roseweird posted:

what is your background in those fields??

Nothing. I've encountered works, some from a Wittgensteinian perspective, others not, critical of conceptual problems in those areas.

roseweird posted:

that's not what i asked though, i asked why you seem to think that on account of wittgenstein we can toss out everything that came before him, what you blandly call "tradtional philosophizing", as "nonsense". like, i don't know what bundle of ideas you are trying to make "metaphysical" carry, but i don't see how wittgenstein managed to do away with the metaphysical by talking about, of all things, language

Because traditional philosophizing is based on conceptual tangles that result from the deviant use of terms or grammatical rules. For example, Hegel's whole system results from conflating the use of the verb 'to be' (sein in German) in expressing identity (e.g. Superman is Clark Kent) with the copula of predication (e.g. The rose is red).

Language is the natural place to start if you want do away with metaphysics because metaphysical propositions don't have real world criteria that would result in their being verified or falsified. The necessary 'truth' or 'falsehood' of metaphysical propositions follows from other propositions and definitions of the terms contained in them.

One common source of confusion is the notion that all substantives are names of objects that we learn by ostensive definition, like by pointing at an apple and uttering 'apple' links the word with the apple-object in language. And when an object can't be found, 'time' for example, metaphysical speculation (grammatical confusion) supposedly has to find them in reaching out to a supersensual realm, discovering superficially plausible but nonsensical propositions about time like: "time is the order of successive events" (Leibniz): necessarily 'true' only by virtue of the hidden re-definition of the words ('time', 'order', 'event', etc.) in the sentence.

In the Blue Book, Wittgenstein's most accessible work, he talks about how we have no problems understanding the different ways we put the word 'time' to use in everyday language, but how the search for an object defining time, asking questions of the form "What is...?" about it, lead us into deep confusion.

roseweird posted:

.custom195203{}NoFreeWill posted:it's funny that it's hard for you to imagine the condition which you and every other human being are in

i don't think it is particularly strange to be unable to imagine and describe the generalizable psychic condition of all human beings... that is kind of a tall order. i don't really want to read a thread on phenomenology, i'm just curious what is so dangerous about cartesianism, and i don't see how phenomenology is supposed to stamp it out anyway, since it seems perfectly capable of assimilating phenomenology's descriptions of consciousness without altering its character in any way

also this is what Heidegger and Husserl try to do (sort of) and its really an admirable and intensely interesting and useful project.

roseweird posted:

swirlsofhistory posted:

if you want do away with metaphysics



lol, right, why would you want to do this, though? what are people going to talk about at communal meals in your marxist-materialist utopia, how much they enjoyed manufacturing that thing they manufactured in the manufactorium just before lunch? "aha, yes, most verifiable, comrade!"

For supposedly being fundamental to all knowledge or existence or whatever, it struck me that people I've worked with rarely ever talk like a metaphysicist, or if they did they would surely drop it as soon as they wanted to be understood.

People still talk about art, make ethical judgments, talk about feelings, and so on... all without need for theory. Ponder that.

Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy.

roseweird posted:

well, no, that's not really what's at stake here, it's just... you keep wanting to purge "metaphysics"... which is itself a metaphysical thing... ??? thinking that if you do this, it will solve your problems... you seem pretty trapped in a grammar game yourself

How is pointing out conceptual confusion and the problems it causes constitutive of another kind of metaphysics? There's no new knowledge or theories on this end, it's just a way of making explicit how the rules of our grammar and logic *already* rule out the possibility of understanding what, on first glance, look like non-empirical/metaphysical truths about the world.

aerdil posted:

"Wittgenstein's assurance that philosophy 'leaves everything as it is' - such statements exhibit, to my mind, academic sado-masochism, self-humiliation, and self-denunciation of the intellectual whose labor does not issue in scientific, technical, or like achievements. These affirmations of modesty and dependence seem to recapture Hume's mood of righteous contentment with the limitations of reason which, once recognized and accepted, protect man from useless mental adventures but leave him perfectly capable of orienting himself in the given environment. However, when Hume debunked substances, he fought a powerful ideology, while his successors today provide an intellectual justification for that which society long since accomplished - namely, the defamation of alternative modes of thought which contradict the established universe of discourse."

"The self-styled poverty of philosophy, committed with all its concepts to the given state of affairs, distrusts the possibilities of a new experience. Subjection to the rule of established facts is total - only linguistic facts, to be sure, but the society speaks in its language, and we are told to obey. The prohibitions are severe and authoritarian: 'Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language.' 'And we may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place.' (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 47)"

"One might ask what remains of philosophy? What remains of thinking, intelligence, without anything hypothetical, without any explanation?"

Your future manager at Dominos will be so impressed.

swirlsofhistory posted:

Because traditional philosophizing is based on conceptual tangles that result from the deviant use of terms or grammatical rules. For example, Hegel's whole system results from conflating the use of the verb 'to be' (sein in German) in expressing identity (e.g. Superman is Clark Kent) with the copula of predication (e.g. The rose is red).

' haha holy shit

blinkandwheeze posted:

you and everyone else on this planet should read the future lasts forever, althusser's memoirs, they are incredible and insane

2 pages into the intro and this already rules

babyhueypnewton posted:

We had a good thread about it in the PSL a while ago.

is that one of the hidden subforums?

babyhueypnewton posted:

swirlsofhistory you seem to have read Marx saying "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it." and read it in the exact opposite way it is intended. I see this a lot with Marxists who are anti-intellectual and think any thought at all is counter-revolutionary because they are lazy. We had a good thread about it in the PSL a while ago. but seriously your own laziness and stupidity is not an excuse to dismiss all philosophy. It is the excuse of analytic philosophy because they were PAID BY THE CIA but since every marxist philosopher in history has been against you and every liberal has played language games with you wtf are you doing?

How am I reading the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach wrong? I never said anything like thought is counter-revolutionary. If you'd been paying attention, you'd know that what I'm saying isn't that I can't understand philosophical propositions, or that most people can't understand them, but that no one –including the philosopher responsible for them – can possibly understand them because there is no sense there to be understood.

If you're saying that I'm wrong in writing off philosophical theory because I haven't read every last work of the last 2400 years, then so what? Have you even read a single work from the logical positivist or ordinary language philosophy tradition? Do you even have a vague notion of how outdated the philosophy you're defending is, and where the problems are with it? Talk about laziness...

I don't know anything about the CIA paying for analytic philosophy, and I don't see why it matters. Most analytic philosophy is hostile to this view these days.

It's not true that every marxist philosopher has been against the anti-philosophical approach: Otto Neurath was a marxist and a member of the Vienna Circle. Gavin Kitching and Guy Robinson are two philosophers who have attempted to integrate Marx and Wittgenstein. Here's an interview at The Northstar with someone working in Marxist anti-philosophy. Hopefully this approach will catch on, and bring us more lasting success than the dialectical marxist dud.

swirlsofhistory posted:

babyhueypnewton posted:

swirlsofhistory you seem to have read Marx saying "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it." and read it in the exact opposite way it is intended. I see this a lot with Marxists who are anti-intellectual and think any thought at all is counter-revolutionary because they are lazy. We had a good thread about it in the PSL a while ago. but seriously your own laziness and stupidity is not an excuse to dismiss all philosophy. It is the excuse of analytic philosophy because they were PAID BY THE CIA but since every marxist philosopher in history has been against you and every liberal has played language games with you wtf are you doing?

How am I reading the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach wrong? I never said anything like thought is counter-revolutionary. If you'd been paying attention, you'd know that what I'm saying isn't that I can't understand philosophical propositions, or that most people can't understand them, but that no one –including the philosopher responsible for them – can possibly understand them because there is no sense there to be understood.

If you're saying that I'm wrong in writing off philosophical theory because I haven't read every last work of the last 2400 years, then so what? Have you even read a single work from the logical positivist or ordinary language philosophy tradition? Do you even have a vague notion of how outdated the philosophy you're defending is, and where the problems are with it? Talk about laziness...

I don't know anything about the CIA paying for analytic philosophy, and I don't see why it matters. Most analytic philosophy is hostile to this view these days.

It's not true that every marxist philosopher has been against the anti-philosophical approach: Otto Neurath was a marxist and a member of the Vienna Circle. Gavin Kitching and Guy Robinson are two philosophers who have attempted to integrate Marx and Wittgenstein. Here's an interview at The Northstar with someone working in Marxist anti-philosophy. Hopefully this approach will catch on, and bring us more lasting success than the dialectical marxist dud.

Yes it's much better for the ego to say that things which you don't understand are unintelligible generally. I'll stick with Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao, and Gramsci who somehow understood Hegel and used it for revolutionary science.

I was gonna say you should hook up with that crazy lady rosa lichtenstein who posts on revleft and posted here for a bit, but it appears you already have. In which case my advice is to take your meds.

blinkandwheeze posted:

roseweird posted:

overall he sounds like he might be interesting but the article you linked to is very bad, the author has a really crude theology/metaphysics that makes me wonder if he hasn't badly misunderstood meilalaaslissouz

kotsko leaves a lot to be desired but it's better than reading f*cking graham harman who as far as i know has the only published commentary in english on his unpublished theological work. i bring him up b.c he has been referred to as a "radical cartesian" & i very much recommend his after finitude

i read maybe 40 pages of the graham harman book and it blew very very hard. i'd been meaning to deal with after finitude, but after that i understandably kinda shied away. just finished his piece on badiou and it was excellent, though, so i'll dust off the pdf of after finitude at your express written request. if you've steered me wrong there will be hell to pay. have you read the number and the siren? is it good? do you have a pdf?

roseweird posted:

sorry, i thought it was extremely bad! but i do find this guy interesting, although so far based on what i have read i am resistant to his assumptions and conclusions. what do you think of this review? http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/23797-after-finitude-an-essay-on-the-necessity-of-contingency/ do you agree that he is a "radical cartesian"? what's all this stuff about doubting the reality of cause and effect? why does he doubt cause and effect?

i don't feel qualified enough to judge meillassoux's cartesian credentials but i think it's an interesting way of looking at him. that review seems fine but maybe overstresses his reliance on badiou

on cause & effect meillassoux isn't even particularly radical, as far as i understand he is pretty simply following hume - we aren't justified in making inductive inferences that B will follow A as it should or supposedly always has because this relies on the necessity of physical laws and the assumption that these are essential properties of our reality and will continue to hold. that there is any necessary reason that one cause cannot give rise to a thousand other effects abandons materialism in favor of an idealist essentialism. which ofc isn't to say that meillassoux would see scientific inquiry as futile - as phenomena that would exist at odds with or in spite of observable law would be itself necessary phenomena (this necessity taking the form of existence despite conditions of nonexistence) ... because of this observable physical law can be understood as existent universally applicable but the assumptions made by the uniformity of nature, the law of noncontradiction still holds because only necessity can depose it

NoFreeWill posted:

The possibility of contingency doesn't imply we should change our actions much at all, its more a thing to 'keep in mind'. Like if gravity suddenly "reversed" tomorrow there would be nothing we could do to prepare for it, since as he says no "observer" would be able to predict it, it therefore is not something we should worry about.

this isn't true tho, the basis of his divine inexistence is how human subjectivity can be altered by the contingencies that would allow his virtual god, contingencies that allow the possibility of a universal justice and messianic emergence of such... hyperchaos might result in the end of gravity or, as adrian johnston says, the f*cking flying spaghetti monster, but these developments are basically novelties & as you say offer little to worry about, while through the confrontation with mortality that offers the "world of justice" meillassoux enshrines an object of hope in our subjective experience

i haven't read number & the siren yet palafox, i am pretty intimidated by it especially because i have no familiarity with mallarme. here is a pdf of it tho

graham harman really is the worst lol

Edited by blinkandwheeze (Oct. 21, 2013 13:08:34)