https://archive.org/details/penseetralit00spiruoft
This work is of considerable interest to the concerns of this blog. Spir belongs to that fascinating category of 'forgotten thinkers' who are only mentioned in the context of biographies of famous literary figures.
Spir (the name seems to be of Greek origin) was born in present Ukraine, but wrote in German. His father was a protestant military surgeon who was knighted.
Spir seems to have partially realized the goal of expressing the core philosophy of early buddhism within the tradition of western philosophy with a particular emphasis on Hume (whom he calls 'the wisest of men') and the spirit (rather than the letter and specific content) of Kantian criticism. Hume and epistemic relativism are placed on a consistent, coherent basis. However remarkably there is no specific mention of buddhism in the work above (though moral, humanitarian and spiritual concerns are central to his thought), but we note the equivalence between 'the norm' and dhamma/dharma. Spir is certainly one of the most interesting 'Humeans' alongside Husserl and Meinong. Indeed his treatment of 'sensations' seems quite analogous to Brentano's and later Husserl's theory of intentionality.
A defect of much of phenomenological and empirical philosophy and psychology was not primarily considering 'impressions' and 'ideas' as 'objects' of desire, attachment, obsession. And not considering the remarkable phenomenology of the process of overcoming such desires which is at once the most difficult of task and yet relatively easy if guided by the right insight - an insight that should be our key philosophical guide.
Poetry (such as Novalis and Hölderlin) should offer an alternative complementary mode and path to philosophical knowledge - giving equal importance to the scientific and to the literary/artistic.
Hegel's logic might be interpreted as extracting (in a kind of depth psychology) the schemata of thought, of consciousness. Hegel's logic in turn can be expressed, according to some, in category theory. Hegel's absolute knowing is awareness of the multiplicity of structures of consciousness as well as their relativity and passing away into another - just as for Sextus spiritual peace involves awareness of the multiplicity of hypotheses and their equipollence without contradicting this awareness itself - this is itself similar to the Spirian-Humean process of enlightenment which finds the norm imitated by yet fundamentally incompatible with phenomena.
An interesting link to Hume is provided by the work of Sowa on conceptual structures (the percepts) - and more specifically the Humean-style work in cognitive psychology discussed in his book (and it is possible that some French philosophers and semioticians (Greimas) of the second half of the 20th century might be of interest as well) - and the connection to category theory might be provided by Goguen (initial algebras, institutions):
The lattice of theories of Sowa and the formal concept analysis of Wille each address certain formal aspects of concepts, though for different purposes and with different technical apparatus. Each is successful in part because it abstracts away from many difficulties of living human concepts. Among these difficulties are vagueness, ambiguity, flexibility, context dependence, and evolution. The purpose of this paper is first, to explore the nature of these difficulties, by drawing on ideas from contemporary cognitive science, sociology, computer science, and logic. Secondly, the paper suggests approaches for dealing with these difficulties, again drawing on diverse literatures, particularly ideas of Peirce and Latour. The main technical contribution is a unification of several formal theories of concepts, including the geometrical conceptual spaces of Gärdenfors, the symbolic conceptual spaces of Fauconnier, the information flow of Barwise and Seligman, the formal concept analysis of Wille, the lattice of theories of Sowa, and the conceptual integration of Fauconnier and Turner; this unification works over any formal logic at all, or even multiple logics. A number of examples are given illustrating the main new ideas. A final section draws implications for future research. One motivation is that better ways for computers to integrate and process concepts under various forms of heterogeneity, would help with many important applications, including database systems, search engines, ontologies, and making the web more semantic.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/11524564_4
Thus we wish for a theory of language and theory of mind based on concepts on a phenomenist-phenomenological (introspective-intuitive) basis with roots in Hume, Kant, Mill, Brentano, Meinong and philosophical psychology (and cognitive psychology) possibly guided by idealism, structuralism, computer science (in particular the relationship between assembly and high-level languages) and category theory (and categorical logic) - ultimately to result in a western elaboration of the philosophy of original buddhism. We are radically opposed to naturalism, behaviourism and in general philosophies that reject the primordial foundational role of meaning and consciousness. This philosophy is distinct from metaphysics or natural science.
And yet we do not even begin to have a clear solid idea of what self- introspection is or how it can be achieved in order to effect a systematic phenomenism and philosophy of mind. That is, how does or can consciousness observe and know its own immanent process ? We can start by inquiring into belief. What beliefs do we hold ? And if so what does it mean for us to hold such a belief or rather what are the consciousness-contents which accompany or indeed constitute the state or act of believing something ?
Important figures: Brentano, Wundt (and other structuralists), Meinong, Lotze, Stumpf, Köhler, Is the psychology of early Buddhism gestalt ? It is this work the constitutes the true 'phenomenology' or what we call 'philosophical introspective psychology'.
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