• Is there an external material world ?
    ↪Tate
    ↪Joshs He's talking about S's idea that the will is the thing in itself. S eventually decided against that.

    N is here agreeing with Kant.     — Tate

    Deleuze argues that Schopenhauer’s pessimism is a result of thinking Will as representation and illusion.

    For Schopenhauer, “ the essence of the will puts us into an unlivable, untenable and deceptive situation.
    And this is easily explained: making the will a will to power in the sense of a "desire to dominate", philosophers see this desire as infmite; making power an object of representation they see the unreal character of a thing represented in this way; engaging the will to power in combat they see the contradiction in the will itself.

    Schopenhauer does not inaugurate a new philosophy of the will in any of these respects. On the contrary, his genius consists in drawing out the extreme consequ-ences of the old philosophy, in pushing the old philosophy as far as it can go.

    By making will the essence of the world Schopenhauer continues to understand the world as an illusion, an appearance, a representation (BGE ) Limiting the will is therefore not going to be enough for Schopenhauer. The will must be denied, it must deny itself.

    According to Nietzsche the philosophy of the will must replace the old metaphysics: it destroys and supersedes it. Nietzsche thinks that he produced the first philosophy of the will, that all the others were the final avatars of metaphysics.“
  • Is there an external material world ?
    Your mind is continually synthesising, combining and judging, and that activity is what constitutes your reality, or should we say, your being. The task of philosophy is understanding that, as Schopenhauer says in the opening paragraph of World as Will and Idea. — Wayfarer

    Now all you have to do is dump Schopenhauer’s metaphysical conception of the Will in favor of Nietzsche’s:

    “There are still harmless self-observers who believe in the existence of “immediate certainties,” such as “I think,” or the “I will” that was Schopenhauer's superstition: just as if knowledge had been given an object here to seize, stark naked, as a “thing-in-itself,” and no falsification took place from either the side of the subject or the side of the object.”(BGE)
  • Is there an external material world ?
    ↪Wayfarer
    This is why I believe that a thoroughly scientifically-aware form of idealism is the philosophy of the future. Materialism in its classical sense - the idea that the Universe consists of inanimate lumps of matter and undirected energy which somehow give rise to life - will be consigned to history. — Wayfarer

    This account implies a relational basis for the basic organizing processes of life, but it doesn’t necessarily support a subject-based and consciousness-based relationality. One could just as easily argue that outside of consciousness and subjectivity are fundamental relational processes that transcend materialism at the same time that they transcend subjective consciousness.
  • Postmodern Philosophy and Morality
    ↪Tom Storm
    ↪Joshs Silly speculative question, perhaps, but what do you think Nietzsche would have made of postmodernism and Derrida's reading of him? — Tom Storm

    I would like to think he would say ‘Finally someone understands me.’( maybe not so much with Derrida)
  • Postmodern Philosophy and Morality
    ↪Tate

    Plus he had a huge mustache. — Tate

    At least he didn’t have mutton chops.
  • Postmodern Philosophy and Morality
    ↪Tate
    ↪Joshs I checked in with some professors on reddit. In some ways the later N is opposed to Kant, but he never strayed from basic Kantian metaphysics, that is, we don't know the world as it is.

    You're putting it a little too strongly, in other words.     — Tate

    There are many Nietzsches. That is , there are many interpretive camps when it comes to his work. There are right and left Nietzscheans, realist and postmodern Nietzscheans. The Nietzsche I understand and find still
    radical and exciting is a postmodernist. The best interpreters of him I have found are Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida and Heidegger. Those who think he believes we ‘don’t know the world as it is’ are not postmodernists, they are neo-Kantians. They certainly have a right to their interpretation but I find it utterly conventional, missing everything that I find original in his work.

    For the Nietzsche I understand , there is no way the world is in itself apart from our creative interaction with it. The world isn’t an external reality, it is a ceaseless becoming.


    “Assuming that our world of desires and passions is the only thing “given” as real, that we cannot get down or up to any “reality” except the reality of our drives (since thinking is only a relation between these drives) – aren't we allowed to make the attempt and pose the question as to whether something like this “given” isn't enough to render the so-called mechanistic (and thus material) world comprehensible as well? I do not mean comprehensible as a deception, a “mere appearance,” a “representation” (in the sense of Berkeley and Schopenhauer); I mean it might allow us to understand the mechanistic world as belonging to the same plane of reality as our affects themselves –,

    … we must make the attempt to hypothetically posit the causality of the will as the only type of causality there is. “Will” can naturally have effects only on “will” – and not on “matter” (not on “nerves” for instance –). Enough: we must venture the hypothesis that everywhere “effects” are recognized, will is effecting will – and that every mechanistic event in which a force is active is really a force and effect of the will.

    – Assuming, finally, that we succeeded in explaining our entire life of drives as the organization and outgrowth of one basic form of will (namely, of the will to power, which is my claim); assuming we could trace all organic functions back to this will to power and find that it even solved the problem of procreation and nutrition (which is a single problem); then we will have earned the right to clearly designate all efficacious force as: will to power. The world seen from inside, the world determined and described with respect to its “intelligible character” – would be just this “will to power” and nothing else.”
    ( BGE)
  • Does anyone know the name of this concept?
    ↪Skalidris
    But if you're arguing about whether sciences are more "objective" than human sciences, and that the person says that nothing can be objective anyway, it's still the same context, it's an epistemological context in both cases. — Skalidris

    Immediate contexts can never be ‘epistemological’ because the latter refers to general categories of meaning, while the former involves the actual subjective and intersubjectively established sense of a generally defined meaning. In other words, the same epistemologically defined meaning can have a potentially unlimited number of senses, depending on the context of its use.
  • Postmodern Philosophy and Morality
    ↪Tate
    I missed that. Where does he shoot down Kant? — Tate


    More on that here:

    https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/book/nietzsches-engagements-with-kant-and-the-kantian-legacy-volume-i-nietzsche-kant-and-the-problem-of-metaphysics/introduction?from=search

    “The later Nietzsche’s uncompromising criticism of Kant places him in clear opposition not only to Schopenhauer, but also to the early ‘back to Kant’ movement.”
  • Postmodern Philosophy and Morality
    ↪Tate
    Opposition to Schopenhauer's pessimism, yes. — Tate

    Also opposition to his metaphysics, which Nietzsche thought was too close to Kantian idealism( his notion of will , for instance). Nietzsche considered himself to be making a radical break with metaphysics , and he thought Schopenhauer remained attached to it.
  • Does anyone know the name of this concept?
    ↪Skalidris
    they were choosing to ignore the specific contextual sense of the phrase in favor of a generic meaning
    — Joshs

    Mmmm I don't know, it doesn't seem context related to me. I believe anyone (who likes questioning things) could say "you're selfish" and mean "you're more selfish than average" in any context.     — Skalidris

    That IS the context of the utterance. When one means ‘you’re more selfish than average’, they have a specific contextual reason for making that statement at that time to that person. There is some currently relevant issue that prompts the insult.
  • Postmodern Philosophy and Morality
    ↪Tate
    It occurs to me I've never considered N to be anything but a philosophical[ (though not scientific) naturalist,
    — 180 Proof

    If by that, you mean he didn't incorporate supernatural causes into his philosophy, yes.

    For N, truth is always a metaphor, though, so he certainly wasn't a physicalist. His touchstone was Schopenhauer.     — Tate

    Yes, a touchstone, and also an adversary. Nietzsche’s starting point is in opposition to Schopenhauer.

    Nietzsche’s naturalism is not Darwinian. It consists of the tension between affective drives rather than causal
    relations among physical objects.
  • Does anyone know the name of this concept?
    ↪Skalidris
    Context-insensitive expressions are governed by linguistic rules that determine their contents (semantic values), which remain invariant in all contexts of utterance.

    Is that what you meant?     — Skalidris

    I didn’t mean they were following a rule, only that they were choosing to ignore the specific contextual sense of the phrase in favor of a generic meaning.
  • Does anyone know the name of this concept?
    ↪Skalidris
    Or maybe there is name to describe people who refuse to see things as non binary? — Skalidris

    Context insensitivity or context blindness? Or maybe literalism.
  • Is there an external material world ?
    How does what they are causally dependant on, or what they reduce to have any bearing on how fundamental or important they are? My wife is made of nothing but molecules. That doesn't have any bearing on how important she is. — Isaac

    Not just the magnitude of her importance to you, but the qualitative changes in her importance, how and whether she is relevant or irrelevant to you, is closely tied to the motivational model you understand her behavior through. You don’t just understand her at the reductive level of neural or molecular interaction in causal terms. You also understand her molar behavior in such terms(social and bodily influences). Objectively causal materialist models are rife in current social
    psychologically we literature, such as ‘cognitive bias’ and Jonathan Haidt’s empirical analysis of moral thought.

    There are of course alternatives to neo-Kantian approaches to motivation that don’t require a return to traditional metaphysics.

    For instance , if your wife develops depression do you recommend a cognitive therapist who will help her to change her ‘unrealistic’ thinking, a classic Freudian who would examine her adjustment to the ‘real world’, or would you choose a client-centered therapist who would encourage her potential to create new realities?
  • The meaning and significance of faith
    ↪unenlightened
    The more one looks at the way the language is used, the more one sees that faith has to do with an ethical life, and the evidence that supports faith is the way one lives oneself, not the way the world works. — unenlightened

    If we put this a bit differently and say that the evidence that supports faith is the way one lives oneself, not the way others live, we might then have to deal with what separates me from we , or binds us all together. This is of course a very sticky wicket. The old fashioned ethical approach begins with such concepts as free will and the autonomous individual, and the assumption that the me and the we are separated by a clear divide such that it is necessary to start from the way I live rather than the way we live. In its most extreme form, Objectivism , the ‘we’ can go to hell if it stands in the way of the me. Utilitarianism tries to strike a balance between me and we.

    More recent approaches , like Wittgensteinianism, phenomenology and postmodernism, assert that the we is already built into the me. From this vantage, evidence concerning how I live my life cannot be separated from evidence concerning how we live our lives. Self-interest is already an investment in the interests of others. Put differently, without an intimate understanding of the way the world of other people works, I will fail to live an ethical life, since that ethics depends on my insightful relations with others rather than empty rules.
  • The meaning and significance of faith
    ↪Tom Storm

    In cults people often radiate happiness as a consequence of 'knowing' that god's will is being fulfilled and that they are part of a system of transcendent meaning that will deliver a great destiny and reward. The world they know is exactly as it is meant to be, all has been provided for. I suppose my overarching point is that perhaps not all optimism is worth having. — Tom Storm

    A central characteristic of the psychology of cults is an intense need for a sense of belonging. This need finds its satisfaction in a delicately constructed and very vulnerable faith, so the happiness radiated by cult members comes at a great cost. It requires enormous energy keeping at bay all forces that might risk bursting the bubble of faith so tenuously held together by lock-step thinking. This means making the outside world the enemy. I got to know the members of three cults, the Moonies , Yogananda , and Kerista, based in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, and saw first hand how this need manifested itself.
  • The meaning and significance of faith
    ↪Moses
    The bible is radical in that it preaches basically the opposite message of a lot of ancient literature and I just have no idea where these ideas came from. the bible humbles kings and boosts the oppressed. I don't know why anyone in antiquity would choose to boost the poor and diseased when it's more natural and widespread to think of them as low. the hebrew bible affirms the dignity of the disabled (exodus 4:10) in a way that virtually no one else does. — Moses

    Have you read any of what Nietzsche proposes concerning this ‘slave’ morality?
  • The meaning and significance of faith
    ↪DingoJones
    That doesnt really make sense. Its like saying “the reason for me walking to the store is reason itself”.
    You gave a non-answer to my question.     — DingoJones

    You asked what is the value of faith. I believe that faith and value are inextricable. Faith in its most fundamental form is an expectation, a hope, an anticipation, a question which assumes a certain kind of answer, a space of possibilities to be realized. Faith can be rewarded or disappointed. When we value, we are also asking a question that expects a certain kind of answer. A value can be violated or confirmed. So faith is intrinsic to valuation. What is the value of having a particular faith? What is the value of having a particular value? These seem to be the same questions to me.
  • The meaning and significance of faith
    ↪Moses
    f we can observe it and there are plenty of witnesses then we could still doubt, but we'd be into some kind of cartesian doubt where we doubt our senses or our own perceptions. faith plays a role in either. — Moses

    Im not talking about rational doubt , which Cartesian doubt is referring to, but pragmatic faith and doubt , which is a very different thing. The perceptual world we experience changes every moment. We use a kind of pragmatic perceptual faith to create and then recognize a certain constancy and stability within what is actually a turbulent flux. This works more or less , but we are also using the same sort of pragmatic faith to assume that our social world, our friends and acquaintances, will behavior in ways that are recognizably predictable and intelligible to us. This is a shakier proposition, which is why on a day to day basis we experience stress , anxiety and disappointment as our faith in others is confounded. This pragmatic anticipatory faith is different from truth-falsity factuality that you’re taking about, The latter is a narrow and artificially worked up practice, whereas the former is how we live most of our lives.
  • The meaning and significance of faith
    ↪Moses
    I see faith as a necessary part of epistemology. lets say we're trying to determine if a historical event happened in antiquity so we have no personal witnesses but we have the bible and a few tablets from ancient rulers indicating a conflict. is that enough to believe? when you make that jump into belief that the event happened? — Moses

    Let’s say there are plenty of personal witnesses and we’re talking about something all of us can observe at the same time. Is a kind of faith not also operative here ?
  • The meaning and significance of faith
    ↪DingoJones
    Maybe they are wrong though…what is the value of faith? — DingoJones

    The value of faith is value itself. Logic, empiricism and reason depend on a foundation of values, which are the essence of faith.
  • The meaning and significance of faith
    ↪Moses
    I'm not explicitly talking about God. The new atheists may or may not be talking about God when they denigrate the role of faith. The topic of faith is a matter of epistemology; it doesn't necessarily relate to God. — Moses

    There is such a thing as faith in epistemology, a faith that the new atheists don’t recognize in themselves.
  • The meaning and significance of faith
    ↪Moses
    Faith is a part of everyday life outside of the Judeo-Christian tradition. It's unavoidable. Faith is basically belief without "adequate" evidence or proof, and it's a necessary component of basic, everyday life. We simply don't have the time or energy to follow up on all the information that we take in over the course of a day or a week. — Moses

    Yes, and I would go even further. Our lives are a mess. All of us. I dont mean this to sound as bad as it does. What I mean is that whatever we have accomplished in our past, we wake up in the morning and have to start from scratch. Logic and information are a delicate house of cards resting on the foundation of a human psyche that struggles day to day with continually shifting moods , now of confidence, now of trepidation and doubt, now of terror , now of anxiety, now of loss. No kind of
    packaged logic, proof or information will enable us to avoid these vicissitudes of mood. Each moment we are alive we put forward a faith, an expectation of some kind that the next moment will either reward or destroy. I arrange all my food containers at a slight angle on my shelves? Why do I do this? For the same reason I consider certain number combinations ‘good’ and others ‘bad’. It is a kind of faith, even in the absence of religious belief or overt superstition.
  • The Metaphysics of Materialism
    ↪Mww
    don’t think “underlying basic assumptions”, being merely suppositions, count as metaphysics.

    I’ll wait for something to actually qualify as an absolute pre-supposition, which a metaphysics of anything, would surely demand.     — Mww

    Husserl , Rorty and Heidegger wrote a fair bit on absolute presuppositions underlying the sciences prior to the 20th century, including res extensia as the notion of a self-identical object with intrinsic content ,
    attributes and properties persisting in time. The natural is thus thought of as restricted to such objects and their measurable movements in a mathematizable space
  • Cognitive bias: tool for critical thinking or ego trap?
    ↪ArielAssante
    ↪Skalidris

    How can we ever be sure that the decision we’re making isn’t biased? Biases are unconscious…
    — Skalidris

    Work to make the unconscious conscious. The few who attempt to do so find it is a long, painful process.     — ArielAssante

    And after all that work they eventually find that what they end up with is a conscious bias.
  • What is essential to being a human being?
    ↪Banno
    get to decide which one is right? Or is it that whichever one I choose is right (Relativism)? Or that it doesn't matter whch one I chose?

    So you agree with me that philosophy is not of much help in deciding between the various systems of ethics, that all it can do is set out the relationships between them. but you add that I get to choose whichever I prefer?

    What of my further point, that it's not down to me alone, but to us?     — Banno

    Whichever one you choose must earn and re-earn that privilege by validating its usefulness repeatedly in your relationships with others. Philosophy is vital to this endeavor , since a personal philosophy or worldview is what is being decided on. Worldview, personal philosophy, ethical system, these are all synonymous, so it makes no sense to say that a system of
    ethics we prefer doesnt help decide between various systems of ethics.


    Is that ‘relativism’ becuase its relative to your construal? I guess so, although you are arriving at the determination of its usefulness with the aid of results from many social interactions. Just because the way those interactions shape you is not identical to the way they shape others doesn’t mean this ‘relativism’ walls you off from others. It just means that agreed on ethics must be negotiated among individuals with somewhat differing vantages, while each ethical perspective must itself be open to constant test and adjustment as a result of social experience.

    So its down to ‘us’, but an ‘us’ which must take into account the vantages of its participants rather than attempting to swallow them up in a group anonymity.
  • What is essential to being a human being?
    ↪Banno
    Which one is the ‘system of ethics’? — Banno

    Whichever one makes the most sense to you. You already have a system of ethics you prefer, which I would guess matches up with something between between Kant and Marx.
  • What is essential to being a human being?
    ↪Banno
    How would that work? — Banno

    Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Kant , Hegel, etc:

    Each of these implies an original approach to ethics.
  • What is essential to being a human being?
    You must have noticed by now that philosophy is not of much help in deciding between the various systems of ethics. All it can do is set out the relationships between them. — Banno

    I though a philosophy WAS a ‘system of ethics’.
  • The Metaphysics of Materialism
    ↪Wayfarer


    It used to be thought of as matter, but then e=mc2 was discovered, along with electromagnetic fields (not to mention "the observer problem"). But that all happened after 1905 so it's out-of-bounds for this thread. — Wayfarer

    Not necessarily.

    “In Einstein's first 1905 paper on E = mc2, he treated m as what would now be called the rest mass,[5] and it has been noted that in his later years he did not like the idea of "relativistic mass".”(wiki )
  • Cognitive bias: tool for critical thinking or ego trap?
    ↪Tom Storm
    What we have a great deal
    of difficulty doing is recognizing that a fact only makes the sense it does within a particular account, and people from different backgrounds and histories use different accounts to interpret facts.
    — Joshs

    Totally agree. But are there not also some dishonest people involved, who do know different to what they profess?     — Tom Storm

    We generally lie when we think our real motives and justifications will not be understood the way we mean them, in their full context , or when we believe the ideas we are operating from will not be properly understood. In these cases our dishonestly is not the root of the problem. It is only a symptom of , and our attempt to ameliorate the effects of, a prior breakdown in mutual understanding.
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    ↪Number2018
    Any apparent presence, full givenness, or definite meaning has become impossible. How can this project become "a way of understanding the basis of all methods"? — Number2018

    In the same way that deconstruction reveals the basis of all idealisms and empiricisms in the movement of differance.
  • What is essential to being a human being?
    ↪180 Proof
    Why would anyone care what a Nazi believes defines "human being"? :shade: — 180 Proof

    Heidegger got his model of animal functioning from Jakob von Uexküll, a pioneer in biosemiotics.
  • What is essential to being a human being?
    ↪Xtrix
    I take the view that the defining characteristic is language. At least that appears the most obvious, in that non-human primates and other animals don't have it.

    I think Heidegger et al. would disagree with this. In his view, human being is an openness, or a "clearing." I'm sympathetic to this view as well.     — Xtrix

    Heidegger’s questionable take on the difference between Dasein and animals:

    “The specific manner in which man is we shall call comportment and the specific manner in which the animal is we shall call behaviour.

    An animal can only behave but can never apprehend something as something-which is not to deny that the animal sees or even perceives. Yet in a fundamental sense the animal does not have perception.”

    “Now if something resembling a surrounding environment is open for the animal and its behaviour, we must now ask whether it is possible to clarify this any further. Instinctual and subservient capability for ... , the totality of its self-absorbed capability, is an interrelated drivenness of the instinctual drives which encircles the animal. It does so in such a way that it is precisely this encirclement which makes possible the behaviour in which the animal is related to other things.

    But these encircling rings belonging to the animals, within which their contextual behaviour and instinctual activity moves, are not simply laid down alongside or in between one another but rather intersect with one another. The wood worm, for example, which bores into the bark of the oak tree is encircled by its own specific ring. But the woodworm itself, and that means together with this encircling ring of its own, finds itself in turn within the ring encircling the woodpecker as it looks for the worm. And this woodpecker finds itself in all this within the ring encircling the squirrel which startles it as it works. Now this whole context of openness within the rings of captivation encircling the animal realm is not merely characterized by an enormous wealth of contents and relations which we can hardly imagine, but in all of this it is still fundamentally different from the manifestness of beings as encountered in the world -forming Dasein of man.”
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    ↪Janus


    Here’s a snippet from his early 20’s:

    As for madness, Jackie sometimes felt he was on the verge of succumbing to it as he started his second year in khâgne. Discipline in the boarding school weighed on him even more heavily than it had the previous year. The cold, the lack of hygiene, the horrible food, and the absence of any privacy had become intolerable. Some evenings he fell into a crying jag and was unable to work or even talk to his friends. Only his ever-more intense friendship with Michel Monory enabled him to keep going. Working together in the thurne de musique – Michel had special permission to keep the key to it –, they wrote sketches for short stories and poems that they nervously submitted to each other. But as the weeks went by, Jackie complained more and more of a ‘malady’ as serious as it was ill defined. He was constantly on the edge of a nervous collapse: he suffered from insomnia, loss of appetite, and frequent nausea. In December 1950, Derrida’s morale had sunk to a new low. For reasons that remain unclear, he did not go back home for the Christmas vacation, but remained alone in Paris – probably at the home of his uncle, since the boarding school was closed. In prey to a vague attack of melancholia, he moped around far from his friends. In a letter to Michel, the beginning of which has unfortunately been lost, Jackie tried to explain his confused feelings. For some time, he had felt as if he were going around ‘in regions too difficult, if not to explore, at least to show even to one’s dearest friend’. The lack of any letter from Michel for several days did not help matters. More depressed than ever, Jackie may have contemplated suicide.”

    And at age 29:

    “The more the months went by, the less did Derrida attempt to conceal his disenchantment. Genette was pleased to have set up ‘a nice little team’ with him but realized that his former fellow student considered the post as a second best. Derrida brooded over his failure to get the Sorbonne job as if he were being persecuted. Initially, his malaise expressed itself in a period of hypochondria. Every day, he discovered new and alarming symptoms. He feared cancer or some other deadly illness, and the various doctors whom he consulted did not manage to allay his anxieties. During the third term, his depression became evident – his ‘big depression’, he later called it, since he would never experience one so serious. When Derrida arrived in Le Mans, he was unwilling to confess the depth of his disappointment. And all at once, he collapsed under his despair. He had suffered for years before passing the exam to Normale Sup, then the agrégation. He had put up with twenty-seven months of military service, waiting for the day when life would finally open up before him. All this effort, just to end up here, standing in front of pupils who did not understand what he was telling them, with colleagues who could talk about nothing but holidays and sport! All this, to wear himself out preparing his lessons and marking boring schoolwork! For months, he had not managed to work on anything personal. He no longer felt up to staying in touch with his closest friends. In conditions like this, how would he ever manage to finish off a thesis?
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    ↪Janus
    ↪Joshs Right, I don't deny that others find him philosophically interesting, and perhaps if I put the requisite effort in I might discover more there than I thought. It just doesn't seem likely to me at this stage, but I do allow for a change of attitude — Janus

    I’m reading his biography right now, and I’m starting to think that his extremely neurotic and depressive personality entered into his writing in the form of endless asides, apologies, digressions and ass coverings , and this is a large part of what makes it so tortuous to read him. Compare his style to early Heidegger, who on the one hand shares many ideas with Derrida and is difficult for many to read, but so much more straightforwardly methodical and systematic in Being and Time than anything that Derrida has ever written.
  • The Space of Reasons
    ↪Janus
    As 'rational' people, we ought to regard the warranted claims of others and justify our own.
    — igjugarjuk

    But this only works in contexts, the empirical or the logical, where it is decidable just what being warranted or justified consists in, For me, philosophy is a matter of ideas and insights, not warranted or justifiable claims and propositions.     — Janus
    :up:
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    ↪Janus
    I think reading Derrida can be enjoyed if it is read as a species of arcane literature. where it is his imaginative gymnastics that are being admired, but I don't take it seriously as philosophy. — Janus

    Just be careful not to universalize your sentiments. It’s fine that FOR YOU he is only enjoyable as arcane literature, and YOU can’t take him seriously as philosophy, but there are many scholars inside and outside of philosophy who consider his work to be a prime example of substantive and serious philosophy. I am one of them.
  • The Space of Reasons
    ↪igjugarjuk
    If I say that I saw a cat on the sidewalk last night, then I'm committed to the claim that I saw an animal on the sidewalk last night. That's a fairly stable rule — igjugarjuk

    But what of the ‘sense’ of this rule? There is never just what is the case, a propositional truth structure. There is a way in which it is the case , a way in which it is relevant to me right now at this very moment, a commitment to a certain comportment toward the utterance. Where is the ‘how’ of this ‘what’? Are they being kept artificially separate from each other? Why did I say I saw the cat, what made it important to me to communicate this and what response am I looking for? These questions are not separate from the fact of the matter, they define the sense of this fact. I can repeat the statement that I saw a cat on the sidewalk last night, and each repetition may offer a whole new sense, a new emphasis , a new intention, a new kind of commitment, all bound up within the ‘same’ claim.
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    ↪180 Proof


    ↪Moliere Derrida's goal/s with "deconstruction" is one thing, the implications and applicability of what he proposes are quite another thing; and it's the self-refuting nature of the latter – in effect, reducing 'all' truth-making discourses to 'nothing but' tendentious rhetoric – which many critics like me take issue with. A semiotic sleight-of-mind perfomative contradiction confidence trick "that opens up space for"...??? — 180 Proof

    The term ‘self-refuting’ tips me off to the root of the issue here, which is less about Derrida in particular than about every one of the numerous philosophical discourses thar have appeared over the past 100 year which take their leave from Nietzsche’s
    critique of truth.
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