Let's take this point by point:
> We start with this. We start with the assumption
that
> each of us exists. We are not images which
> depend for their existence on someone imagining us,
> for that someone could only be ourselves, which puts
> us back where we started. It's the beginning
> of philosophy, the one assumption we can really
count
> on, because we all have unmediated knowledge of its
> truth.
The substantiality of the subject was the starting point for Descartes -- or maybe I should say "seemed to be" since prior to stating the _cogito_ he had to cast himself into radical doubt (Adorno quips somewhere in _Critical Models_ that Descartes's oppoisiton of "thinking thing" and "extended thing" already implies their unity). Kant's analysis of subjectivity is different; he doesn't take the _cogito_ as an unmediated first but examines the subject's faculties and finds there are intuitions -- namely, space and time -- that must be _a priori_ ones and proceeds from there. Then there's Hegel for whom *EVERY CATEGORY* of cognition -- from the here and now, to the thing, to the understanding, to the self and self-consciousness -- IS MEDIATED. So while the subject and subjectivity are principle themes in philosophy from Descartes to Heidegger (and does Da-sein really replace/displace subjectivity, but instead smuggle in all sorts of reactionary baggage into a hash of traditional subjectivist epistemology that claims to be ontology?) it's at least a distortion to say that the _cogito_ is the "unmediated" starting point for these thinkers and the people posting on this thread.
So when you write "We start with the assumption that each of us exists," I have to respond, "Whadya mean 'WE' white man?" For Adorno, the _cogito_ is an historical/ideological artifact (although one he wants to wrest it from it's ideological context and use it for other means). I'm certain a patient reader of Lacan such as Ken could exhibit that thinker's objections to a first philosophy that procedes from the cogito. Historical materialists of whatever stripe don't start there.
So (1) even within the tradition of subjectivist epistemology, the _cogito_ is not an unmediated first, and (2) even idealists (whether self-proclaimed like Hegel or imputed like Adorno or Lacan) can discard or ignore or attack the _cogito_.
And yet whenever someone claims that mind is reducible to brain, you accuse them of Platonism! On what grounds? That in order to perform a language act that begins with 'I think,' I have to have an internal state that proceeds from the cogito? Well, for all you know, I could be zombie with no internal states or self-consciousness yet capable of performing such acts (Searle attacks functionalism by positing such zombies in his review of Chalmer's book I mentioned in my previous post to Brad.) And to bring the man out of the parentheses, what about Searle, whom you claim to like? Even he believes that mind is an emsemble of brain processes (but rants and raves as though his approach is the only correct one, even with people who don't seem to disagree with him).
> Starting philosophy without the recognition of one's
> own self-existence is like performing a long
> algorithm, and since the very first step is wrong,
> further steps only lead deeper into cognitive error.
"This is not the time for first philosophy, but last philosophy." -- Curtiss, who is having too much fun to heed the injunction that one only refutes something by putting it coolly and respectfully on ice.
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