Gilles Deleuze – What is Philosophy? [audio] • Hacker News Board

Re: Gilles Deleuze – What is Philosophy? [audio]

#51

Post by zupatol » Sat, Dec 09, 2023, 5:25 PM UTC

nathias wrote: post #36

zupatol wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read a few pages of thousand plateaus and I didn't get the impression he really wanted the reader to make sense of it. It's full of quotations of works you would certainly know if you had enough culture. It feels like an violent attempt to humiliate the reader into submission. Apparently the english version came out with a lot of footnotes to provide context. This probably betrays the spirit of the original. I'll t…

Continental philosophy has some starting points, but some authors will be completely incomprehensible without reading most of the classical works. It's written for philosophers. If you haven't read at least Kant and Hegel, Heidegger and know what psychoanalysis and structuralism are about you have no basis of understanding for it.

Haven't read all of that, but it strikes me that some of these authors like Freud and Levi-Strauss are perfectly understandable without much background. Haven't tried Kant but other authors consider him very methodic and logical, about the opposite of Deuleuze, and he's a big inspiration for the very readable Schopenhauer.

Maybe Hegel and Heidegger are where things get complicated.

Re: Gilles Deleuze – What is Philosophy? [audio]

#52

Post by mrkeen » Sat, Dec 09, 2023, 5:29 PM UTC

nathias wrote: post #6

Deleuze is one of the best thinkers of the last century, but he requires a lot of reading before what he's saying can make any sense.

What was something he said that made sense?

Re: Gilles Deleuze – What is Philosophy? [audio]

#53

Post by keiferski » Sat, Dec 09, 2023, 5:55 PM UTC

zvmaz wrote: post #3

"Deleuze's work is characterized by his emphasis on difference and multiplicity, which he saw as fundamental to understanding the world. He developed a philosophy of becoming, which emphasizes the importance of change and transformation." Vacuous. Reminds me of David Stove's "What is wrong with our thoughts" [1]. [1] https://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/wrongthoughts.html

These words have specific meanings in Deleuze’s philosophy. They aren’t that complicated.

Your comment is tantamount to someone that doesn’t speak German saying “vacuous” when they come across a word like Geist. Lazy and uninformed.

Re: Gilles Deleuze – What is Philosophy? [audio]

#54

Post by standfest » Sat, Dec 09, 2023, 5:55 PM UTC

abyssin wrote: post #39

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #26

One of the greatest charlatans of postmodernism

For those interested in reading a great book exposing Deleuze and others like him, I recommend Fashionable Nonsense by Sokal & Bricmont.

I am not a big fan of the Sokal Hoax and the follow ups. They made cheap money out of obvious misinterpretations, and did much more harm than anything else. While Chomsky, maybe from a US perspective, found some value, I am more with Derrida who analysed it as what it was: sad. I recommend his perspective https://philpapers.org/rec/DERPM

Re: Gilles Deleuze – What is Philosophy? [audio]

#55

Post by namarie » Sat, Dec 09, 2023, 5:57 PM UTC

zupatol wrote: post #51

nathias wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Continental philosophy has some starting points, but some authors will be completely incomprehensible without reading most of the classical works. It's written for philosophers. If you haven't read at least Kant and Hegel, Heidegger and know what psychoanalysis and structuralism are about you have no basis of understanding for it.

Haven't read all of that, but it strikes me that some of these authors like Freud and Levi-Strauss are perfectly understandable without much background. Haven't tried Kant but other authors consider him very methodic and logical, about the opposite of Deuleuze, and he's a big inspiration for the very readable Schopenhauer. Maybe Hegel and Heidegger are where things get complicated.

Do try Kant; being "methodic and logical" in no way implies being easy to read!

Re: Gilles Deleuze – What is Philosophy? [audio]

#56

Post by standfest » Sat, Dec 09, 2023, 6:00 PM UTC

nathias wrote: post #36

zupatol wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read a few pages of thousand plateaus and I didn't get the impression he really wanted the reader to make sense of it. It's full of quotations of works you would certainly know if you had enough culture. It feels like an violent attempt to humiliate the reader into submission. Apparently the english version came out with a lot of footnotes to provide context. This probably betrays the spirit of the original. I'll t…

Continental philosophy has some starting points, but some authors will be completely incomprehensible without reading most of the classical works. It's written for philosophers. If you haven't read at least Kant and Hegel, Heidegger and know what psychoanalysis and structuralism are about you have no basis of understanding for it.

I would like to support this observation. Obviously, they generated some language of their own, with lots of implications and references. Once you start reading it, it becomes a rabbit hole (back in the days my entry point was Adorno and Horkheimer). Words might be familiar, but their meaning is different. There was a reason to study, and the trend to render science accessible to laypeople was not yet born. Maybe even not wanted, to quote the ideas behind the concept of cultural industrial complex.

Re: Gilles Deleuze – What is Philosophy? [audio]

#57

Post by Cockbrand » Sat, Dec 09, 2023, 6:04 PM UTC

There's a quite influential electronic music label called Mille Plateaux [0], named after Deleuze's work. Label founder Achim Szepanski often quoted Deleuze in interviews and liner notes. I found that somewhat pretentious b/c I could hardly grasp any of that. Still, Mille Plateaux released quite a few absolutely timeless classics.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mille_Plateaux_(record_label)

Re: Gilles Deleuze – What is Philosophy? [audio]

#58

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Dec 09, 2023, 6:06 PM UTC

modernpink wrote: post #38

bangkoksbest wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Stove essay (in truth it's a prolonged rant) supposedly extols the virtues of empirical thinking, and you invoked it to back up the sense you had that the description of Deleuze's philosophy is vacuous... And yet... Difference and multiplicity are core to empirical data and scientific & engineering modelling. To make a measurement you assume there is a scale to measure difference. To have a variable is to assume…

All of modern science is possible without philosophy. In fact, it is when what was called natural philosophy broke off into the natural sciences that philosophy per se devolved into a series of language games on metaphysics that became of little relevance aside from those in the philosophy profession itself. All our modern advances from hypersonic missiles, large language models, quantum physics and spaceflight and a…

[deleted]

Re: Gilles Deleuze – What is Philosophy? [audio]

#59

Post by kelseyfrog » Sat, Dec 09, 2023, 6:15 PM UTC

modernpink wrote: post #38

bangkoksbest wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Stove essay (in truth it's a prolonged rant) supposedly extols the virtues of empirical thinking, and you invoked it to back up the sense you had that the description of Deleuze's philosophy is vacuous... And yet... Difference and multiplicity are core to empirical data and scientific & engineering modelling. To make a measurement you assume there is a scale to measure difference. To have a variable is to assume…

All of modern science is possible without philosophy. In fact, it is when what was called natural philosophy broke off into the natural sciences that philosophy per se devolved into a series of language games on metaphysics that became of little relevance aside from those in the philosophy profession itself. All our modern advances from hypersonic missiles, large language models, quantum physics and spaceflight and a…

Let me see if I got this right by echoing it aphoristically: science doesn't care about epistemology?

How do you feel about falsifiability?

Re: Gilles Deleuze – What is Philosophy? [audio]

#60

Post by nathias » Sat, Dec 09, 2023, 6:16 PM UTC

zupatol wrote: post #51

nathias wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Continental philosophy has some starting points, but some authors will be completely incomprehensible without reading most of the classical works. It's written for philosophers. If you haven't read at least Kant and Hegel, Heidegger and know what psychoanalysis and structuralism are about you have no basis of understanding for it.

Haven't read all of that, but it strikes me that some of these authors like Freud and Levi-Strauss are perfectly understandable without much background. Haven't tried Kant but other authors consider him very methodic and logical, about the opposite of Deuleuze, and he's a big inspiration for the very readable Schopenhauer. Maybe Hegel and Heidegger are where things get complicated.

Freud and Levi-Strauss were scientists/academics who influenced philosophy, but not philosophers. Philosophy has a lot of dependencies, this is why every so often a fork is needed to 'restart' but it never works and dependencies start piling up again.