Hype's Philosophy Thread

off-topic conversation unrelated to Jane's Addiction
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mockbee
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Re: Hype's Philosophy Thread

#51 Post by mockbee » Thu Jan 07, 2016 11:26 am

Hype wrote:Now EF, you should know, cut and paste'll get you a C+/B- in first and second year university philosophy classes these days.

But seriously... what is going on on this page of this thread? To put what EF said a bit more nicely: the discipline of philosophy is essentially diametrically opposed to the sort of thing said in so-called 'self-help [philosophy]' books, despite their being placed on the same shelves as actual philosophy at bookstores.

That isn't to say that philosophy, the academic discipline, can't or doesn't offer a kind of 'self-help' if you want to put it that way. Since Spinoza's been brought up... there is what you could call a 'psychotherapeutic' aspect to Spinoza's ethical work. Some scholars have argued that he presages Freud in this respect and when Freud was asked about a connection to Spinoza his response was something along the lines of: "well, I didn't use any Spinoza directly in the development of psychoanalysis, but Spinoza was always "in the air" so-to-speak, of the intellectual atmosphere at the time". What led people to ask Freud this is that Spinoza was among the first to offer a systematic catalogue of human emotions, and the first to come right out and say that he would treat human emotions exactly the way we treat any other area of science. Hobbes and Descartes before him had offered long lists of emotions (in Leviathan and Passions of the Soul, respectively), but it was Spinoza who explicitly tells us that emotions are not to be mocked or scorned or hated but understood, and what's more, because the universe is absolutely determined (everything that happens, happens necessarily), we can't demand that people simply change or otherwise choose to have different emotions than the ones they do have in whatever situations they find themselves in, so if we want to have a realistic ethics and politics, we should probably figure out how to deal with this in a scientific, systematic, causally efficacious way, pace Christianity, for example.

I'm not sure what else to say.
yeah, I don't know what's going on here either. I didn't bring up the book or try to pass it as "philosophy" (well, I suppose I was, but really I was just baiting Hype. :hehe: )

I like what you wrote about the connection between a psychotherapudic, or cognitive, benefit to the philosophical work on ethics and emotions.
:wave:

But surely if the common folk out there can benefit from a basic "dumbed down" exploration of the general nature of reality and existence, that ain't a bad thing. :noclue:
Last edited by mockbee on Thu Jan 07, 2016 11:55 am, edited 2 times in total.

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Re: Hype's Philosophy Thread

#52 Post by mockbee » Thu Jan 07, 2016 11:40 am

Oh and Hype, if the philosophy thing doesn't financially work out for you, there are millions and millions of people out there who would buy your dissertation if you moved it over a shelf and put some kitties on the front. :wink:


Image



Be careful what you loathe. :lol:

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Re: Hype's Philosophy Thread

#53 Post by Bandit72 » Thu Feb 18, 2016 6:13 am

Has anyone got anything controversial they want to say? It's been a bit lagging on the forum lately. :bored:

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Re: Hype's Philosophy Thread

#54 Post by Hype » Mon Feb 22, 2016 1:03 pm

Image

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Re: Hype's Philosophy Thread

#55 Post by kv » Mon Feb 22, 2016 1:41 pm

It's a ducabbit!

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Re: Hype's Philosophy Thread

#56 Post by Hype » Mon Feb 22, 2016 2:23 pm

:lol: Wittgenstein's original point with it was to distinguish between seeing something that's there and seeing it as something. The Duck-rabbit / Rabbit-duck / Ducabbit / Kaninchenente is just a drawing that you can see as either a duck or a rabbit even though there's no fact of the matter about which of the two the drawing is representing (because it's not representing either one).

The German says "Which animals are the most like each other?" and the answer is "Rabbit and duck." It's silly, but it's also kinda neat. Our senses don't give us the world in a direct way, they kinda modulate it, passing us data which we then comprehend through our concepts.

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Re: Hype's Philosophy Thread

#57 Post by kv » Mon Feb 22, 2016 7:31 pm

As well as auto filling in the missing pieces...whether they are correct or not...ie what you said

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Re: Hype's Philosophy Thread

#58 Post by SR » Tue May 03, 2016 8:47 am

:lolol: My kiddo just texted from his Spinoza lecture. He's hating on how hard it is.....He NEVER texts me from class. :hs: :noclue: :lol:

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Re: Hype's Philosophy Thread

#59 Post by Hype » Tue May 03, 2016 2:11 pm

SR wrote::lolol: My kiddo just texted from his Spinoza lecture. He's hating on how hard it is.....He NEVER texts me from class. :hs: :noclue: :lol:
:rockon: Tell him to check out Jonathan Bennett's website, http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/ Bennett has "translated" difficult texts, even ones written in English, into more easily understood language for undergraduates to use.

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Re: Hype's Philosophy Thread

#60 Post by SR » Tue May 03, 2016 4:10 pm

I told him to say hello to you. :noclue: He very likely won't, but who knows. I'll definitely send the word on the site. I'd hope that he'd already been advised about it....where he is and all. Again, :noclue:

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Re: Hype's Philosophy Thread

#61 Post by Hype » Tue May 03, 2016 4:32 pm

SR wrote:I told him to say hello to you. :noclue: He very likely won't, but who knows. I'll definitely send the word on the site. I'd hope that he'd already been advised about it....where he is and all. Again, :noclue:
It's probably not worth it to talk to me for a small part of a class tbh. There's a really basic bunch of things they want students to get from it at that level... something about substance monism (as opposed to dualism), and probably a little bit about causal necessity... The trick is to recognize how difficult the details are but not get too hung up on them.

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Re: Hype's Philosophy Thread

#62 Post by SR » Wed May 04, 2016 6:03 am

Hype wrote:
SR wrote:I told him to say hello to you. :noclue: He very likely won't, but who knows. I'll definitely send the word on the site. I'd hope that he'd already been advised about it....where he is and all. Again, :noclue:
It's probably not worth it to talk to me for a small part of a class tbh. There's a really basic bunch of things they want students to get from it at that level... something about substance monism (as opposed to dualism), and probably a little bit about causal necessity... The trick is to recognize how difficult the details are but not get too hung up on them.
:cool:

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Re: Hype's Philosophy Thread

#63 Post by Bandit72 » Thu Jun 30, 2016 8:56 am

I've just discovered the Magic Sandwich Show. :wiggle:

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Re: Hype's Philosophy Thread

#64 Post by Bandit72 » Wed Sep 14, 2016 7:13 am

If you were to ask a Muslim or a Christian why dinosaurs aren't mentioned in the Quran or in the Bible, and the answer they gave you was 'because they are irrelevant to what the books try to teach', would you accept that as an answer?

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Re: Hype's Philosophy Thread

#65 Post by Hype » Wed Sep 14, 2016 10:11 am

Bandit72 wrote:If you were to ask a Muslim or a Christian why dinosaurs aren't mentioned in the Quran or in the Bible, and the answer they gave you was 'because they are irrelevant to what the books try to teach', would you accept that as an answer?
They would probably actually point you to the stuff about behemoth / leviathan...

But the latter answer... yeah, sure. That seems fine.

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Re: Hype's Philosophy Thread

#66 Post by wally » Wed Sep 14, 2016 11:53 am

Image

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Re: Hype's Philosophy Thread

#67 Post by Artemis » Wed Sep 14, 2016 12:24 pm

:lol: :lol:

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Re: Hype's Philosophy Thread

#68 Post by Hype » Wed Sep 14, 2016 12:27 pm

wally wrote:Image
That's literally how the scientific method was developed. But it does seem funny if you don't think about it.

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Re: Hype's Philosophy Thread

#69 Post by Matz » Tue Sep 20, 2016 2:59 pm

Hype, in the beginning of the Free will thread you called Sam Harris a hack. I just watched this video and as far as I can tell you two seem to agree 100%. If you got time do you mind explaining, why you think he's a hack? (I didn't put the video up expecting you to watch it of course just to let you know my source)


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Re: Hype's Philosophy Thread

#70 Post by Hype » Tue Sep 20, 2016 5:30 pm

That's a fair question. I do think he's a hack, which I take literally, just to mean that he isn't an especially skilled thinker, philosopher, or even public intellectual. And I say this as someone who, unlike most of my peers, still holds a lot of respect for Dawkins as a science educator, and Dennett as a philosopher, and Hitchens as a rhetorical powerhouse (this being the rest of the "Four Horsemen" of the "Atheist Apocalypse"...)

Like a hack comedian who can get cheap laughs, I wanted to like Harris years ago, but I just can't endorse what he does, much of what he says, or the way he goes about it. The fact that he and I might agree about some conclusions is totally independent of our respective approaches to philosophical argument, rhetoric, etc.

I also agree with Ayn Rand, Donald Trump, and Henry Kissinger about some things, but that doesn't mean I think their methods are sound.

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Re: Hype's Philosophy Thread

#71 Post by Matz » Wed Sep 21, 2016 2:34 am

ok, I see, thanks

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Re: Hype's Philosophy Thread

#72 Post by Bandit72 » Wed Sep 21, 2016 5:21 am

Hype wrote:And I say this as someone who, unlike most of my peers, still holds a lot of respect for Dawkins as a science educator, and Dennett as a philosopher, and Hitchens as a rhetorical powerhouse
I'd be interested to hear their reasoning as to why they don't.

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Re: Hype's Philosophy Thread

#73 Post by Hype » Wed Sep 21, 2016 5:49 am

Bandit72 wrote:
Hype wrote:And I say this as someone who, unlike most of my peers, still holds a lot of respect for Dawkins as a science educator, and Dennett as a philosopher, and Hitchens as a rhetorical powerhouse
I'd be interested to hear their reasoning as to why they don't.
I think they rightfully see that Dawkins has at times attacked non-science areas of academia, largely unfairly, and yet went ahead and wrote The God Delusion, which basically rehashes a bunch of arguments Bertrand Russell wrote in "Why I'm Not a Christian", a potboiler from 60 years ago. It doesn't help that a lot of people who read that book started treating Dawkins like a god... I experienced that shit myself back when the book first came out. But I think it's a bunch of different things. Dawkins has also said some pretty insane, rude, horrible things recently that don't exactly endear him to people who already dislike his strategy.

Dennett is seen as someone who wants badly to be a scientist, not a philosopher. He's also an interesting case, because he works at Tufts, which doesn't have a PhD program, so he doesn't have his own grad students.

Hitchens is seen as a pseudo-intellectual, and I think there's truth in that. But he's also interesting. And I think he's right about Mother Teresa.

I think part of the problem is that these guys are all popularizers, and academics often resent the watering down of areas that they themselves work on. Plus there are professional rivalries and jealousies, since there's only so much research funding to go around.

Another issue may be that all of these guys have been outspoken and quite blunt about religion in ways that many people dislike. Some of this may be residual unjustified belief that religion is "off the table", so to speak, but some of it is also just a difference of opinion about educational strategy.

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Re: Hype's Philosophy Thread

#74 Post by SR » Wed Sep 21, 2016 6:44 am

I have never understood the position of academics who are content to have the depths of their work compartmentalized in their ivory towers. Academics who gain traction in the mainstream are whores to a socio/political/economic game. That's built into a much larger system, that without, would never allow them to reach non academics. The point, the richness, the goal of academics work is to better the human condition.

Eagleton, Bloom, Zinn, Greenblatt, and the editors of all the Norton anthologies (these are massive anthologies edited for what are essentially non academics in literature, undergrads), Dawkins, Dennett, and many more have served a noble utility in ushering information and thought to a much larger audience than would have been otherwise possible. This is a very good thing. It has to be watered down. Not everyone has the opportunity, resolve, or initiative to spend a decade studying.

Too, academics (or the institutions they work for) routinely invite non academics into their world where it might serve to glean some shine from the likes of celebrities. Recently a group of friends in academia were lamenting that Angelina Jolie was invited to guest lecture. I see their point.....many were exceptionally well educated and worthy of tenure track, but sadly had little hope of it ever materializing. On the other hand, Jolie has served as a credible humanitarian and frankly, people care about a message from her lips and not my bitter friends.

And then there's this. A great deal of angst is energy in academics is to continue with their work, not for the betterment of any meta level human condition, but to impress and gain recognition within academia's hierarchy. By no means is it everyone and to what degree it happens to each one individually can never be calculated, but it's real. We're human; I get that. We all want recognition whether we admit it or not.

Ho hum, if Hitch was a pseudo intellectual there's no hope for any of us. His ability to think critically couldn't have been taught, but likely could have been sharpened by more formal education. It's comforting thought that he did not consider himself an intellectual.

Harris is an odd bird to me. 15/20 years ago his arguments were murky and tepid. After some years, he has appeared to take pause and edit his positions to be clear, though not often in depth.

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Re: Hype's Philosophy Thread

#75 Post by Bandit72 » Wed Sep 21, 2016 6:48 am

Yeh, fair enough. All four of them do have a personality certain people aren't going to like and I do get the Dawkins critique and he does have a tendency to rub people up the wrong way. I kind of agree with the Hitchens comment, although I don't believe Hitchens himself would class himself as an intellectual, he just posesses an abundance of vocabulary and has a rather quick analytical mind. The evidence against Mother Teresa is overwhelming, and for her to deny her faith just before she died slammed the final nail in her coffin.
Another issue may be that all of these guys have been outspoken and quite blunt about religion in ways that many people dislike. Some of this may be residual unjustified belief that religion is "off the table", so to speak, but some of it is also just a difference of opinion about educational strategy.
I would say "tough" to this. Is religion only off the table for fear of reprisal?

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