Yes, some people are comfortable with such breathy, substance-free rhetoric that amounts to little more than "Boo reductionism!" ("Boo materialism!" "Boo scientism!) — SophistiCat
In fact that's actually what knowledge is I think, abstracting away from the world of particulars, to be able to make more general predictions.... or put in another way, we loose information at the level of detail, to gain knowledge on larger scales, i.e. to have a more holistic view. — ChatteringMonkey
And why something is more important than other things is exactly because of our social constructs in our mind like nations etc. that simply aren't reduced to atom level interaction. — ssu
The science of sociology has evolved more or less self-consciously to fill this niche, which is what I'm focusing on now.
Since the winter I've covered Marx, Weber, Mead, Habermas. I have some more purely cultural works lined up (Dewey, Habermas' political stuff), then I'm going to move on to sociology of linguistics and symbols (Saussure, Cassirer). — Pantagruel
Some philosophers are afraid of 'spirit' as too squishy. They wan't to construct an atemporal method for critical thinking, and they fend off insights that suggest the impossibility of such a project .
Others are keen on addressing spirit but angsty about how historical it seems to be. For them the method is a forgotten treasure, not a work still and perhaps endlessly in progress (both spirit and the talk of spirit, which is part of spirit.) — path
Also, Saussure is awesome. Culler's little book on him is great. — path
Yes, I agree, it is almost as if a big part of the battle is internal. If I didn't know better, I'd swear it was the 'little ego' trying to stave off the larger self..... — Pantagruel
, such as astronomers deciding pluto is not a planet — ernestm
The fundamental error of reductionism is to believe that that 'small things' (e.g. atoms) always and totally determine big things (e.g. human beings), in a one-way street. But since "to all action a reaction", it stands to reason that, IF the small can have an effect on the big, then the big can have an effect on the small...
an hour ago — Olivier5
I went from Derrida to Saussure, and so much that I like in Derrida was already there in Saussure, albeit more ambivalently. The system of differences without positive elements is pretty mind-blowing, and it helped me see Wittgenstein in a new way — path
I think Saussure's idea of negative differences between concepts and their absence of clear-cut ontological value is fundamental to understand natural languages. Concepts are relational, the meaning is at the level of the network between concepts more so than inside each concept taken in isolation. — Olivier5
In a less naive form of materialism, Descartes dualism should be reformed into the fundamental duality or ying-yang relationship between matter and information (understood as the infinite shapes and forms that matter can take and 'support'), two sides of the same coin. — Olivier5
More to system thinking and structuralism. — Olivier5
Have you read Laszlo? — Pantagruel
So the idea that mind is an epiphenomenon contradicts the laws of physics. — Olivier5
The fundamental error of reductionism is to believe that that 'small things' (e.g. atoms) always and totally determine big things (e.g. human beings), in a one-way street. But since "to all action a reaction", it stands to reason that, IF the small can have an effect on the big, then the big can have an effect on the small... — Olivier5
If A has causal efficacy, why can’t something from level A affect something from level B?You can maintain that A is in some sense reducible to B without denying the reality and causal efficacy of A. — SophistiCat
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