Aristotle wrote the book on humor in the Poetics : contrasting Tragedy with Comedy. Everything since has been footnotes to Aristotle. In his discussion of rhythm & meter he even anticipated the modern comedian's summary : "it's all in the timing". But the basic distinction between Tragedy & Comedy is the attitude of the observer : when a slap-stick Marx Brother gets poked in the eye, his tragedy is my comedy. :cool:So far, this book is the only one that I've read on the subject, I do believe that there are others as well. — IvoryBlackBishop
I've yet to see anything akin to a "grand unified theory" or humor, or how humor relates to art and aesthetics — IvoryBlackBishop
↪DingoJones ha, you are very perceptive, although I said indication, not reason. Anyway, a rather good reason for philosophy being dead is the complete lack of music in works of philosophy, now this is a very good reason, indeed. Humour, maybe we can do without, but music, as well as poetry, we cannot. — Pussycat
Well, I didn't quote you as saying “reason” — DingoJones
Those things you mentioned may be missing from philosophy, but wouldnt that mean philosophy never lived at all rather died? — DingoJones
Also, there is no reason philosophy cannot be applied to those things is there? So are you talking about the limits philosophy, or philosophers? — DingoJones
A sort of mirror image of beauty, I hold, is drama, by which I mean an umbrella category encompassing both comedy and tragedy. The common factor to comedy and tragedy, and what I hold makes drama like a mirror image of beauty, is that while beauty is about experiences of something seeming in some way right, comedy and tragedy are both experiences of something seeming in some way wrong. The distinguishing difference between comedy and tragedy is how they approach that wrongness: comedy approaches it frivolously, with levity, making light of whatever is wrong; while tragedy approaches it seriously, with gravity, taking the wrong thing to be a weighty matter. This wrongness can be of either a descriptive or prescriptive kind, just like the rightness of beauty can be. I think this is best illustrated in the wide varieties of comedy, ranging from slapstick (where people experiencing physical violence is treated lightly instead of as a matter of grievous injury) and roasts or other jokes explicitly at someone's expense (that are treated as an acceptable transgressions of social norms), which are both making light of prescriptively bad things; to jokes that hinge on setting up and then subverting expectations (where something that was thought to true turns out to be false), including postmodern comedy that violates medium conventions such as breaking the fourth wall, and even things like puns where the wrongness is just the use of the wrong word in place of the expected one. All comedy hinges on something being, in some way or another, wrong, and yet treated as not a big deal. Tragedy, on the other hand, depicts something being in some way wrong, and makes a big deal out of it being wrong. Both of them are, for that wrongness that they depend on, in some way un-beautiful. Yet both can nevertheless be, in the end, beautiful in their own way. Comedy, in making light of bad things, shows them as not so bad, and so correspondingly good, at least relatively speaking, and thereby beautiful in a way. And tragedy, in treating bad things as weighty matters, can speak hard truths about bad experiences that people can really have, and so, for that truth, also be beautiful in a way. — The Codex Quaerentis: On Rhetoric and the Arts
For many, especially the young, discovering a new meaning in the midst of the fallen world is thrilling. And social-justice ideology does everything a religion should. It offers an account of the whole: that human life and society and any kind of truth must be seen entirely as a function of social power structures, in which various groups have spent all of human existence oppressing other groups. And it provides a set of practices to resist and reverse this interlocking web of oppression — from regulating the workplace and policing the classroom to checking your own sin and even seeking to control language itself. I think of non-PC gaffes as the equivalent of old swear words. Like the puritans who were agape when someone said “goddamn,” the new faithful are scandalized when someone says something “problematic.” Another commonality of the zealot then and now: humorlessness. — PuerAzaelis
Despite claims of the contrary, "woke" derives at least half from the Frankfurt school, of Marxist basis. Some believe that Neo-Marxism is antithetical to religion, especially Christianity; it may be so, but for me Neo-Marxism is the polluted sea of modernity where the river of Christianity leads to, one is the conclusion of the other. Victimism and disingenuity is a core tenet of both. — Lionino
but I’m not sure what it would mean to call Marxism and its progeny disingenuous. — Joshs
Its philosophical contributions have been acknowledged by many 20th and 21st century schools of philosophy — Joshs
Karl Marx (1818–1883) is often treated as a revolutionary, an activist rather than a philosopher — SEP
The only ones rejecting the philosophy in toto are conservatives , who generally haven’t ventured past Kant in their thinking — Joshs
Karl Marx (1818–1883) is often treated as a revolutionary, an activist rather than a philosopher
— SEP — Lionino
Like all popular movements, conservatism has its philosophy deniers, but I’m not sure what it would mean to call conservatives philosophy deniers. — Lionino
I would call him someone who doesn’t understand philosophy. This was true of Stephen Hawking as well, but not Heisenberg or Bohr.I would not call NDT a conservative — Lionino
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