearly fixed the problem, emphasizing the importance of the enbodiment of human experience, but remained with his concept of phenomenology in a theoritical dimension: it is, following the path of western philosophy with it's Greek origins, still philosophy as theoretical reflection.



There's a very interesting reception and evolution of phenomenology in contemporary cognitivism. In this context I'd like only to mention Francisco Varela and his co-authors Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch) and his/their concept of an "embodied mind" (as "embodied action") as a manifestation (or a kind of synthesis) of "cognitive science" and "human experience".



Having reached this point I want to stop here. My starting point was to criticize the completely different use of "glassy" in science and human experience. The complete transformation on the atomic level of the orginal matter at the surface of a meteorite via heat makes the scientist to qualify the new status of matter as "glass". But "glass", as we all know from common experience (which is closely connected to the empirical aspects of etymology), mainly evocates "shining" as well as "being transparent" - qualities which don't describe, regarding experience, the appearance of a frish fallen and crusted meteorite at all, whether stone nor iron. But, as we know as well: such a problematic use of language isn't the reason of, it's only symptomatic for the main problem: the fissure between experience and intellect.



Regards,



Matthias





 

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Thaddeus Besedin
  To: Matthias B?rmann
  Cc: meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com
  Sent: Wednesday, January 10, 2007 1:03 AM
  Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Irons DON'T form Fusion Crust's - yes they DO


  Is there really any way of determining distinctions between phenomenologicality and scientific knowledge, the ding an sich (noumenon)? We are really speaking here of an epistemology of replicable phenomena. What is seen by all is seen by one. Power inverts this relationship. The paradigmatic phenomenologist Husserl ("zu den sachen selbst") was a positivistic empirical verificationist with a Platonic heart; perhaps, as with the dialectical effect of the conflict of Berkeley/Kant/Hume on their philosophical progeny, any absolutely empirical criterion is in its end itself both a denial of analytic a priori knowledge of a world - a denial of a world - and an affirmation of its necessary presence - and the presence of such a conceivable possibility as 'presence.' To think of thought as it may have been preceding the acquisition of extrinsic, codified communication - the invasion of signs - is impossible, although this must have been the case: a catalytic reference, an initial logos, possession by one's genome,
 by one's neurotransmitters. Husserl's eidetic-geometric-intuitive presupposition articulating his ontology violated at least one certain limit of certainty, of verification: infinite regress as one continues to find the bottom of one's being. Meaning is constructed and emerges and we become possessors of things and not the pressure, pitch, scent, and nutrition of mothers in their progressively predictable places within cyclical constellations of cooccurring events. Memory. Diachronic distances are tantamount to spatial proximities, and we only approach a transcendent synthesis of raw event and cooked history, processed by we intermediaries called consciousnesses. We anticipate only potential - and have a sentence ready. This is how we fulfill our prophesies.
   Merleau-Ponty would have placed a non-phenomenalistic body between itself and its context, an outside which is only outside of language, ontologically incommensurable with apprehension by language itself, peremptorily concealing the indeterminable nexus of definition ( if such a concept - nexus - is not simply a necessary reification).
  Certainly bodies are calibrated, and we enjoy or suffer from an inscrutably enclosed conventional realism - indistinguishable from idealisms from within our consciousness-as-temporality.
  Well,
  subjective appearances of glassy ('vitreous' as a macroscopic qualitative label in petrology) of course are optical in nature because I see them.

  Matthias B?rmann <majbaermann at web.de> wrote:
    I agree. But using an expression (also a scientific one) in a
    phenomenological manner we should take care to avoid a contradiction (or
    even tensions) between the phenomenological and the scientific dimension.

    ----- Original Message -----
    From: "Darren Garrison"
    To: "Matthias B?rmann"
    Cc:
    Sent: Sunday, January 07, 2007 8:26 PM
    Subject: Re: Re: [meteorite-list] Irons DON'T form Fusion Crust's - yes they
    DO


    On Sun, 7 Jan 2007 20:17:25 +0100, you wrote:

>But it doesn't hit the point regarding meteorites. "Glassy" evokes the
>impression of something shiny, very smooth, mirror-like. But as we all now

    But the "laymen" use of the term isn't the scientific one. "Glassy" means
    something that cooled quickly enough that it didn't have time to crystalize
    and
    is instead, on the atomic level, an amorphous mess.

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Received on Wed 10 Jan 2007 06:32:04 PM PST