Transgressing the End of Metaphysics in Martin Moors' Mythos and Logos course

summarization of Moors' ideas, by Corry Shores
[Search Blog Here. Index-tags are found on the bottom of the left column.]

[Central Entry Directory]

[Martin Moors's From Mythos to Logos - From Logos to Mythos course, Entry Directory]

Philosophers continually try to renew philosophy. The first step is a critical return tophilosophy's origin.

The second step involves a recognition of the mythological origin, and then a transgression of another limit. So after a critical examination of philosophy's history, a philosopher who is trying to renew philosophy will secondly then look to its upper limits, to the rational knowledge it does not yet know. This too is critical, because it looks to what is limiting rational discourse. In the first step, what limited rational discourse was its mythological origin. Now what limits it is the lack of what it knows. So there is an erotic drive to transgress these upper limits.

Beyond these upper limits stand the gods with their perfect knowledge, as we saw with Plato's hierarchy. But because knowledge is deified in its absoluteness, here too, like with the first critical move, philosophers transgress again toward mythology. But the move into this divine space of knowledge is not a progression, because once there all knowledge is attained. Rather, it is a transgression, because it is a crossing of an internal limit.

Here we have the end of metaphysics. But not end as destruction, but rather end as aim or destination. So the metaphysician must think both

1) back to philosophy's origin, but as well

2) forward to its end, aim, or purpose.

[Taken from the second lecture of Professor Martin Moors Philosophy of Being 2008 course: "From Mythos to Logos - From Logos to Mythos," at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Professor Moors is not just a remarkably gifted instructor, he is as well a renownedmetaphysician and Kant scholar. His publication list is available here.

The ideas I here present are not my property, but belong to Prof. Moors. A suggested citation:

Moors, Martin. "From Mythos to Logos - From Logos to Mythos: Class 2." Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. 02-Oct-2008.

]

Philosophy's Perpetual Call to Transgress the Limits of Its Mythological Origins by Means of Metaphor, in Martin Moors' Mythos and Logos course

summarization of Moors' ideas, by Corry Shores
[Search Blog Here. Index-tags are found on the bottom of the left column.]

[Central Entry Directory]

[Martin Moors's From Mythos to Logos - From Logos to Mythos course, Entry Directory]

Development in metaphysical thought requires we critique it, which means we find those limits indicating what lies before philosophical thought, at its origin. This is myth. So the call to renew philosophy is a calling-back to its mythical origins.

There is no philosophy without presuppositions, and critical thinking examines and evaluates presuppositions. So for philosophers to critique philosophy, they must go back to its mythical origins to find out what its fundamental presuppositions are.

Because the task of philosophy is continually to renew it, philosophers are perpetually called back to philosophy's mythical origins.

Mythology is a proto-form of philosophical thinking, because it tries to account for things. Mythology tries to find causes for effects. Human suffering, guilt, and vulnerability are accounted-for by means of the myth of the fall from paradise. So mythology is a logos, but a mytho-logos. There is a logic to mythology that is the proto-form of philosophy's logic.

Philosophy makes a critical move to its mythical origin, thereby transgressing its internal limits.

Consider for example Kant's discussion of substance. What appears to us are accidents. Something else underlies these accidents, and that is substance.

Mythical thought operates by means of metaphor. We see also in the term substance a mythological spatial metaphor: lying under. So Kant returns to philosophy's mythical origin by critiquing the way philosophy thinks about substance. At root, philosophy looks at substance mythologically, as a primeval spatiality, a lying-under. And this lying under accounts for all things in the world, just as myths about God account for all things in the world.

[Taken from the second lecture of Professor Martin Moors Philosophy of Being 2008 course: "From Mythos to Logos - From Logos to Mythos," at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Professor Moors is not just a remarkably gifted instructor, he is as well a renowned metaphysician and Kant scholar. His publication list is available here.

The ideas I here present are not my property, but belong to Prof. Moors. A suggested citation:

Moors, Martin. "From Mythos to Logos - From Logos to Mythos: Class 2." Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. 02-Oct-2008.

]

Plato's Epistemic Rationality and Irrationality (A-Rationality), and Hetero-Rationality, in Martin Moors Mythos and Logos course

summarization of Moors' ideas, by Corry Shores
[Search Blog Here. Index-tags are found on the bottom of the left column.]

[Central Entry Directory]

[Martin Moors's From Mythos to Logos - From Logos to Mythos course, Entry Directory]

The gods on high bear the highest knowledge.

This highest knowledge is intuitive, noetic knowledge. Below it is discursive or dianoetic knowledge. The lowest forms of knowledge are belief and sensible representation.

Corresponding to epistemic rationality is epistemic a-rationality or irrationality. Not anti-rationality. What is anti-logical comes out of the logical. But the a-rational or a-logical is hetero-logical.

There are three levels of heterology (a-logic). That is to say, logic has three others: the hyper-rational, the para-rational, and the hypo-rational.

The heterologies correspond with the levels of rationality:

Myth is hyper-rational, because it is higher than rational discourse.

Science is para-rational. Even though it is a rational discourse on being, it is not metaphysics.

Sensible representation (aesthesis) has not yet been made rational, and hence is hypo-rational.

Knowledge moves upwards from sensibility to divine intuitive knowledge, namely, to myth and religion.

Metaphysicians inquire into metaphysical matters. But how are metaphysicians to understand their own field of inquiry? By comparison with other fields inquiry. So, by coming into contact with other manners of inquiry, metaphysical inquiry develops dialectically. Hence, when metaphysicians compare their field with science, for example, they further define and distinguish -- and thereby further develop -- metaphysical inquiry's methods and theories.

This schema will be useful when discussing the relationship between mythology and metaphysics.

[Taken from the first lecture of Professor Martin Moors Philosophy of Being 2008 course: From Mythos to Logos - From Logos to Mythos," at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Professor Moors is not just a remarkably gifted instructor, he is as well a renowned metaphysician and Kant scholar. His publication list is available here.

The ideas I here present are not my property, but belong to Prof. Moors. A suggested citation:

Moors, Martin. "From Mythos to Logos - From Logos to Mythos: Class 1." Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. 25-Sept-2008.

]

[Site Topic Directory]

Limit versus Boundary according to Prof. Martin Moors of Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

by Corry Shores
[Search Blog Here. Index-tags are found on the bottom of the left column.]

[Central Entry Directory]

[Martin Moors's From Mythos to Logos - From Logos to Mythos course, Entry Directory]

[The following is based on student notes.]

Within its very self, metaphysics discovers its own limits. It encounters its own finite limitations, but we must distinguish limits from boundaries.

Limit (German: die Grenze)

Limit is taken positively, because it implicitly or indirectly expresses what lies across it. Consider that for Kant, our rational understanding finds itself limited within the world of appearances. But "phenomena" is a term implying or pointing-to what lies beyond it, namely the thing-in-itself or noumenal world, which is not knowable from within our system of categories. Thus metaphysics or reason is limited within the realm of appearances, which nonetheless is positively linked with what abuts it. We cannot know what lies beyond the limit, but we can think about it.

Thus overcoming is limitation's dynamic.

Boundary (German: die Schranke)

Boundary is regarded negatively, because bounded things are isolated unto themselves. They do not refer to what lies beside them. They self-enclose. A boundary lacks reference to anything but itself, and for that reason is deficient or negative.

Reason or metaphysics self-renews and historicizes by discovering and overcoming its internal limits. Hence criticism does not keep its topic bound, but rather opens its limits to something else besides it.

[Taken from the first lecture of Professor Martin Moors Philosophy of Being 2008 course: "From Mythos to Logos - From Logos to Mythos," at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Professor Moors is not just a remarkably gifted instructor, he is as well a renowned metaphysician and Kant scholar. His publication list is available here.

The ideas I here present are not my property, but belong to Prof. Moors. A suggested citation:

Moors, Martin. "From Mythos to Logos - From Logos to Mythos: Class 1." Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. 25-Sept-2008.]

Husserl’s Phantom, According to Ullrich Melle and Filip Mattens of the Leuven Husserl-Archief

by Corry Shores
[Search Blog Here. Index-tags are found on the bottom of the left column.]

[Central Entry Directory]

[Husserl Entry Directory]

Husserl’s phantom is the object resulting after the spatial features of a physical thing are abstracted from its “causal properties." These causal properties are not ones involving the causal chain of which the phantom is a part. Rather they are properties of the object which are observed when altering its physical circumstances, for example, the results of heating it. When we abstract merely the physical object's visual-spatial features away from these causal properties, we obtain a phantom. Some phantoms, however, are not derived from physical objects, for example rainbows and shadows.

*My sincerest thanks to Filip Mattens for correcting my original mistaken use of "phantasm" instead of "phantom."