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On October 03 2013 09:28 sam!zdat wrote:
neatly encapsulating the other half of what is wrong with the academy today
scholastic pretension and PC groupthink. what has sam gotten himself into. should have become a busyness man
no sam, you need to stay in there and make useful contributions so students can have something to look forward to! I think eventually society will move beyond this ugly postmodern phase (whatever that even means), and then it will hopefully go back to meaningful, rational arguments that are meant to be understood cleanly and clearly, like a math text. There are some philosophers today who actually value being understood and speaking clearly. This is why I love coming here to see how you and frogrubdown and others really care about clarity. I hope you can make something useful out of your profession.
If you went into business I think you'd be depressed  . They would force you to make lots of money and probably in not very honest ways. Instead you'd probably be better off becoming an author or something
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This just in. Apparently sam makes sense some of the time. TL public is shocked. More at 10
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i make sense all the time. but it's nothing at all like math. fuck you radscorpion
+ Show Spoiler +
edit: but yes. it's worth it and i believe in what i'm doing (and i wouldn't be doing it otherwise because lemme tell you i'm not getting rich). but I'm going to bitch about my shitty shitty readings to you guys because you are my support group
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
d'aww moment. i'm in ur support group too~
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Did someone say math texts? :o
http://www.math.tohoku.ac.jp/~kuroki/Sokal/bricmont/node4.html
Have fun making sense out of that radscorpion.
EDIT - As much as I hate to admit it, I think Sokal was on to something when he wrote his work. Even though I disliked most of postmodernism greatly, especially French postmodernism, I hate most of the critics. Even if postmodernism was not a sham, I know they would still be criticizing it.
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I have a hardcover version of this on my shelf:
![[image loading]](http://img2.imagesbn.com/p/9780199239207_p0_v1_s260x420.JPG)
should find some way to cite it in a critique of garrett stewart. not this book i mean the actual hoax. we need to reclaim this text as a landmark of postmodern criticism. who cares what sokal's intent was. death of the author amirite??
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Are you drunk by any chance sam? :D
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
sokal's point was pretty legit. using complicated but fairly irrelevant references to technical stuff to gain academic credence shows that your field's own substantive research isn't working its own weight. i'm pretty sure all the pomo people don't actually give a fuck abotu the world and just want to sound deep so they can publish stuff.
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On October 03 2013 12:42 sam!zdat wrote:
edit: but yes. it's worth it and i believe in what i'm doing (and i wouldn't be doing it otherwise because lemme tell you i'm not getting rich). but I'm going to bitch about my shitty shitty readings to you guys because you are my support group
Glad I could be considered part of the support group. Remember, you have to keep doing it otherwise packrat might continue to be uninformed 
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![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/ZM7TPlr.jpg)
Already finished now, though partially because I stopped thinking super-carefully about the arguments after his reconstruction of Berkeley's master argument.
The book consists of a series of case studies in which philosophers brush up against contradiction due to approaching certain "limits", most interestingly the limits of expressibility. To shed the metaphor, a philosopher might "approach the limits of expressibility" by trying to demarcate the boundary between sense and nonsense (as in Wittgenstein) or between objects that are conceived of and objects that aren't conceived of (Berkeley). The connection between the topics discussed doesn't typically get beyond the level of metaphor, with "limits" referring variously to boundaries between certain concepts or to what happens after you repeat an operation infinitely many times.
The contradiction generally involves the demonstration that we cannot do something we clearly can do, such as conceive of objects not being conceived by anyone, or refer to the set of all ordinals (or sets), or, in Frege's case, say anything at all about concepts. Rather than taking such demonstrations as reductios of the views that generate them, Priest treats them as evidence for his Dialetheism, the view that there are true contradictions.
Overall the cases are significantly less unified than Priest makes out, being mostly a ragtag collection of paradox-ish things Priest finds cool. And unless you come to the book without any strong views on the matters, it's unlikely he'll convince you of any true contradictions. But it's a fun, mind-melting, guided tour of a lot of interesting philosophy/mathematics and Priest frequently makes much better, clearer versions of a philosopher's argument than that philosopher himself.
edit: I'll add that the Derrida section is an absolute mess, but I don't blame Priest for that.
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On October 03 2013 12:58 Shiragaku wrote:
Are you drunk by any chance sam? :D
not yet but i'm working on it
On October 03 2013 13:03 oneofthem wrote:
sokal's point was pretty legit. using complicated but fairly irrelevant references to technical stuff to gain academic credence shows that your field's own substantive research isn't working its own weight. i'm pretty sure all the pomo people don't actually give a fuck abotu the world and just want to sound deep so they can publish stuff.
yep. they say so explicitly. il n'y a pas de hors-texte. fuck them. the point is for "someone to say something about something" as ricoeur puts it, although it's kinda sad that he had to even say it in the first place
On October 03 2013 13:12 packrat386 wrote:Show nested quote +On October 03 2013 12:42 sam!zdat wrote:
edit: but yes. it's worth it and i believe in what i'm doing (and i wouldn't be doing it otherwise because lemme tell you i'm not getting rich). but I'm going to bitch about my shitty shitty readings to you guys because you are my support group Glad I could be considered part of the support group. Remember, you have to keep doing it otherwise packrat might continue to be uninformed
i just hate to see you wallow in ignorance <3
that book looks very interesting froggy. does he talk about hegel
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Priest is all about Hegel. Well, he considers Hegel almost completely incomprehensible, but Hegel comes out as just about the only philosopher in the book that Priest thinks understood the force of the arguments for contradictions.
He also wrote a fairly humorous article for a special joke issue of Mind in large part concerning Hegel:
Worlds Apart
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hegel is incomprehensible in exactly the same way that the world is incomprehensible. which makes him extremely useful
I will definitely have to check that out.
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Good luck sam, happy to be here for you :p
And don't feel bad about me, at least I can read whatever I want...
Edit : people who wish philosophy/litterature were like maths remind me of that maths teacher who told me of that number theory book "it reads like a novel". Yeah, I'll let you guess what I think...
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+ Show Spoiler +On September 20 2013 16:42 TOCHMY wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On August 26 2013 23:38 TOCHMY wrote:Finished: ![[image loading]](http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1178660247l/818123.jpg) I don't know what to say about this book... I guess I'm not really that satisfied by short stories. Some were good, some were weird and some were a waste of time. But regardless of how good they were, they didn't satisfy me. Still trudging through: ![[image loading]](http://anyiko.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/gabriel-garcia-marquez-one-hundred-years-of-solitude-04.jpg) It's going really really slow for me with this one. I just can't seem to find motivation to keep reading it. Partly because it's hard for me to comprehend what's happening sometimes, and partly because stuff is happening all over the place, much of which isn't that interesting to be honest. I know this book's been praised alot in this thread. I guess I'm one of those less erudite people in this thread. Just arrived: ![[image loading]](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_RSub0VjLWU8/TOJA8Hf53tI/AAAAAAAABKo/f50i99I2H9Q/s320/amsterdam.jpg) ![[image loading]](http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1343059311l/13578175.jpg) ![[image loading]](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kHAI3kSeA2g/T37WZgx7lmI/AAAAAAAAFEU/K0EzME1t0qA/s400/The+Witcher+USA.jpg) I started The Last Wish today and it looks really promising! Best part is that I have a clear understanding of how the various monsters in the book looks like, since I played the game. Always useful! Finished: ![[image loading]](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/c/c5/Elantris_cover.jpg/200px-Elantris_cover.jpg) I have yet to read a book by Brandon Sanderson that I didn't like. While Elantris is the book I've enjoyed least by him, it was still great. His character development skills is on another level. ![[image loading]](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_4f7SgzBsUIc/TSWglXIFFpI/AAAAAAAAAFs/yo-zkzakmvg/s400/amsterdam.jpg) I got recommended this book by an english teacher that comes to my work from time to time. His favourite author is Ian McEwan and he recommended me Amsterdam and Enduring Love. Amsterdam was... okay I guess. The main character is dead from page 1 and I didn't feel any kind of connection to the other characters in the book. I don't know really. The plot was okayish but the execution could be better. Currently reading: ![[image loading]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51wSPtNU0iL._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA300_SH20_OU01_.jpg) Book 2 about Geralt the witcher. I love these books! Up next: ![[image loading]](http://functionalnerds.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/The-Emperors-Soul.jpg) Brandon Sanderson <3 Just ordered: + Show Spoiler +
Finished:
I can recommend these books to anyone who likes fantasy. I urge anyone who's played the games to read these books. They are absolutely amazing and I can't wait for the rest of the series to be translated. I'm currently halfway throught the third book (actually the second in the series, but the third translated book about The Witcher) Times of Contempt.
Short, easy to read, distinct character development. I liked The Emperor's Soul, but it's not my favourite Sanderson.
Currently Reading:
![[image loading]](http://img1.imagesbn.com/p/9780316219136_p0_v1_s260x420.JPG)
Geralt <3
Up Next:
![[image loading]](http://www.adlibris.com/images/1439283/when-giants-walked-the-earth-a-biography-of-led-zeppelin.jpg)
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On October 03 2013 16:02 corumjhaelen wrote:
Good luck sam, happy to be here for you :p
And don't feel bad about me, at least I can read whatever I want...
Edit : people who wish philosophy/litterature were like maths remind me of that maths teacher who told me of that number theory book "it reads like a novel". Yeah, I'll let you guess what I think...
Prima facie, saying philosophy should be like math is quite different from saying literature should. But in either case, a lot hinges on how the two are supposed to be like each other. If "like math" means taking place in an artificial language with explicitly defined axioms, then obviously philosophy needn't always be "like math."
But "like math" could also mean that attempts are made to make your terms intelligible to outsiders, that each step of the argument is easily identifiable, and that it's always obvious why one thing is taken to follow from a different thing. I see no reason why philosophy shouldn't strive to be like math in this sense, except for philosophy that has literary pretensions. But I've never seen a good argument for why a given claim is best argued for in a literary format, and even if you can do such things well the talent is not as easily teachable as the more "math like" philosophy.
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Just finished:
Note: Spoiler tags do not contain any plot details.
![[image loading]](http://bestfantasybooks.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/happy-hour-in-hell-uk.jpg)
+ Show Spoiler +I think I preferred the first book, Dirty Streets of Heaven better. I found the first half of the book rather hard and tedious to get through because of how ploddingly dark and bleak it was. It does end rather well though.
![[image loading]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51riT4tyG6L.jpg)
+ Show Spoiler +Hmmmm. It's really hard for me to have an unbiased opinion of this book. The wait was so very long, and expectations were still extremely high. At the same time I had followed what Lynch had gone through. All in all, a good enough book I think to get the ball rolling for him again. It doesn't really reach the epic heights of Lies or Red Seas, but revelations about the Bondsmagi and the way it moves the plot of the world forward was certainly extremely interesting. On the other hand, I really did not enjoy the 'Back When' story in this book at all. I'm still looking forward to The Thorn of Emberlain though.
Not sure what I'm going to read next, might read Sanderson's Steelheart though I'm not that excited about it. Might just want to do it to see if he's kept up the level of writing as The Emperor's Soul.
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+ Show Spoiler +On October 04 2013 00:56 elt wrote:Just finished: Note: Spoiler tags do not contain any plot details. + Show Spoiler +I think I preferred the first book, Dirty Streets of Heaven better. I found the first half of the book rather hard and tedious to get through because of how ploddingly dark and bleak it was. It does end rather well though. Hmmmm. It's really hard for me to have an unbiased opinion of this book. The wait was so very long, and expectations were still extremely high. At the same time I had followed what Lynch had gone through. All in all, a good enough book I think to get the ball rolling for him again. It doesn't really reach the epic heights of Lies or Red Seas, but revelations about the Bondsmagi and the way it moves the plot of the world forward was certainly extremely interesting. On the other hand, I really did not enjoy the 'Back When' story in this book at all. I'm still looking forward to The Thorn of Emberlain though. Not sure what I'm going to read next, might read Sanderson's Steelheart though I'm not that excited about it. Might just want to do it to see if he's kept up the level of writing as The Emperor's Soul.
He released a book for young adults as well:
![[image loading]](http://media.sfx.co.uk/files/2013/03/The-Rithmatist-cover.jpg)
Might be worth checking it out. It's on my current "5 books of the month" list
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On October 03 2013 20:54 frogrubdown wrote:
except for philosophy that has literary pretensions
only worthwhile kind
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EPT![[image loading]](http://gatheringbooks.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/hm-danceukpaper.jpg)
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