Heidegger

GEVANS613 at aol.com wrote:

>jPolanik@nc.rr.com writes:

>Joe: the difference between ‘I am deceived’ and ‘I am mistaken’ is
>insignificant; but; the difference between ‘I am’ and ‘I am alive’ *is*
>significant. in ‘I am alive’ the copula is complemented with something
>other than the root predicate; consequently, ‘I am alive’ claims
>additional knowledge as to what I am (a living thing) not just that I
>am.

>Jud: Humans differentiate between existing in the world on the one
>hand as thinking, conscious, mistaken, unmistaken, deceived,
>undeceived, experientialists, and on the other hand as merely being
>alive as corporeally functioning but brain dead vegetables. The latter
>state is often described as *merely existing* and *better off dead.*

>Obviously an exanimate piece of human meat would not be able to think
>or utter the words ‘I am alive.’ … [or] mouth silly, illogical
>redundancies like: I think therefore I am (or even worse: I experience
>therefore I am).

yes. ‘I allege that I am alive; therefore, I am alive’ is a
self-verifying performative argument. the fact that I can make the
self-referencing allegation ‘I am alive’ demonstrates that it is true.

>All sentences that are formed with what I sometimes call a hanging,
>covert, orphanic or denotata-less predicate, and imply the existential
>modalic nature of the utterer (the subject) by the verb employed …
>Thus: *I play football therefore I exist,* suggests that the utterer is
>a footballer, or at least, if not a professional in that sport, it
>implies that he or she is in the habit of playing football as a feature
>of their current existential modalities. If the utterer who makes such
>a claim is not a footballer, then the claim *I am a liar therefore I
>exist* could legitimately be made in its place.

I’m not sure what you are claiming here. usually by ‘orphanic’ you mean
a statement like ‘I am experiencing; therefore, I am’ in which the naked
copula has no explicit complement. Is this also what you mean by
‘denotata-less predicate’?

in any event, if the statement ‘I am’ is expanded to explicitize the
implicit complement of the naked copula, we would get one of the
following:

‘I am’ = ‘I am an existent (of some sort)’
‘I am’ = ‘I am a reality (of some sort)’
‘I am’ = ‘I am a being (of some sort)’

we have to add the qualifier ‘(of some sort)’ because of the ambiguity
as to the mode of being/existence/reality of the referent of ‘I’.

this is Kant’s point. I, this instance of phenomenological
self-awareness, knows that I am … a phenomenological reality ((of some
sort); but, I do not know whether I am a product of the brain, or a
product of the soul or a product of the interaction of the two.

I know *that* I am; but, not *what* I am. consequently, it can not be
the case that the ‘am’ in ‘I am’ indicates the modality in which I am
— except, significantly, for the instance of self-awareness that I am.

Joe

–
Philosophy is, after all, done ultimately in the first person for the
first person. — H-N Castaneda

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 http://what-am-i.net
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Posted on Sunday, November 16th, 2008 at 7:00 am
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