One route to dealing with this question is Cartesian: I ask the question
concerning stable knowledge, therefore there is stable knowledge. And
maybe that is Heidegger's route, not in its Cartesianim proper, but
rather in the matter of Being: * I s * there stable knowledge? Can there
* b e * stable knowledge, etc. One can trace the like Descartes-Husserl
-Heidegger here, from the moment of doubt, to Husserl's view of the
opening of the whole range of self-certain mental acts, as well as the
relevance of this for the "crisis of the European Sciences", to
Heidegger, though in the last case, grasping the importance of this
heritage in this aspect seems to me rather difficult.
Generally, my own take on this is that the "Heideggerian moment" (above)
does obtain, but not as fully or as extensively as Heidegger might have
thought, and that there are multiple stabilities in multiplicities of
conditions of possibility which are variously commensurable and
incommensurable by degree. For Wittgenstein, coming from another end of
things, he reached at some point a sense of "obviousness" concerning
certainties: that there are innumerable certainties. If I have my hand in
the middle of a table, it is a certainty that dropping a ball will put
it somewhere on the table to start. Once this is grasped in its
significance, I think the business of stabilities spills out.
I'm actually satisifed by this, but maybe I'm naive. But I think the
setting of the question is *extremely* important: who is asking (I don't
mean the specific poster stating this thread), why are they asking? What
understanding inheres in the asking? What sense lies in the question?
What objects and interlocutors are implied? What conditions of discourse
regarding such a question, etc.?
Tom B.
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"I'll take my coffee without sugar produced in slave labor camps, on third
world plantations or by prison chain gangs, thank you. The same goes for
the coffee itself, naturally."
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