Gary, Philosophy, especially the dead end of western left brained philosophy, ends here in this work which has a subtitle: "Told By Means Of A Self-Illuminated Illustration Of The Totality Of Mind".
1. www.mummerybook.org
Altogether this work radically examines EVERY possible philosophical point of view of the entire Great tradition of Humankind---and outshines them all!
Altogether the purpose of this work is to complete shatter the usual "point of view" asana of our normal "sanity" and therby allow the entire being to quite literally see and feel the Radiant Conscious Light that is always already prior to any and every limited point of view. The Conscious Light in which all of this is arising.

This work is now being performed in a Sacred Space designed by the author. A space which is in the shape of a globe. Another feature of the "performance" is the copious use of the authors Divine Image Art ( www.daplastique.com )which are projected on to various screens throughout the entire event.
The images being quite large. Much bigger than the human form.
These extraordinary images are purposed to overwhelm ones usual point of view perspective.

It might be remarked that Heidegger is rather to precipitate in reducing science to cybernetics, in accordance with the fashion among some German physicists at the time. And there's that tergiversation: science results from and displaces the lost normativity of metaphysics, but, if it thereby becomes possible to "see through" the mistaken "normativity" of metaphysics to a new, more "primordial" thinking, did metaphysics actually possess that authoritative normativity in the first place?

John C.,
yes to your remark that Heidegger is rather too precipitate in reducing science to cybernetics--but not to a representational -calculative reason.

It was positivism that was operational and ontologically naive---the shift to realism and physicalism changed that. Physicalism decried that its ontology was the way the world was in its essence.

But "representational-calculative reason" is a real and delimitable possibility of symbolic thinking, which has not just its uses, but its validities, no?

Natural scientific explanation by means of efficient causes alone is broadly "economic" in nature,- (just consider the fundamental role of conservation laws in its structure),- which realization serves as a crux for considering what sorts of questions are amenable to treatment in its terms and what are not. It's a matter of neither confusing the rationality of such norms of explanation with the whole of "reason", nor of denying to them a kind of rationality. It's a matter of arriving at a non-foundationalist conception of the sciences. The positivists' notion of a "unified science" was precisely a metaphysical hangover, even as it decried such a thing.

I took that to be one of the motivating dimensions to Heidegger's own appeal to "authenticity": if science is not to be "grounded" by appeal to its sheer systematic unity, then its claims to validity must be assessed in terms of the "authenticity" of the projects/questions of its researchers, which, in turn, implies a thinking of a "topology" of Being. The "mistake" is the inflated transference of "representational-calculative reason" onto the understanding of the world as a whole, including human relations in and toward that world, which leads to a pervasive instrumentalization of all relations shadowed by the ascendancy of a will-to-power that dissolves the bindingness and coherence of any and all rational norms and limits. But at that point, any appeal to a supposed normative order provided by and grounded in traditional metaphysics, as providing limits to human existence and orders of beings, loses all cogency.

Gary,

Can you say more about the difference between positivism and physicalism? For some reason, I always thought the latter was just old wine poured into a new skin.

Herr Ziffer,

In the twentieth century, physicalism has emerged out of positivism. In terms of metaphysics, which is how Heidegger would approach it, the positivists were Humeans--everything was based on sense impressions of the individual subject. Though positivism started out as a movement by objectively minded scientists to advocate a sound basis for scientific inquiry, is was ultimately undermined by its own under-recognized sensationist Humean epistemology. The conclusion is that the ultimate content of scientific truths is atomistic private sensations.

The physicalists, in contrast, based their metaphysics on matter (physical things)--ie., the fundamental objects of physical reality as understood by physics. The earlist forms of physicalism were reductionist.

Thank you for that explanation, Gary. Just one more question, so I can get my concepts straight. Is what you are here calling positivism the same thing as the psychologism that Husserl took aim at and argued against in his Logical Investigations?

Herr Ziffer.
I'm not sure. My sense is that Husserl understands "psychologism" to be the theory that psychological analysis may be used as a method of resolving philosophical problems. In Logical Investigation (particularly in the first volume, Prolegomena to Pure Logic) Husserl rejected "any notion of logical rationality that could be explained by individual, contingently subjective processes, a view which he asserted should rightly be censured as blatant psychologism".Brentano (intentionality) seems to be in Husserl's sights.

On this account in Logical Investigations Husserl analyzed and criticized the errors and limitations of psychology as the foundation of logic and of all sciences. Because of these errors and limitations, psychology as the foundation of logic and of the sciences cannot achieve exact and true knowledge.

Psychologism appears to be influenced a lot by empiricism.