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what are some analytic philosophers I should care about? I tried to read some david lewis recently and thought it was pointless
On October 04 2013 10:18 frogrubdown wrote: unlike most historians I usually take historical philosophers to be deeply confused when they sound deeply confused.
i think everybody is deeply confused! analytic philosophy is just another phase in a long history of deep confusion :D
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Quick question sam, is Foucault a shock artist?
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eh?
foucault is brilliant and deserves all praise that comes his way. it doesn't matter that he's wrong. what a tragic loss, i wish he had lived to produce a full lifetime of work
why would he be a shock artist
edit:
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On October 04 2013 11:57 sam!zdat wrote: eh?
foucault is brilliant and deserves all praise that comes his way. it doesn't matter that he's wrong. what a tragic loss, i wish he had lived to produce a full lifetime of work
why would he be a shock artist I need to read more on him, I mostly explored both of his books on madness, psychiatry, and society as well as his life and it is fascinating stuff. However, he reminds me of myself when I have talked to many people here at the university when I make shocking, yet insightful statements which is not exactly the best thing to do when spreading philosophy, social issues, or politics. I think I need to research him a bit more.
EDIT - One thing though that really intrigues me the most is his idea on anti-humanism. I explored it in Heidegger before and got a bit confused then decided to put it off for a year but I think I understand you much more now.
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On October 04 2013 12:11 Shiragaku wrote:Show nested quote +On October 04 2013 11:57 sam!zdat wrote: eh?
foucault is brilliant and deserves all praise that comes his way. it doesn't matter that he's wrong. what a tragic loss, i wish he had lived to produce a full lifetime of work
why would he be a shock artist I need to read more on him, I mostly explored both of his books on madness, psychiatry, and society as well as his life and it is fascinating stuff. However, he reminds me of myself when I have talked to many people here at the university when I make shocking, yet insightful statements which is not exactly the best thing to do when spreading philosophy, social issues, or politics. I think I need to research him a bit more.
Just curious, why do you think it is not good to " make shocking, yet insightful statements ... when spreading philosophy, social issues, or politics."?
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On October 04 2013 12:16 SwatRaven wrote:Show nested quote +On October 04 2013 12:11 Shiragaku wrote:On October 04 2013 11:57 sam!zdat wrote: eh?
foucault is brilliant and deserves all praise that comes his way. it doesn't matter that he's wrong. what a tragic loss, i wish he had lived to produce a full lifetime of work
why would he be a shock artist I need to read more on him, I mostly explored both of his books on madness, psychiatry, and society as well as his life and it is fascinating stuff. However, he reminds me of myself when I have talked to many people here at the university when I make shocking, yet insightful statements which is not exactly the best thing to do when spreading philosophy, social issues, or politics. I think I need to research him a bit more. Just curious, why do you think it is not good to " make shocking, yet insightful statements ... when spreading philosophy, social issues, or politics."? People become more interested in me rather than in what I am talking about. That is where we get people like Glenn Beck, Christopher Hitchens, and Bill Maher whose audience and speaker are more concerned with delivery under the assumption that the person you are engaging in discourse with are irrational human beings and rivals to be crushed and in order to crush them, you deliver great rhetoric.
Of course I would use another example with different people that does not involve television and YouTube, but that would cause another huge controversy in this really heated thread which has been serving as my personal time sink :/
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you think I am anti-humanist?? I am humanist to the core
i think the best way to participate in intellectual discourse is 1) shock people and 2) have a personality. you have to avoid making it all about shocking and personality, but i don't think it's possible or desirable to do without. then again, this is an big zizek fan you are talking to
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On October 04 2013 12:27 sam!zdat wrote: you think I am anti-humanist?? I am humanist to the core
i think the best way to participate in intellectual discourse is 1) shock people and 2) have a personality. you have to avoid making it all about shocking and personality, but i don't think it's possible or desirable to do without. then again, this is an big zizek fan you are talking to Oh, I am most certainly not saying you are anti-humanist, you told me very similar things when we talked that appeared in the works of Foucault. One of the things that makes you different is that you are not anti-humanist, mostly critical of the rationality of society as he witnessed.
EDIT- why did I say anti-humanity?
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I went back some pages and I still have no clue way you start to talk about analytical philosophy in Literature.
Anyway. I'm trying to read Enderby from A. Burguess and The Exaggerated Life of Martín Romaña A. Echenique. Neither one is really good,
Echenique's is very very booring, the main character just keep crying to his father save him from the cruel world. Enderby is too 'nothing is happening, better put some onomatopoeias to fart', I knew that would try to be like this, but the drama isn't there. I'm just reading because I don't have anything else.
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On October 04 2013 12:27 sam!zdat wrote: you think I am anti-humanist?? I am humanist to the core
i think the best way to participate in intellectual discourse is 1) shock people and 2) have a personality. you have to avoid making it all about shocking and personality, but i don't think it's possible or desirable to do without. then again, this is an big zizek fan you are talking to
it's an interesting thing to consider. personally i think the best way to talk is to think of the consequences of the way you talk. I see this a lot in chomsky and it was in Bertrand Russell too-or at least his writing. They try to explain things as simply as they possibly can, so the most amount of people can understand what they mean. Chomsky is a particularly interesting talker to me, and he considers himself very simpleminded. A lot of people consider him boring but to me he is one of the best speakers i can think of. Using sardonic wit and often quotes a lot of dumb things the rich and powerful say. A lot of the sources of information he gets are from things like mein kampf, lenins writings, trilateral commision, ect.
I definitely favor someone that talks extremely simplistically, or as simply as they possibly can. it shows that they care.
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it's tricky. on the one hand you have to make yourself understood so you are not a pretentious fuck, on the other hand you have to make your audience want to come to you.
please don't take the way I talk on TL as an example of this philosophy
On October 04 2013 13:01 pedrlz wrote: I went back some pages and I still have no clue way you start to talk about analytical philosophy in Literature.
one thing leads to another, you know
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On October 04 2013 11:11 sam!zdat wrote:what are some analytic philosophers I should care about? I tried to read some david lewis recently and thought it was pointless Show nested quote +On October 04 2013 10:18 frogrubdown wrote: unlike most historians I usually take historical philosophers to be deeply confused when they sound deeply confused.
i think everybody is deeply confused! analytic philosophy is just another phase in a long history of deep confusion :D
I don't think there are any analytic (or continental) philosophers that people should care about independently of their own concerns/confusions. In particular, I don't see why anyone who doesn't care or have reason to care about metaphysics or semantics/pragmatics (and maybe a few other things) should read David Lewis.
So I'd need to know more about your interests. It sounds like you like political/social theory and psychoanalysis a lot, and I probably couldn't help you much there. In the former area I only know the big names (Rawls, Nozick, etc.) that you probably hate, and no one uses psychoanalysis for anything here. Grunbaum's got a book on it though.
Gather you don't like analytic Marxism?
In threads about the mind, it sounds like you're interested in David Chalmers, or other voices through which his work has been filtered.
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but that's just the thing froggy. I try to be interested in anything that's worth being interested in. (also i should note that I have some small training in analytic philosophy so it's not a totally foreign thing to me, i went to college intending to major in phil). I'm interested in the way people think about the world. I THOUGHT I was interested in metaphysics... at least I would LIKE to be interested in metaphysics. If David Lewis is supposedly this guy who understands something important, I'd like to know what that is, so I can understand better the state of human knowledge in the early 21st century.
I don't understand what's the point of a field if the people in that field don't think that people in other fields should try to understand what they are doing, or don't think that they should be able to explain to other people why what they are doing is important. it's a bit mystifying to me, particularly as someone who spends really at least half of my time reading what I naively think of as "philosophy." Why don't analytic philosophers want to communicate with me? Do they really think everything they do is a kind of self-contained little puzzle with no relevance to anything else? If so, why do it? If something is concerning, I'd like to be concerned about it too!
i'm aware of the existence of a thing called analytic marxism but never really cared to investigate it. I've read some Chalmers although it's been a while. I'm almost done with Dennett's Consciousness Explained and he's an idiot (spoiler: consciousness not explained).
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On October 05 2013 02:06 sam!zdat wrote: but that's just the thing froggy. I try to be interested in anything that's worth being interested in. (also i should note that I have some small training in analytic philosophy so it's not a totally foreign thing to me, i went to college intending to major in phil). I'm interested in the way people think about the world. I THOUGHT I was interested in metaphysics... at least I would LIKE to be interested in metaphysics. If David Lewis is supposedly this guy who understands something important, I'd like to know what that is, so I can understand better the state of human knowledge in the early 21st century.
I don't understand what's the point of a field if the people in that field don't think that people in other fields should try to understand what they are doing, or don't think that they should be able to explain to other people why what they are doing is important. it's a bit mystifying to me, particularly as someone who spends really at least half of my time reading what I naively think of as "philosophy." Why don't analytic philosophers want to communicate with me? Do they really think everything they do is a kind of self-contained little puzzle with no relevance to anything else? If so, why do it? If something is concerning, I'd like to be concerned about it too!
i'm aware of the existence of a thing called analytic marxism but never really cared to investigate it. I've read some Chalmers although it's been a while. I'm almost done with Dennett's Consciousness Explained and he's an idiot (spoiler: consciousness not explained).
I don't understand in what sense you think analytic philosophers don't want to communicate with you. Is wanting to talk about things you aren't interested in the same thing as not wanting to communicate with you? And it's not like the puzzles are completely self-contained. Kripke's views on language in Naming and Necessity have been very important to metaphysics and metaethics for instance.
Does it have to change things in other fields too? Well, often it does do that. Austin has been very important in certain parts of literary theory and race/gender studies, Fodor/Putnam and others have been very important to cognitive science, more philosophers than I can name quickly have been essential to semantics and pragmatics, and study in logic has been very important to math/computation.
But I don't see why the requirement of affecting other fields should be there in the first place. I've never found a single thing in literary theory helpful to anything I'm concerned about. I don't take that to be a decisive objection against the field.
Metaphysical Addendum:
+ Show Spoiler +You take yourself to be interested in metaphysics. What types of metaphysical questions excite you?
What exists? What is fundamental? Is everything physical? What are laws of nature? What is causation? What is the nature of persistence and time? What is the nature of necessity and possibility? What is grounded in what? What do any of these questions mean?
All of these questions are asked by analytic metaphysicians. Are there other metaphysical questions you want asked that they don't ask, or do you just think they have a poor methodology for answering them and your field has a better one? These are very different problems.
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yeah! I'm interested in all those questions! but I tried to read david lewis and I thought it was entirely pointless. then I got into an argument with a phil student about david lewis and he explained it to me, and i still thought it was pointless, although he tried to say that this was just because I didn't understand
anyway, I don't know what more there is to say about it. I'm going to keep trying to read some analytic philosophy sometimes, but it seems so scholastic to me at times
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I would say Foucault is anti-subject, against the role of the subject in cultural and epistemological history; and also against the using of humanism to explain cultural progress in Western society (you can read about it in The Order of Things). Anti-humanist is kind of a confusing term, I rarely see it used. Foucault may also be amoral, but again not in the sense commonly understood.
Btw can anyone recommend a good PDF reader for Android tablets?
Currently reading Sheila Heti - How Should a Person Be?
Interesting prose, has a weird realism.
![[image loading]](http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/how-should-a-person-be_436.jpg)
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On October 05 2013 04:39 sam!zdat wrote: yeah! I'm interested in all those questions! but I tried to read david lewis and I thought it was entirely pointless. then I got into an argument with a phil student about david lewis and he explained it to me, and i still thought it was pointless, although he tried to say that this was just because I didn't understand
anyway, I don't know what more there is to say about it. I'm going to keep trying to read some analytic philosophy sometimes, but it seems so scholastic to me at times
I find a lot of debates uninteresting too! Including some on that list.
Given that, there are two possibilities:
(1) The mystique that I felt long ago when thinking about these issues was based on being so confused in their presence that I didn't even have a good enough conceptual framework for expressing and evaluating them. With such a framework, they're less interesting than they appeared earlier.
(2) The mystique was something real that the current debate fails to capture! I don't know what that something is. Maybe it's ineffable. But it's real.
I lean towards being a (1) sort of guy. Maybe you're more (2)-ish. Not sure what I can say about the virtues of one over the other aside from saying, "Well, my views are effable" or "At least Wittgenstein had the decency to pass that shit over in silence".
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Ahh yes, Wittgenstein would have us pass over the mystique in silence, but he said nothing as to the propriety of pointing
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
david lewis did a lot fo things. i guess sam was concerned with modal realism or something. some of the stuff in analytic philosophy comes from very 'stubborn' pursuit of formalized rules, leading to counterintuitive results. this is interesting to a philosopher who treats those rules seriously in the way mathematicians treat existing theorems. but for sam it may appear silly indeed.
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