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eriatarka

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Everything posted by eriatarka

  1. You cant judge philosophers based on those who claim to have been inspired by them - this is the same logic that leads to the 'Nietzsche was a nazi' nonsense. Kant explicitly opposed the extension of his philosophy by later people such as Schelling/Fichte, and it was more their ideas which inspired Hegel than Kant's directly. Any comparasion of Kant and Hegel will show a vast number of fundamental differences in their beliefs, and Kant would have disagreed with Hegel on many things. I dont think the Romantic movement was overtly Kantian in nature: it tended to be based on very artistic/dubious interpretations of Kant's third critique which placed a large emphasis on aesthetic judgements, while ignoring his first one. But the third critique doesnt really cohere well with his first two anyway, and the Romantics tended to be against what they saw as the stifling hyper-rationality of the CPR (which is what he's most famous for now). Again, I suppose it depends on whether you judge someone based on the effects they had, or on what they were actually committed to. If someone handpicks various ideas from Kant while ignoring/misinterpreting his fundamental points, I dont think you can really blame Kant for influencing them. Yeah, you can observe the historical effects that Kant had by looking at the people who followed him, but that doesnt mean that he would have agreed with them or that they agreed with him (Kant and Hegel both viewed Aristotle as being one of their major influences). 'Postmodernists' (whatever that means) would probably disagree with Kant on everything. Kant believed in objectivity and I'd imagine most philosophy professors in England/America do too, although it depends on precisely what you mean by 'objectivity' I guess. Again, very few major Anglo-American philosophers would agree with this. There are a few exceptions such as Rorty, but on the whole I'd say that excessive devotion to science/positivism is actually one of the main problems with analytic philosophy rather than social relativity. The kind of thing youre talking about is much more common in Studies Studies departments than philosophy ones.
  2. The idea of sciences being necessarily experimental is fairly modern/Anglo-American: in European philosophy, the German word which gets translated as science is 'Wissenschaft' which has a broader meaning, referring to any organised body of human knowledge regardless of whether it follows the scientific method. Rand's usage of the term 'science' seems to have grown out of this tradition and it's not how most modern scientists would use it, especially since I vaguely remember her calling mathematics a science in ITOE (although I dont have a citation) and ethics a science in TOE, neither of which would commonly be called sciences. Its a matter of different philosophical traditions really.
  3. Orwell was a lifelong socialist: 1984 isnt about 'the evils of altruism'. Orwell was deeply committed to the belief that socialism could be implemented while avoiding the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union, which is why he spent most of his life advocating socialist principles while simultaneously opposing those on the left who defended Soviet communism (Homage to Catalonia being an example).
  4. Are you basing this on Hollywood stuff, or are you including the films of Bresson, Tarkovsky, Bergman, etc? I think that most popular American films are fairly shallow when it comes to philosophical/conceptual issues regardless of which decade youre in, so I could definitely understand if you think that 'classics' like Citizen Kane/Metropolis/etc are overrated since they tend to rely on visual effects and technical stuff which isnt as impressive now as it was back then since its a lot easier to do these days as technology has developed. But I really dont see how you could make the same argument about (largely European) art films such as Persona, The Pickpocket, or Roshomon, which are highly conceptual and pretty much timeless. Theres no way someone today watching Star Wars/Jaws could appreciate it in the way that someone watching it back in 1970 did, since a lot of these film's popularity lay in the blockbuster special effects which have been surpassed by modern CGI, but that only shows that films which rely on special effects become dated much faster than ones which rely on interesting treatment of concepts, cinematography, etc.
  5. Hegel never ever used the terms thesis/anti-thesis/synthesis by the way, thats was earlier Kantians like Fichte/Schelling. Hegel did believe that history often evolved through negation, but it wasnt as simplistic as the "thesis and antithesis merge to form a synthesis" stuff that gets falsely attributed to him.
  6. The Hollingdale translation of TSZ is fine in my opinion, and I vaguely remember finding it more poetic than Kaufmann's. Get both I guess.
  7. Why is this an unreasonable claim? Timothy Leary reported pretty good results in his Harvard when he was using it for supervised behavior/thought modification. I think youre confusing people who thought that LSD was a potentially useful tool to be used in a medical/psychiatric context under the guidelines of a trained professional, or otherwise used responsibly (which was the position of Hofmann/Leary etc), with people who promoted irrational recreational use (which both of those two opposed). You make it sound like Hofmann supported the hippy movement or something. Some fairly smart people have believed hallucinogenics could have useful benefits when used responsibly (Aldous Huxley being a notable example). None of them supported irrational drug use or hippy lifestyles. Its not a binary choice between an entirely drug-free existence, and living as some kind of stoner.
  8. This may be true today, but how was it true at the time when Marx was writing? Its pretty ridiculous to say that an uneducated factory worker in 1870 working 12 hours a day would be likely to achieve a non-pauper lifestyle through hard-work alone (I mean I guess it could happen in a few cases, but its pretty unlikely - late 19th century industrialism isnt really known for its social mobility and conditions at the time Marx was writing were _horrible_ for most workers). You cant drop the historical context here - Marx was writing about a particular society, not the one which exists at present. Western societies evolved in ways which Marx didnt predict, and I'm sure if he were alive today he would revise a lot of his claims (20th century Marxists have been constantly revising them, and you arent going to find many serious Marxists who agree with Marx on most things). Also the Communist Manifesto was a propaganda piece aimed at average workers, not a work of 'serious' philosophy/economics. If youre really interested in what Marx thought, you'd be better off engaging with his more in-depth works rather than picking low-hanging fruit. As far as I know, the CM was written to provoke action/revolution, not to be a short replacement for Kapital/German Ideology/etc.
  9. eriatarka

    Franz Kafka

    This seems like a pretty limited definition of literature which would rule out (eg) most works of social critique. Is 1984 an affirmable novel with a good story for instance? I think there's more to books than interesting plots - presenting/exploring interesting concepts can be just as valuable even if this results in books which arent plot driven, and I think Kafka definitely falls into that category. Noone is saying that Kafka novels have complex and engaging plots in the way that the works of Huge or Doestovysky do, but that doesnt have to be a criticism. Its ok for different books to have different goals. That being said, I dislike Metamorphosis and its probably my least favourite Kafka work :/
  10. No he isnt, whats your justification for this claim?
  11. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/ ?
  12. Well that would depend on a lot of very complex questions about just how memories are stored in the brain, and the degree to which individual memories are localised rather than distributed. Its not a question which could really be answered without a pretty advanced knowledge of cognitive/neuroscience and I doubt anyone really knows at the moment, although I dont claim to be anywhere near up-to-date with current research.
  13. The poetry is what's good about TSZ: Nietzsche often expresses his ideas in really beautiful ways and "says more in a sentence than many writers say in a book". However the downside of this is that unless you already understand what hes trying to say, TSZ can be an extremely hard read and it is very easy to misinterpret. I wouldnt really recommend it to someone who wasnt already familiar with Nietzsche's main ideas: Beyond Good And Evil, the Genaeology of Morals, and Twilight of the Idols would all be better places to start imo since they are written in a much clearer style. Its not a literal statement, its a metaphor. I assume it relates to how Nietzsche believed that some degree of hardship was necessary for truly great deeds, as opposed to the 'Christian'/last-man belief that a completely sanitised/'happy' life was something to strive for (this gets expanded on explicitly in Twilight but runs all through TSZ and pretty much everything else he wrote). A lot of TSZ is based around the conflict between the 'last-man' described by Nietzsche at the start of the book (the sort of passive contented life that Huxley describes well in Brave New World where there is no longer any hardship, toil or struggle), and the 'overman'/ubermensch.
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