Charles Brown wrote:
> My response to Chris was precisely that his error is that he
> doesn't think of practice as social (collective) , proving that you
> are
> exactly wrong as to what I have in mind concerning the 2nd Thesis on
> Feuerbach.
The description of human self-consciousness as "praxis" is a description of it as self-consciousness of "sensuous activity" elaborated as "activity" in "internal relations" having logical space for self-determination and final causation.
If this description is true, reality is not an unknowable thing-in- itself because it is in our experience via these internal relations. So, the description doesn't imply the solipsism (the radical skepticism) implied by any interpretation of experience that that constitutes it as subjectively "mediated" in a way that necessarily disconnects it from any reality other than my own existence now.
This readical skepticism isn't "uncertainty"; it's the implication of an unquestioned interpretive claim about experience, the implication being that, on this interpretation, it's logically "certain" that nothing other than this solipsism is knowable.
"Uncertainty" is what is involved in the "bracketing" constitutive of Husserl's phenomenology. The question as to whether or not human self- consciousness is "praxis" is a "phenomenological" question in this sense.
Starting from this point, we can then move to the "social" basis of "knowledge," as does Husserl, through the idea of "transcendental intersubjectivity," an idea itself requiring phenomenological grounding.
Ted