This reminded me of someone. When I was doing my degree (a BS in Philosophy, because it's fun to say and I liked neurosciencey things), I had a classmate a year ahead of me who wrote/talked like...
This reminded me of someone. When I was doing my degree (a BS in Philosophy, because it's fun to say and I liked neurosciencey things), I had a classmate a year ahead of me who wrote/talked like this. He wore a beret and round glasses, talked incessantly, never finished books, got in some shit over quaaludes and ended up doing some sort of self help cult. His website is still up so I assume that must have worked out ok. I won't link it because I don't need him getting a whiff of me remembering. I bring it up because of that paragraph about "powerful minds" choosing philosophers over religion, I swear that could have been written by him.
I had the most fun with philosophy when we stopped reading the ancients/western stuff and got into where it intersects with things/problem solving. Neuroscience, psychology, the big problems of broad things like politics and superstructures, shit is endlessly interesting because human beings just don't stop, and what's a solution today might tomorrow become a new problem. Epistemology was always my favorite slice, because it pretty much shatters a lot of the enlightenment-era attachment to stuff like "knowledge", "reason", "truth", etc. Folks don't all think the same about that, they don't all define the words the same way, and knowing some of the differences means being able to communicate in rare and special ways about difficult stuff with folks you might not think you could reach. Being able to crunch some absurd set of ideas and extrude them out into a simpler, more easily communicated shape is a skill, at least that's how my professors approached what we were doing. It wasn't about who was right, it was about just taking what was out there, making some sense of it, and seeing if/how it could apply to anything, with a broader aim of "find and fix a problem somewhere". Sometimes folks need words for things, a problem needs to be identified/broken down, a situation needs to be understood, before work can be done. You can work the ability to do stuff like that by trudging through what some beleaguered nerd of the past tried to say, but it comes with a challenge, don't take them too seriously. Nobody gets it 100%, and between the politics and our own psychology, some real good thoughts are probably getting left out. You're on your own there, try to avoid having those book purchases show up on anything. You'll have to steal some depending how deep you wanna go.
I'll be real I'm not sure I had a huge point to make, I just wanted to provide a bit of a counterweight to the arrogance/disdain Stove displays talking the way he does, as someone who probably investigated a bunch of the same things. He is doing beret wearer shit in my view. Trying to proclaim all human thought is madness is like telling me the sky is blue or that water is wet - no shit, my guy, we're human, take off the beret, have two beers. Ignoring other parts of the world and calling folks primitive is just being shitty at the job, too. The job is to embrace the madness - understand its forms, speak its tongues, know the way it travels, so that perhaps while it unfolds we can contribute in a good way toward making life a little nicer. At least, that's been my opinion for a while with respect to what philosophy is for/about.
Sorry to ramble, I guess I can't stop myself when the beret sensor tingles a bit. I got annoyed and skimmed too, just to be honest with you. I really enjoyed the stuff I studied, and this sort of argumentation about the absolute state of something like "human thought" feels akin to an argument about whether Goku can defeat a Gundam. I certainly am guilty of trying to talk about stuff that's too big for me, but I try to maintain a certain humility and openness to critique that feels completely absent in the way Stove expresses himself, just like my old classmate.
I'm more or less unwilling to read something of this length that both says this and doesn't even give the barest reference to any eastern philosophers (at least not that I could find). I've got an...
Those four things, in their turn, are sufficiently representative of what human thought, in its highest reaches, has been.
I'm more or less unwilling to read something of this length that both says this and doesn't even give the barest reference to any eastern philosophers (at least not that I could find). I've got an extremely shallow level of knowledge of Chinese philosophy and even I can identify some very obvious points worth engaging with in an article on this topic (especially given that this article clearly isn't aiming for brevity). I would love to see how this writer would engage with Zhuangzi's butterfly, for instance, if there was any indication that he'd even heard of him.
Well he considered vodou to come from a primitive people. So your instinct about his Western centrism is correct. And is exactly the sort of rationalism/atheism I dislike. But I found the authors...
Well he considered vodou to come from a primitive people.
First, however, I need to emphasize what sort of thoughts it is, or rather, what grade of thoughts it is, that I am asking about. I am not interested here (or anywhere else, much) in thoughts of primitive people, or of ignorant or stupid people, or of people of no importance for the history of thought, or of people who are, even by ordinary standards, mad. My specimens above were not drawn from the voodoo religion, for example, or from the medicine of Paracelsus, or from the 'philosophy' of William Blake, or from the 'psychotherapy' of Wilhelm Reich.
So your instinct about his Western centrism is correct. And is exactly the sort of rationalism/atheism I dislike.
But I found the authors Wikipedia
Stove and David M. Armstrong both resisted what they saw as attempts by Marxists to infiltrate the Faculty of Arts at the University of Sydney. In 1984–85 Stove protested publicly that the faculty was favouring women in appointments.[5][6]
In "A Farewell to Arts", Stove wrote that he abandoned Marxism when he discovered "what real intellectual work was".[7]
In his essay "Why You Should be A Conservative", Stove argued that actions can have unforeseen and unwelcome consequences; that just because something is wrong or evil, it does not follow that the world would be better off without it; and that a decline in respect for life and property had led to a decline in quality of life.[8]
In "Racial and Other Antagonisms" (1989) Stove asserted that racism is not a form of prejudice but common sense: "Almost everyone unites in declaring 'racism' false and detestable. Yet absolutely everyone knows it is true".[9]
In "The Intellectual Capacity of Women" (1990) he stated his belief that "the intellectual capacity of women is on the whole inferior to that of men".[10][11]
Tbh I can't get behind his premises so I don't find this particularly compelling. But I'm very unsurprised by his other opinions.The guy that hosts this page shares some of them.
Oh nice, I already disliked the guy's insufferable writing, but I feel a lot more justified knowing he's also an insufferable person. I figured he was just your normal Eurocentric philosophy guy,...
Oh nice, I already disliked the guy's insufferable writing, but I feel a lot more justified knowing he's also an insufferable person. I figured he was just your normal Eurocentric philosophy guy, as it's pretty common (unfortunately) for philosophers in the West to ignore schools of philosophy from other places. I feel a lot less guilty about not reading the whole piece in depth knowing that he's a bog-standard racist and misogynist, too.
Perhaps it would be reasonable to reinterpret the article as asking why so much Western philosophy is nonsense, and leave Eastern philosophical nonsense for some other time?
Perhaps it would be reasonable to reinterpret the article as asking why so much Western philosophy is nonsense, and leave Eastern philosophical nonsense for some other time?
Fair point, but if you're going to write a line about how it represents all human thought without looking outside Europe, you're basically begging for me to call what you're saying nonsense too 😉
Fair point, but if you're going to write a line about how it represents all human thought without looking outside Europe, you're basically begging for me to call what you're saying nonsense too 😉
I’m all for criticism of bad writing, but what is Stove’s deal? I’m frustrated by his approach of quoting some confusing paragraph from the middle of a famous work, then proclaiming that it’s...
I’m all for criticism of bad writing, but what is Stove’s deal? I’m frustrated by his approach of quoting some confusing paragraph from the middle of a famous work, then proclaiming that it’s self-evidently bullshit, and concluding that most (western) intellectual pursuits have been some sort of collective delusion.
What even is the point of this line of argument? If it really was that obvious that so many famous philosophers were “dangerous lunatics”, they wouldn’t be dangerous. It really feels like the author just wants to stroke his ego. And what does the reader get out of it, the knowledge that someone thinks Foucault was a bullshitter? That’s all anyone ever says about the guy!
Stove says that defects in character are a source of bad philosophy. With this in mind, it seems relevant to point out that his opinions about women and racial minorities are easily accessible on his Wikipedia page. (Also he once held a competition and awarded the prize to himself, which is a relatively minor sin but a funny one.)
This is a book except that I read because it was linked from an anti-philosophy blog post, but I'm not familiar with the author. I thought it was pretty funny. Maybe a less grandiose conclusion...
This is a book except that I read because it was linked from an anti-philosophy blog post, but I'm not familiar with the author. I thought it was pretty funny.
Maybe a less grandiose conclusion would be that famous philosophers wrote nonsense sometimes?
Yeah that’s totally fair. I guess I reacted especially negatively because the essay was similar to a lot of other (bad imo) arguments that I’ve lost patience for. I’m the interest of making fun of...
Yeah that’s totally fair. I guess I reacted especially negatively because the essay was similar to a lot of other (bad imo) arguments that I’ve lost patience for.
My four examples above are, then, sufficiently representative, respectively, of Christian theology, of neo-Platonist metaphysics, of German idealism, and of whatever it is that Foucault represents. Those four things, in their turn, are sufficiently representative of what human thought, in its highest reaches, has been. My four examples, however, are also examples of thought gone hopelessly wrong. A damning verdict therefore follows, on past human thought: a verdict essentially the same as the one which was pronounced on it by the eighteenth century Enlightenment, and repeated, with even greater vehemence, by the Logical Positivists in the twentieth century.
Of course it is a verdict against most past thought, not against all of it. Exempted from it are, for example, Greek mathematics in antiquity, and most importantly of course, natural science in the period since Copernicus: this being the ground on which the Enlightenment in general, and Logical Positivism in particular, took its stand. But both Greek mathematics and modern science are, in the overall historical scene, mere points of light in a boundless and impenetrable darkness. Most of even the highest human thought is what David Hume said religion is: 'sick men's dreams.’ By contrast, rational thought - what Hume called the 'calm sunshine of the mind' - is historically rare, local, and ephemeral.
From an Enlightenment or Positivist point of view, which is Hume's point of view, and mine, there is simply no avoiding the conclusion that the human race is mad. There are scarcely any human beings who do not have some lunatic beliefs or other to which they attach great importance. People are mostly sane enough, of course, in the affairs of common life: the getting of food, shelter, and so on. But the moment they attempt any depth or generality of thought, they go mad almost infallibly. The vast majority, of course, adopt the local religious madness, as naturally as they adopt the local dress. But the more powerful minds will, equally infallibly, fall into the worship of some intelligent and dangerous lunatic, such as Plato, or Augustine, or Comte, or Hegel, or Marx.
😒 I hate sentences like this with a passion. This sort of Enlightenment-fixed thinking— Oh, hello! 🤭 Thank you for the little excerpt. I will now read the whole thing. 😅
Those four things, in their turn, are sufficiently representative of what human thought, in its highest reaches, has been.
😒 I hate sentences like this with a passion. This sort of Enlightenment-fixed thinking—
My four examples, however, are also examples of thought gone hopelessly wrong.
Oh, hello! 🤭
Thank you for the little excerpt. I will now read the whole thing. 😅
This reminded me of someone. When I was doing my degree (a BS in Philosophy, because it's fun to say and I liked neurosciencey things), I had a classmate a year ahead of me who wrote/talked like this. He wore a beret and round glasses, talked incessantly, never finished books, got in some shit over quaaludes and ended up doing some sort of self help cult. His website is still up so I assume that must have worked out ok. I won't link it because I don't need him getting a whiff of me remembering. I bring it up because of that paragraph about "powerful minds" choosing philosophers over religion, I swear that could have been written by him.
I had the most fun with philosophy when we stopped reading the ancients/western stuff and got into where it intersects with things/problem solving. Neuroscience, psychology, the big problems of broad things like politics and superstructures, shit is endlessly interesting because human beings just don't stop, and what's a solution today might tomorrow become a new problem. Epistemology was always my favorite slice, because it pretty much shatters a lot of the enlightenment-era attachment to stuff like "knowledge", "reason", "truth", etc. Folks don't all think the same about that, they don't all define the words the same way, and knowing some of the differences means being able to communicate in rare and special ways about difficult stuff with folks you might not think you could reach. Being able to crunch some absurd set of ideas and extrude them out into a simpler, more easily communicated shape is a skill, at least that's how my professors approached what we were doing. It wasn't about who was right, it was about just taking what was out there, making some sense of it, and seeing if/how it could apply to anything, with a broader aim of "find and fix a problem somewhere". Sometimes folks need words for things, a problem needs to be identified/broken down, a situation needs to be understood, before work can be done. You can work the ability to do stuff like that by trudging through what some beleaguered nerd of the past tried to say, but it comes with a challenge, don't take them too seriously. Nobody gets it 100%, and between the politics and our own psychology, some real good thoughts are probably getting left out. You're on your own there, try to avoid having those book purchases show up on anything. You'll have to steal some depending how deep you wanna go.
I'll be real I'm not sure I had a huge point to make, I just wanted to provide a bit of a counterweight to the arrogance/disdain Stove displays talking the way he does, as someone who probably investigated a bunch of the same things. He is doing beret wearer shit in my view. Trying to proclaim all human thought is madness is like telling me the sky is blue or that water is wet - no shit, my guy, we're human, take off the beret, have two beers. Ignoring other parts of the world and calling folks primitive is just being shitty at the job, too. The job is to embrace the madness - understand its forms, speak its tongues, know the way it travels, so that perhaps while it unfolds we can contribute in a good way toward making life a little nicer. At least, that's been my opinion for a while with respect to what philosophy is for/about.
Sorry to ramble, I guess I can't stop myself when the beret sensor tingles a bit. I got annoyed and skimmed too, just to be honest with you. I really enjoyed the stuff I studied, and this sort of argumentation about the absolute state of something like "human thought" feels akin to an argument about whether Goku can defeat a Gundam. I certainly am guilty of trying to talk about stuff that's too big for me, but I try to maintain a certain humility and openness to critique that feels completely absent in the way Stove expresses himself, just like my old classmate.
I'm more or less unwilling to read something of this length that both says this and doesn't even give the barest reference to any eastern philosophers (at least not that I could find). I've got an extremely shallow level of knowledge of Chinese philosophy and even I can identify some very obvious points worth engaging with in an article on this topic (especially given that this article clearly isn't aiming for brevity). I would love to see how this writer would engage with Zhuangzi's butterfly, for instance, if there was any indication that he'd even heard of him.
Well he considered vodou to come from a primitive people.
So your instinct about his Western centrism is correct. And is exactly the sort of rationalism/atheism I dislike.
But I found the authors Wikipedia
Tbh I can't get behind his premises so I don't find this particularly compelling. But I'm very unsurprised by his other opinions.The guy that hosts this page shares some of them.
Oh nice, I already disliked the guy's insufferable writing, but I feel a lot more justified knowing he's also an insufferable person. I figured he was just your normal Eurocentric philosophy guy, as it's pretty common (unfortunately) for philosophers in the West to ignore schools of philosophy from other places. I feel a lot less guilty about not reading the whole piece in depth knowing that he's a bog-standard racist and misogynist, too.
Perhaps it would be reasonable to reinterpret the article as asking why so much Western philosophy is nonsense, and leave Eastern philosophical nonsense for some other time?
Fair point, but if you're going to write a line about how it represents all human thought without looking outside Europe, you're basically begging for me to call what you're saying nonsense too 😉
I’m all for criticism of bad writing, but what is Stove’s deal? I’m frustrated by his approach of quoting some confusing paragraph from the middle of a famous work, then proclaiming that it’s self-evidently bullshit, and concluding that most (western) intellectual pursuits have been some sort of collective delusion.
What even is the point of this line of argument? If it really was that obvious that so many famous philosophers were “dangerous lunatics”, they wouldn’t be dangerous. It really feels like the author just wants to stroke his ego. And what does the reader get out of it, the knowledge that someone thinks Foucault was a bullshitter? That’s all anyone ever says about the guy!
Stove says that defects in character are a source of bad philosophy. With this in mind, it seems relevant to point out that his opinions about women and racial minorities are easily accessible on his Wikipedia page. (Also he once held a competition and awarded the prize to himself, which is a relatively minor sin but a funny one.)
This is a book except that I read because it was linked from an anti-philosophy blog post, but I'm not familiar with the author. I thought it was pretty funny.
Maybe a less grandiose conclusion would be that famous philosophers wrote nonsense sometimes?
Yeah that’s totally fair. I guess I reacted especially negatively because the essay was similar to a lot of other (bad imo) arguments that I’ve lost patience for.
I’m the interest of making fun of Hegel, I’ll share this post: https://pervegalit.wordpress.com/2012/06/09/how-to-fake-your-way-through-hegel/
From the article:
😒 I hate sentences like this with a passion. This sort of Enlightenment-fixed thinking—
Oh, hello! 🤭
Thank you for the little excerpt. I will now read the whole thing. 😅