To me, philosophy is the art of finding the most low-stakes, ungrounded problems on Earth, so you can argue about the solution ad nauseam until eventually someone who doesn't care about philosophy stumbles across the solution by mistake.
Gilles Deleuze – What is Philosophy? [audio]
71–80 of 89 posts
Re: Gilles Deleuze – What is Philosophy? [audio]
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
this is more of a problem of the US reception of Deleuze via literary studies not philosophy, Deleuze is a very serious and rational thinker, but without context, it's senseless (which people use for posturing)
Hm, I should not have used the word "drivel", that may have been a bit too harsh. A thing with Deleuze is that I still see very little value in some of his ideas. The idea of a "rhizome" for instance (which might be related to Latour's "actor-network theory") seems rather trivial to me. This may well be because I grew up in a time when these ideas were already fairly mainstream, but I find it highly unlikely that peo…
most of it is an attempt to escape Hegelianism/Marxism/psychoanalysis, but his earlier works (Difference and Repetition, Logic Of Sense) are much better in terms of accessibility, to me his best are books on other philosophers, on Kant, Spinoza, Leibniz.
The late stages of philosophers' works are often quite wacky.
Re: Gilles Deleuze – What is Philosophy? [audio]
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Excuse my spamminess (and for hijacking the current top comment), but I would like to recommend the innocent looking episode 162 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-43zh_za_eQ The Creation of Meaning - The Denial of Death ( transcript https://www.philosophizethis.org/transcript/episode-162-tran... ) "The Denial of Death is a 1973 book by American cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker which discusses the psychological an…
"you know a squirrel doesn't sit around and agonize over what kind of squirrel they want to be this week" 3:37 I'm not sure about this. Some look quite contemplative.
yes, it's nuts
Re: Gilles Deleuze – What is Philosophy? [audio]
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is very strange.. Those are not what tautologies are. In order for something to be tautological, you need to be working within some formal system of proof. Proposing definitions to terms could never be tautological. I think you just want to say "I know that already!" Also, Deleuze would love this comment, precisely because of your confusion in the term. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Sense
> This is very strange.. Those are not what tautologies are. > I think you just want to say "I know that already!" > “All humans are mammals” is held to assert with regard to anything whatsoever that either it is not a human or it is a mammal. But that universal “truth” follows not from any facts noted about real humans but only from the actual use of human and mammal and is thus purely a matter of definition. [1] Mo…
As the parent commenter, I already put a reply you could respond to
Re: Gilles Deleuze – What is Philosophy? [audio]
#75Earlier 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.
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 eve…
I would like to third this as well. Software developers are incredibly familiar with the concept of a field that contains a lot of jargon and that you can't have meaningful conversations about certain things until you've learned some of it: that's also software engineering!
Just because these folks are writing for people with a different background than the one that you have doesn't mean it's nonsense, it means you have yet to engage with enough of the field to understand what's going on. Everyone starts there!
Re: Gilles Deleuze – What is Philosophy? [audio]
#76Earlier 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…
I'm pretty sure Deleuze never said anything about difference, multiplicity, variables, or process that has proved useful to a scientist or engineer, but I'd be very interested to be proved wrong.
I'm an engineer and I find some of his stuff useful, particularly when it comes to thinking through how to think about how to use large p, small n data.
But I also don't have a strong reactionary anger to Deleuze's penchant for writing in an obscurant quasi-post-modern literary style, and I get that many do. In any case, it's not like similar ideas are not also worked through in less cryptic ways in contemporary philosophy of science journals.
Re: Gilles Deleuze – What is Philosophy? [audio]
#77"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
I know almost nothing about philosophy and exactly nothing about Deleuze.
I do know the ancient philosophers cared a lot about change.
So I assume Deleuze's notions wrt change are serious too, and not just some self-help new age crap.
Re: Gilles Deleuze – What is Philosophy? [audio]
#78Earlier 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…
> To have a variable is to assume that something can vary. Tautology. > To be a cause is to assume something can make a difference. Tautology. > To have a process is to assume a system that can change and transform. Tautology. Vacuous is exactly how I'd describe the above. The only statement with potential depth is: > To make a measurement you assume there is a scale to measure difference. This invokes quantum mechan…
> This invokes quantum mechanics a little.
It also invokes politics, economics, and all that implements some form of notional value, because as some other philosopher quipped, what gets measured gets treasured.
Re: Gilles Deleuze – What is Philosophy? [audio]
#79Philosophy is accurately describing an antagonism instead of asking questions which just further mystify the antagonism allowing it to continue, unabated. This is the time for philosophers.
Re: Gilles Deleuze – What is Philosophy? [audio]
#80To me, philosophy is the art of finding the most low-stakes, ungrounded problems on Earth, so you can argue about the solution ad nauseam until eventually someone who doesn't care about philosophy stumbles across the solution by mistake.
what's an example of something argued successfully/unsuccessfully in your definition?