I'd like to point out that I'm not necessarily calling for the specifically Spinozan discourse here, but I have been drawn to some of these issues by the kind of philosophy that I'm reading at the minute.

I accept that we won't be able to abstract the philosophy from the scientific or anecdotal methodologies entirely, but I think it is worth trying to create a type of philosophy that is not reliant on another type of discourse for its justification - just as those other discourses need not rely on philosophy to mediate between them.

I'm not frightened by the idea of metaphysics and I don't think that it has to mean woolly or wishful thinking.

Let me venture an example of the kind of thing I'm getting at here.

Imagine looking in the mirror - should be very easy, my guess is that you do it every day (probably less than a vain creature like me, but still). When you look in the mirror, what do you see? There are lots of possible answers to that question, which would require a variety of different modes of expression. You might say that you see yourself as you are at that moment, or you might focus on particular features of your reflection (depending on the activity you're in the process of undertaking), or possibly you focus on your sense of your image as it has developed (over days, months or perhaps years). The more prosaic amongst us might possibly consider the biological, chemical or even physical grounding of those impressions. It doesn't matter, the point is that there are multiple different ways of looking at oneself in the mirror. Science, art, religion, etc. - these are concerned with the ways of looking. What I'm wondering is if philosophy, as third discourse, shouldn't be concerned with the act of looking itself, the singular unity of those multiple moments.

Edelman, Tononi and Damasio, three respected neuroscientists, agree with Ricoueur that each human has a unique perspective of awareness by virtue of specific embodiment. Ricoeur's second objection to the "third discourse" has to do with reductionism as looking at development backwards, as observing development from a higher level of complexity and attempting to describe what is happening on a lower level.

The problem of seeing a disconnect between the specific and the general, IMHO, appears in the literature of neuroscience as a monkey wrench thrown into the machinery of discovering a common matter to mind trajectory, which seems to be the holy grail of scientists who dare comment on consciousness.
Uniqueness from embodiment is a matter of position in time and space. I cannot inhabit your body. Still, I cannot see how a "privileged" position could yield an awareness that no other human, living or dead, has ever experienced. Doesn't our knowledge entail agreement on generals comprised of specifics? On what is common? Disagreement won't contribute to splicing the atom or the gene.

Rather, we provide individuated responses to a set of problems posed by the sunset, responses that we develop through processes rather than by stumbling across the answer lying in wait.

How would we determine this set of problems that is any different than what is conventional philosophical methodology?

How would you mesh individuated responses through processes?

Process begins with an agreed upon set of assumptions and an agreed upon narrow perspective.

I'm not seeing anything different than conventional philosophy here. What am I missing?

We don't "determine" them, they're problems - that's exactly the point. We don't access problems as such, we respond to them.

Really? Perhaps before language developed, but I can't think of anything describable that doesn't involve language. An emotive response is certainly possible, but how does one share that without the use of language?

I've had experiences with others where no words were exchanged, and there was a knowing of shared understanding, but those are few and far between. Moreover, there was no after-the-fact discussion, it was just "in the moment".

I'll confess, I haven't the foggiest how one would ever explore this as a third discourse, except to say that something happened with no further explanation.

I firmly believe that there is much beyond philosophy and language that we can experience and understand, I just don't see a way to talk about it without destroying it.