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Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

psyche.co

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Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#131

Post by denton-scratch »

whimsicalism wrote: post #76
bakhy wrote: post #32

There's a contradiction in the conclusion. Foucault was an academic philosopher, got a degree in philosophy, was awarded a doctorate, and is respected by many people who also got a lot of education in philosophy. So, how is more philosophy education supposed to have stopped him?

I suspect they are saying more analytic philosophy education a la departments in Britain and America would have lead to more critical thinking.

Publishing books on analytical philosophy, logical philosophy, and philosophy of language generally doesn't get you a bestseller that makes you rich and famous.

Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#132

Post by MockObject »

baron_harkonnen wrote: post #114
whimsicalism wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that this article is rehashing the age-old continental vs. analytical debate, I disagree that because the debate is old, it is thus worthless. I see many defending the "perfectly clear" meaning of continental philosophers, even if they don't obviously build up a clear argument from assumptions like a "10 year old" analytic philosopher might do. Many, in my view, are forgetting just quite how obscurant many of…

> is close-to-incomprehensible to me Because it's written for an audience of people who are very familiar with structuralism, Althusser, and the general development of Marxist philosophy over a 200 year period of time. This is no different than a paper like "Attention is All You Need" expecting you to have a background in neural networks, recurrent neural networks specifically, neural-language models, and the transfo…

When I consider that sentence, except with all the technical terms replaced with ones with which I am well acquainted, it would still be quite a severe mouthful, begging to be rewritten for clarity.

And that is the point.

Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#133

Post by whimsicalism »

denton-scratch wrote: post #131
whimsicalism wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect they are saying more analytic philosophy education a la departments in Britain and America would have lead to more critical thinking.

Publishing books on analytical philosophy, logical philosophy, and philosophy of language generally doesn't get you a bestseller that makes you rich and famous.

Theory of Justice?

Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#134

Post by BlueTemplar »

ostrophonics wrote: post #10

This sort of thing is always by turns boring and frustrating to read, because there are good and interesting philosophical criticisms to be made of Foucault's epistemology, but the idea that for him facticity itself is questionable isn't one of them. Foucault is never really in doubt about what constitutes, e.g., an event, occurrence, or fact - actually his entire corpus very self-consciously relies on having a commo…

Yeah, isn't it basically a repeat of Jordan Peterson's criticism of 'French Theory' academics ?

I don't know that much about 'postmodernism', but it seems like both JP and the North American academics responsible for the 'French Theory' are pretty much misunderstanding those French philosophers (which is partially the fault of French philosopher's dense prose, which isn't new for philosophers (I hear some Germans are even worse ?), and maybe also the North American academics being unable to read French, which is new ?

https://medium.com/s/story/peterson-historian-aide-m%C3%A9mo...

https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/french-theory-how-foucault-derrida-...

Funnily enough, Peterson is in a way right about calling their bullshit ? But that's easier than being constructive... (Which he probably also is in that book of his, but self-help isn't philosophy.)

Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#135

Post by BlueTemplar »

ostrophonics wrote: post #10

This sort of thing is always by turns boring and frustrating to read, because there are good and interesting philosophical criticisms to be made of Foucault's epistemology, but the idea that for him facticity itself is questionable isn't one of them. Foucault is never really in doubt about what constitutes, e.g., an event, occurrence, or fact - actually his entire corpus very self-consciously relies on having a commo…

I'm interested about this claim :

> This kind of fallacious critique of the notion of objective truth is a particularly pernicious aspect of obscurantist pseudophilosophy in general. Often, it’s due to simple misunderstandings (such as confusing truth with belief or knowledge), but sometimes it’s due rather to wilful obscurity (as in the case of Foucault).

Now, surely if this is a valid claim, it would have been made during Foucault's life ? What did he respond to criticisms like these ?

EDIT : I guess this Foucault/Chomsky debate might answer this question ? I'll have to find time to listen to it... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26077760

Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#136

Post by DyslexicAtheist »

truthbetoldnow wrote: post #66

Reality is subjective and so should philosophy be. Nobody knows what is going on here and anyone that thinks they do is lying. What is right for me may not be right for you. Learn what is right for you through trial and error. Failure is the best teacher to find out something will not work. Nobody should follow anyone else. You should be the leader of your own life as it is your experience. The goal is not self indul…

> It is as simple as that, no philosopher or book can tell you that

yet Heidegger's central point was exactly that.

Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#137

Post by ostrophene »

paganel wrote: post #50
ostrophonics wrote: post #10

This sort of thing is always by turns boring and frustrating to read, because there are good and interesting philosophical criticisms to be made of Foucault's epistemology, but the idea that for him facticity itself is questionable isn't one of them. Foucault is never really in doubt about what constitutes, e.g., an event, occurrence, or fact - actually his entire corpus very self-consciously relies on having a commo…

> facticity itself There are facts and facts. The OP thinks that Foucault's (pseudo-)philosophy is against the fact that the Earth is non-flat, or that saying that the Earth is non-flat is somehow infused with ideology, but there are also facts that are given to us as true (and which affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people) which are indeed infused with ideology, one of the latest examples being the "fact"…

yes. the point of my post was that Foucault, rightly or wrongly, has a clear delineation of what counts as fact and what counts as Fact. we can freely debate the ideological implications of THAT division. but he does not - and this is my point - throw the baby of reliable objective reference out with the bathwater of ideological knowledge formation.

Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#138

Post by denton-scratch »

Nasrudith wrote: post #65
jnwatson wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience is exactly the opposite. My undergraduate philosophy degree had exactly one history class. Names of philosophers were important mostly to label ideas. I'm not sure what you're talking about with respect to philosophical positions invalidated by science. I can't think of any myself.

The ancient Greek philosophers contain some real howlers like Aristotlean impetus and belief that women must have fewer teeth than men because of a smaller skull and an assumption that human teeth are identical in size and spacing. They refused to check their ideas to reality under a self indulgent concept of "purity of thought". I blame aristocratic influnce and the disdain for the practical.

That would be the "pre-socratics". I was forced to study them for my degree, and I could barely contain my laughter.

Some of those guys had some pretty bonkers beliefs, and it does seem to be true that they often disdained actually cheecking their claims empirically. A few of them were on the nail, though, at least sometimes; Democritus, for example.

Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#139

Post by mancerayder »

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #121
jonathanstrange wrote: post #52

As somebody who makes a living "as a philosopher" in areas that overlap with CS, decision making, logic, AI and appear to be more scientific in nature, I may find this article emotionally somewhat appealing but still don't think it's a useful view about philosophy. The first and foremost thing about philosophy laymen should realize is that the vast majority of philosophers do not consider philosophy a science. They a…

I've done well by staying clear of anyone airing their thoughts about post-modernity in the past 15 years. (perhaps with the exception of some very few individuals like Zizek). This is because of the constant efforts from conservative pseudo-philosopher's like Stephen Hicks[0] (who on his YT channel hasn't shied away from inviting neo-Nazis to talk about the subject) all the way to JP[1] who do not understand the top…

It seems that applied postmodernism takes a very anti-materialist stance that rankles left wing (old school) progressives and centrist liberals as well. Standpoint Theory and Social Constructivism contradict materialist conceptions of knowledge and power, and they contradict classical liberal ideals of progress.

Also, we often see criticisms of social constructivism as "alt right" and the evidence for this are people who are on the right. But there are plenty of people on the Left as well who criticize applied postmodernism and it seems they get swept up unfairly in labels.

Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#140

Post by BlueTemplar »

mordymoop wrote: post #61
Veen wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's the century plus old distinction between analytical and continental philosophy The article's claim is not that this distinction doesn't exist or that it is not a useful distinction, but that "pseudophilosphers" tend to equivocate between "truth as some property of the universe" and "truth as it matters to us". That seems to me to be an interesting position that is worth considering. (btw. the claim that "The d…

This is a rhetorical trick that people have been using for a long time. The Thinker takes a bold and shocking stand, which is compressed, by the rules of memetic natural selection, into the boldest and shocking-est possible framing: "People don't actually care about their children." Or "Truth doesn't exist." Or "We should kill poor people to increase the average level of happiness." People are instantly nerdsniped by…

You seem to have exaggerated the 'stands' you give as examples. The problem with that is that I'm instantly reminded of all those times where I've seen critics of some 'Thinkers' accuse them of taking 'stands' like these, and after more or less digging (depending on of unpopular they were) it indeed ended up being either words taken out of context, or just strawmen.
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