The title of pseudo-philosophy (or sometimes labeled "x's 'so called' philosophy of ...") is thrown around from time to time to disparage/discredit certain views or thinkers. A common example is Ayn Rand*, (her "so called" Philosophy of Objectivism for example). I think this title of pseudo-philosophy is meant to demarcate something that sounds philosophical but that lacks the proper argumentation of support. Is this a correct characterization of pseudo-philosophy? If so, what is the status of seminal philosophical works such as Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus? For I think that this work lacks 'arguments' in favor of pronouncements. So does philosophy itself have a Popperian "demarcation problem"? Otherwise, can someone give me a good example of pseudo-philosophy, or exactly what people mean by this, and further, what distinguishes it from philosophy proper? Any other thoughts or questions?
*I am not a Rand fan/apologist, it is just a common title or remark for her works. I've only read "Anthem" when I was heavy into dystopias in high school.
To use Rosenbaum as a point, the problem is mostly robustness and inflexibility with what the actual philosophy tries to accomplish. She's trying to tell a way of how society should be through some major points, some of which are correct and some of which are against human nature. Objectivism also hasn't had the advantage of several hundreds of years for innovation in the way that Aristoleanism and other such ideologies have.
Others, such as feminism, become too ivory towered and try to build a new language out of something that's fairly common like sex and human relationships. Rather than adopting languages as an intersection between various sciences and philosophies to help normalize aligned concepts the school tried to reinvent verbiage. Eventually we end up with stuff like zhe and the whole privilege bit, which doesn't help much because the argumentation style descends into talks about "well you have privilege, but you're just not *aware* enough of it. Which makes it into a contrite argument.
The same with anarcho-capitalism, where "everything that government does is a moral hazard." I'm frankly not really impressed with that form of anarchism, as some of the basic structures for the argument tended to not be able to answer some fundamental questions. Those that drifted closer to the nightwachman approach to government were better served, but that placed those people into the min anarchist camp. When you can't really explain how to deal with humans on a wide scale you fail. At the very least there are min anarchists that have argued for the decline of nation-states and the rise of city-states which is a lot more fair because of how much GDP a city has on a nation-state. That and capped with the old neo-confederate ideology that the Civil War was totally about state's rights added another inflexible argument in light of primary documents.
The ideologies get trapped in these little bugbear dillemas with doctrine or as acting to midwife for an overfocus on one area and a lack of focus on others that affects more people like domestic violence.
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Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
Obviously there's no bright line, but I wouldn't call someone like Rand a pseudophilosopher - just a poor philosopher. "Pseudophilosophy" as I use it really means crazier crazies like, oh, Deepak Chopra. Rand was a self-taught amateur who didn't take constructive criticism very well, and accordingly she made some embarrassing mistakes, but at least she grasped the fundamental concepts of what philosophy was about and what a rigorous analytic argument looked like. Like them or not, you knew exactly what Rand's claims were and why she thought they were true. Pseudophilosophers are more the sort who make vague, cryptic, deep-sounding pronouncements and expect them to be accepted on the basis of intuition rather than argument. They tend to react poorly to analysis, often responding to critics who request concrete definitions and propositions with handwaves like, "These ideas cannot truly be put into words" or "If you have to ask, you cannot ever understand."
Oh, Jacques Derrida. He's a pseudophilosopher who's inexplicably read in some of the darker and more gullible corners of the academy.
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Interesting, I've heard people tear into Derrida, but not as a pseudo-philosophy, but rather as a poor philosophy. Where would someone like Heidegger fit? I've often heard him described as almost purposely incomprehensible. Obviously different scholars have different opinions, but I do recall reading Being and Time (I've only read small sections of it) and being utterly baffled at first, that book really made me think hard about what he was trying to say.
You need to read Derrida very sympathetically to call his stuff philosophy of any kind.
Pseudophilosophy is, more or less, saying things that sound deep to stoners. And that's pretty much what Derrida does. No thanks.
Rand, on the other hand, isn't even a poor philosopher. She's actually a pretty decent one. She's no more wrong than most philosophers (most philosophical points that have ever been made have eventually been discredited). Rand is a poor writer - her "storytelling" (which is both compelling and horrible at the same time) gets in the way of the good bits of philosophy. She's also anti-philosophical as an individual, and Objectivist movements tend to treat her work as canonical rather than as subject to discussion or debate. But her philosophical contributions are significant when you shed the, uh, crud.
Derrida is great, but you have to understand the purpose. I'm still not sure it is philosophy. But, as a shaman, I use language to re-shape reality and Derrida shows how to use language as a tool to deconstruct reality, or almost anything else.
Derrida is an excellent resource for destabilizing a variety of texts. One of my favorite Academic activities is to find magic, mythology and occultism hidden in a variety of non-mystical texts. Derrida's method of peeling away layers of language, like you would peel an onion, to reveal things beneath the surface is extremely useful!
I love Ayn Rand's writing, but I hate her philosophy. She presents it excellently, her ideas just sicken me.
Rand, on the other hand, isn't even a poor philosopher. She's actually a pretty decent one. She's no more wrong than most philosophers (most philosophical points that have ever been made have eventually been discredited).
It's not that her conclusions are wrong, it's that her methods are poor. She launches vicious, hyperbolic attacks on arguments she has misinterpreted, most notably those of Immanuel Kant. And her thinking is everywhere heavily contaminated with the fallacy of the false dichotomy. There are other libertarian philosophers who argue for much the same conclusions and do so much more cogently. Robert Nozick springs to mind. His Anarchy, State, and Utopia is an important work in political philosophy and ethics, discussed relatively respectfully even by philosophers who utterly disagree with it. Rand's essays are practically unread.
It's not that her conclusions are wrong, it's that her methods are poor. She launches vicious, hyperbolic attacks on arguments she has misinterpreted, most notably those of Immanuel Kant. And her thinking is everywhere heavily contaminated with the fallacy of the false dichotomy. There are other libertarian philosophers who argue for much the same conclusions and do so much more cogently. Robert Nozick springs to mind. His Anarchy, State, and Utopia is an important work in political philosophy and ethics, discussed relatively respectfully even by philosophers who utterly disagree with it. Rand's essays are practically unread.
Like I said, her essays are practically unread.
Rand also called herself a Romantic in a Donahue interview(it's on youtube), which has other issues associated with that as well. Equally, having one aspect I've found rather annoying is that just because she saw there for the Bolshevik Revolution and her dad's business was seized by the government doesn't make her necessarily the go to person for everything communist or capitalist.
I feel that the main attraction to her is her antagonistic spirit, her ability to move upwardly in society with tact, simplicity of her message, and the tract towards rugged individualism. Which tends to be a problem with American society, since it wasn't so much the rugged individualist that made society rather the urbane Renaissance Men like Franklin and some of the lesser known individuals and tended to be more community oriented than some of the modern right tries to paint them as.
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Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
Individualities may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.
Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
It's not that her conclusions are wrong, it's that her methods are poor. She launches vicious, hyperbolic attacks on arguments she has misinterpreted, most notably those of Immanuel Kant. And her thinking is everywhere heavily contaminated with the fallacy of the false dichotomy. There are other libertarian philosophers who argue for much the same conclusions and do so much more cogently. Robert Nozick springs to mind. His Anarchy, State, and Utopia is an important work in political philosophy and ethics, discussed relatively respectfully even by philosophers who utterly disagree with it. Rand's essays are practically unread.
I mean obviously yes, this is how Rand operates. I don't agree that this invalidates her work as serious philosophy (moves it into the category of 'pseudo-philosophy'), though, in much the same way that Nietzsche's manner of writing and argumentation is both far from the norms for philosophical writing and frankly pretty much obscurantist a lot of the time. Neither writer really fits into mainstream philosophy (Nietzsche has been more aggressively rehabilitated than Rand has in recent years, though), but they're both right there on the fringes and have a lot to offer if read carefully.
I guess it just comes down to how much weight that label of pseudo-philosophy has. If you label something as pseudo-science, nobody looking for any kind of deep scientific understanding of a subject is going to pay attention to it. Rand deserves to be read carefully and cautiously. This is as opposed to, say, Derrida, who has nothing interesting to say. Personally, I'd reserve the label of pseudo-philosophy for people like Derrida, but I don't know of any broadly accepted razor to use for deciding whether something is or isn't pseudo-science, and if we're having a semantic disagreement over where the line falls, hopefully I've provided enough insight into my own thoughts on the subject for you to identify that fact (Otherwise, we can have a big debate over whether Rand actually brings something to the table, but I feel like that's a whole other thread).
I mean obviously yes, this is how Rand operates. I don't agree that this invalidates her work as serious philosophy (moves it into the category of 'pseudo-philosophy'), though, in much the same way that Nietzsche's manner of writing and argumentation is both far from the norms for philosophical writing and frankly pretty much obscurantist a lot of the time. Neither writer really fits into mainstream philosophy (Nietzsche has been more aggressively rehabilitated than Rand has in recent years, though), but they're both right there on the fringes and have a lot to offer if read carefully.
Recall that I said Rand was a poor philosopher, not a pseudo-philosopher.
Also, Nietzsche, among his many other virtues, was a lot more fun.
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Rand deserves to be read carefully and cautiously. This is as opposed to, say, Derrida, who has nothing interesting to say. Personally, I'd reserve the label of pseudo-philosophy for people like Derrida
I don't understand this. From my understanding Derrida is a controversial figure, and I think there would be no controversy if there were nothing of interest. The stance that Rand should be read and Derrida should not be, seems based on personal interest. So am I correct in assuming: "I call Philosophy things that I like. I call Pseudo-Philsophy things that I don't like."?
Also, Nietzsche, among his many other virtues, was a lot more fun.
This statement also seems to confirm this. "Although his writing is often obscurantist, I label Nietzsche a Philosopher because he is fun to read (or rather his ideas are fun)."
From my understanding Derrida is a controversial figure, and I think there would be no controversy if there were nothing of interest.
Oh, hogwash. There is no controversy about Derrida among professional philosophers. His popularity springs from those in less rigorous disciplines that - how to put this delicately - produce people like pstmdrn.
The stance that Rand should be read and Derrida should not be, seems based on personal interest. So am I correct in assuming: "I call Philosophy things that I like. I call Pseudo-Philsophy things that I don't like."?
This statement also seems to confirm this. "Although his writing is often obscurantist, I label Nietzsche a Philosopher because he is fun to read (or rather his ideas are fun)."
Nietzsche wasn't obscurantist, he was a prose poet. Difference.
Okay, maybe he was a bit obscurantist.
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Oh, hogwash. There is no controversy about Derrida among professional philosophers. His popularity springs from those in less rigorous disciplines that - how to put this delicately - produce people like pstmdrn.
I don't like Ayn Rand. I call her a philosopher.
Nietzsche wasn't obscurantist, he was a prose poet. Difference.
Okay, maybe he was a bit obscurantist.
By professional philosophers do you really mean those in the "analytic" tradition?
The thing about like/dislike equals philosophy/pseudo-philosophy was not directed at you in particular, but point well taken. Perhaps, "like" isn't the best term to use.
I think this whole debate is actually better centered around someone like Derrida than Rand (I sort of regret mentioning her to begin with, as she seems to evoke such strong feelings regarding her work), though regretfully I know little of both thinkers and cannot comment much. But I think (in my not very knowledgeable opinion) that Derrida highlights* a general dislike of a tradition or approach to philosophy, that one either likes or dislikes, and is therefore more or less apt to label that tradition (or thinkers within it) as pseudo-philosophy. I'll quote (from Wikipedia entry on Derrida, so take it for what its worth) this regarding his (Derrida's) influence:
"His output of more than 40 published books, together with essays and public speaking, has had a significant impact upon the humanities,[4] particularly on Anthropology, Sociology, Semiotics, Jurisprudence, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies in general. His influence in the academe in Continental Europe, South America and all countries where continental philosophy is predominant, is enormous; becoming crucial in debates around Ontology, Epistemology (specially concerning Social Sciences), Ethics, Esthetics, Hermeneutics and Philosophy of Language."
Is that influence just an outright lie then? Or is he less influential than the article hints?
Edit: Or is that influence not important, as it's in a less philosophically rigorous discipline like "pstmdrn"?
*Edit 2: By this I mean 'talk or discussion of Derrida' and not 'what Derrida means in such and such a book'.
If pseudo basically comes to mean "sophism" then its ALL that to some degree or another. Most of the contributions made came with a lot of System garbage (Spinoza's substance, Kant, whatever the hell Hegel was building).
And for the most part the debate revolves around whether to build from the system to the world (Kant) or from the world into the system (used to be called inductivism).
Or to put it a different way, the ultimate quandry is that no one knows whether the system is whatever the results say it is (with varying criteria for what counts as 'results') or whether there is some idealization which subsumes all of the results generated in nature.
The easiest example of this I've heard is the Pauli Exclusion Principle. Why can't two fermions occupy the same quantum state simultaneously? Why -- because of the Paul Exclusion Principle. As Pauli was noted for saying "Thats not right! Its not even wrong!" (welcome to positivism)
On the other end of the spectrum you get the Shrodinger wave equation which is said to be "real". Ok..
(and now you're pretty close to tossing in the long tradition of Skepticism starting with the greeks who wanted to puruse problems like "what is the cause of the cause of the cause of the..")
Its interesting to see that probability theory is basically the latest iteration of this dispute playing out, but its extremely ad nauseam at this point.
Marx says that 'Philosophy died with Hegel' (or perhaps more accurately Feuerbach?). I say that philosophy isn't dead..but it should be.
He also said that the point of philosophy is not to explain the world but to change it. For the most part this amounts to "pass the excedrin and get on with your life"
(that last statement being in NO WAY anti-intellectual or a rejection of theory/ideology)
I don't understand this. From my understanding Derrida is a controversial figure, and I think there would be no controversy if there were nothing of interest. The stance that Rand should be read and Derrida should not be, seems based on personal interest. So am I correct in assuming: "I call Philosophy things that I like. I call Pseudo-Philsophy things that I don't like."?
This statement also seems to confirm this. "Although his writing is often obscurantist, I label Nietzsche a Philosopher because he is fun to read (or rather his ideas are fun)."
Pseudo philosophy would be best illustrated by parody - Stewie Griffin, smoking pot in Amsterdam: "Dude, you know what I think? I think we only die because we think we have to. Whoa." *waves hand in the air*
That's parody and it goes a little too far, but it's the difference between things that can hold up to a careful examination (they might turn out to be wrong, but they're at least meaningful) and things that merely sound deep. Derrida is in the latter category. Granted, doing that stuff professionally is quite hard; you have to be obscure enough in your writing that people don't just catch on to the fact that you have nothing to say.
Marx says that 'Philosophy died with Hegel' (or perhaps more accurately Feuerbach?). I say that philosophy isn't dead..but it should be.
He also said that the point of philosophy is not to explain the world but to change it. For the most part this amounts to "pass the excedrin and get on with your life"
Marx was wrong about this. There is interesting, worthwhile philosophy being done today. As an example topic - what would count as a "conscious" AI? As another - moral relativism has undergone a significant resurgence over the last couple decades, where 50 or 100 years ago it was dismissed more or less out of hand.
Some topics in philosophy get played out. That doesn't invalidate philosophy; there are new topics opening up all the time.
Or to put it a different way, the ultimate quandry is that no one knows whether the system is whatever the results say it is (with varying criteria for what counts as 'results') or whether there is some idealization which subsumes all of the results generated in nature.
The easiest example of this I've heard is the Pauli Exclusion Principle. Why can't two fermions occupy the same quantum state simultaneously? Why -- because of the Paul Exclusion Principle. As Pauli was noted for saying "Thats not right! Its not even wrong!" (welcome to positivism)
In any science, if you dig deep enough, you arrive at principles that can only be established empirically. In classical quantum mechanics, the Pauli principle is one of those things. However, if you move to relativistic quantum mechanics, on which the Standard Model is based, Pauli's principle is actually derivable from the spin-statistics theorem. Further advances will further subsume the principle, making it a consequence of simpler axioms rather than an axiom unto itself.
So according to the best current science, you're just wrong, but even if we rewind to the time of Pauli, it's not clear to me how this creates a dichotomy between your two ideas about the ontology of natural systems.
Pauli arrived at his principle by adhering to the idea that the system is whatever the results say it is. He looked at the results, saw that fermions couldn't share spin states, and codified it as an idealization that was meant to subsume all the results. Later, it was subsumed by a better idealization. But that isn't a contradiction -- it's clear evidence that we're on the right track!
In other words, the real ontology of natural systems is actually something like the union of both of your non-contradictory halves: the system is what the results say it is, and there is an idealization that properly subsumes all the results.
On the other end of the spectrum you get the Shrodinger wave equation which is said to be "real". Ok..
What are you driving at here? This is a category mistake at best. What would it mean to say that the Schroedinger equation was "not real?"
By the way, not to put you on the spot, because you're far from alone in this, but attempting to use misinterpretations or non-interpretations of scientific concepts like Pauli's principle or the evolution of wavefunctions by Schroedinger's equation to bootstrap nonsensical philosophical ideas surely falls under the heading of pseudophilosophy.
Hey Crashing, if I may, I think you may understood.
In many disciplines, ones approach is bound to look strange, stilted, or contrived if taken out of its historical context (that is, who the author is engaging). Often the author either sees no good reason to alter the lines of argument of the original (especially if they are being critiqued) or they are left the same on purpose to establish a contrast. On rare occasion they are preserved because the author thinks they are correct, even.
So while I think virtually all "philosophy of physics" is sheer sophism and that most of the examples are about on the order of Philip K Dick "brainbenders", you can't deny that there is a large positivist school of thought in the so-called hard sciences that produces many silly statements which essentially invoke a circular authority (see Pauli example or modern "computerism" for lack of a better word). Like I said, its the easiest/readiest example which almost never means the BEST example.
Pauli arrived at his principle by adhering to the idea that the system is whatever the results say it is. He looked at the results, saw that fermions couldn't share spin states, and codified it as an idealization that was meant to subsume all the results. Later, it was subsumed by a better idealization. But that isn't a contradiction -- it's clear evidence that we're on the right track!
On the right track to what? is your question. And the answer is (drumroll) "ontology" and no surprise there. And what is ontology? Well, its an attempt to explain the entire world which is the point of philosophy which I'm sure "is interesting" but..is not different than the thinkers of antiquity sitting around the campfire (this is, it is social, ideological, and relative no matter its own pretensions to the contrary). And now our definition of worthwhile -- which is what is truly at issue -- is far more restricted and limited.
So, I really am following the dictum that the point of philosophy is not to explain the world -- I'm not trying to establish or address "two different ontologies of natural systems" as you put it. The split exists and has dominated the course of philosophical thinking and while it is worth critiquing, I am trying to make the case that it is can't BUT be sophism and, whats more, show how it has descended into sheer parody in its modern incarnation.
But, yes, I think the only way to escape its clutches is to reject it (which, again, is not the pomo nonsense you seem to be concerned about) and when it goes, so does all of the baggage it carries with it like "ontology" (which is not pseudo-philosophy only because that really is the point of philosophy..it 100% is sophism which only ultimately ends in solipsism)
As for what is "real"..c'mon categories? Are you an archivist? Logic and theory correspond to reality..and not the reverse.
Edit: Or is that influence not important, as it's in a less philosophically rigorous discipline like "pstmdrn"?
Yes. It's like Däniken's Chariots of the Gods: enormously influential in the fringe community, but not relevant to those who are actually trying to get some real work done. (Though at least Chariots of the Gods provided us with the inspiration for Stargate.)
...which is the point of philosophy which I'm sure "is interesting" but..is not different than the thinkers of antiquity sitting around the campfire (this is, it is social, ideological, and relative no matter its own pretensions to the contrary).
I think that science is social, ideological, and relative, and I will continue to think that no matter what protestations it makes.
As for what is "real"..c'mon categories? Are you an archivist? Logic and theory correspond to reality..and not the reverse.
And a category mistake is just that: an attempt to ascribe some property to a thing that cannot have it. Like, to use the famous example, ascribing a color to an idea. "C'mon categories?" does not constitute a sound refutation of this notion, nor does it defend you from the objection Crashing00 raised to your statement.
It is becoming clear that you are not as well informed on this topic as you think you are, and you are attempting to bull your way through the conversation with sarcasm and bluster. Please stop.
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Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Oh, Jacques Derrida. He's a pseudophilosopher who's inexplicably read in some of the darker and more gullible corners of the academy.
Before I tear into this, I will preface this with I don't know Derrida very well. In fact, I don't know Derrida at all. And there's where my skepticism towards this statement stems from because I have no opinion, but you haven't given me anything substantial to accept your statement as QED. All I have is this:
Derrida is great, but you have to understand the purpose. I'm still not sure it is philosophy. But, as a shaman, I use language to re-shape reality and Derrida shows how to use language as a tool to deconstruct reality, or almost anything else.
Two things:
1. @pstmdrn: As a training language master myself, I now own a Ferrari, and the best part is that someone else is insuring it. My point, yes, language has a powerful influence over perception of reality, but no matter how many times I brag about my Ferrari, it doesn't mean that I own a Ferrari in this reality (although if driving games or toy models did count towards the meaning of car that is being implied, then I'd own a Lamborghini or two). And the problem with the word "reshape" is that it implies that you can deconstruct reality and then reconstruct events outside perception as you see fit.
2. @Blinking Spirit: You're expecting me to make too big of a leap to accept this as evidence for Derrida to be a pseudo-philosophy. All that this post reads to me as is an exaggeration of the power of interpreting language to define reality. First, I accept that language has the power to "reshape" reality, but only as how we come to interpret it. Language is how we interpret actions and express those interpretations, and if the language changes, then those interpretations are capable of changing as well. In short, yes, I'm saying that you need to add something to that.
Oh, hogwash. There is no controversy about Derrida among professional philosophers. His popularity springs from those in less rigorous disciplines that - how to put this delicately - produce people like pstmdrn.
I'd say... Citation needed... and perhaps a false correlation (or at the least a correlation you haven't demonstrated) with pstmdrn.
Aside from the whole citation still needed, you need to explain why we're writing off the Continental Tradition or waving our hand and ignoring those people because I hear Continental Philosophy (and other traditions) is still pretty big in places that are not the United States (and even the United States to a lesser extent).
So while I think virtually all "philosophy of physics" is sheer sophism and that most of the examples are about on the order of Philip K Dick "brainbenders", you can't deny that there is a large positivist school of thought in the so-called hard sciences that produces many silly statements which essentially invoke a circular authority (see Pauli example or modern "computerism" for lack of a better word). Like I said, its the easiest/readiest example which almost never means the BEST example.
It's not an example at all; at least not of anything relevant. The Pauli exclusion principle is, at worst, as thoroughly empirically grounded as gravity, and at best it's actually a theorem. In no sense can it rightly be regarded as circular.
On the right track to what? is your question. And the answer is (drumroll) "ontology" and no surprise there. And what is ontology? Well, its an attempt to explain the entire world which is the point of philosophy which I'm sure "is interesting" but..is not different than the thinkers of antiquity sitting around the campfire (this is, it is social, ideological, and relative no matter its own pretensions to the contrary). And now our definition of worthwhile -- which is what is truly at issue -- is far more restricted and limited.
So, I really am following the dictum that the point of philosophy is not to explain the world -- I'm not trying to establish or address "two different ontologies of natural systems" as you put it. The split exists and has dominated the course of philosophical thinking and while it is worth critiquing, I am trying to make the case that it is can't BUT be sophism and, whats more, show how it has descended into sheer parody in its modern incarnation.
But, yes, I think the only way to escape its clutches is to reject it (which, again, is not the pomo nonsense you seem to be concerned about) and when it goes, so does all of the baggage it carries with it like "ontology" (which is not pseudo-philosophy only because that really is the point of philosophy..it 100% is sophism which only ultimately ends in solipsism)
Do you see what you're doing here? This is pseudophilosophy.
In your previous post, you made an incorrect but intelligible claim about the ontology of natural systems. This is to your credit, and as much as you may wish to deny that you were talking about the ontology of natural systems, that is what those words you wrote meant whether you like it or not.
I attempted to give you some good reasons to suspect your assertion was not correct. If you were smart you would simply have agreed with me, but you could even have intelligibly disagreed and we'd still have been doing philosophy.
Instead we get this. The goalposts have been radically shifted (apparently we're talking about the futility of philosophy as a whole now?), you deny the plain meaning of English words, you repudiate the intelligibility of the only intelligible claim that was actually on the table, only to immediately reassert the same claim in more or less the same words without addressing my counterclaim at all, and after all this you actually accuse the other side of sophistry.
Normally I wouldn't respond at all, but since we're talking about pseudophilosophy, it couldn't hurt to have another in vivo example at hand, I suppose.
As for what is "real"..c'mon categories? Are you an archivist? Logic and theory correspond to reality..and not the reverse.
The Schroedinger equation, like all other equations, is an abstractum. It is not the sort of thing that can be "real" or "not real." By asserting its unreality you have committed a classical category mistake, or perhaps simply uttered a tautology if you want to look at it that way. Either way, you made no intelligible claim for discussion. I was attempting to get you to rephrase your objection or problem with Schroedinger's equation in a way that was intelligible. I am starting to believe that the likelihood is very high that my hopes are in vain.
Before I tear into this, I will preface this with I don't know Derrida very well. In fact, I don't know Derrida at all. And there's where my skepticism towards this statement stems from because I have no opinion, but you haven't given me anything substantial to accept your statement as QED.
We have so far been having a casual conversation about names like Derrida, Rand, and Nietzsche from a basis of mutual familiarity with their styles. What I've been saying about Derrida hasn't really been aimed at people who don't know him. But if you want in, all you have to do is ask. No need to get snippy.
There are a few problems with Derrida. The first is that he really is obscurantist. He employs undefined and often undefinable terms liberally in some of the most godawfully constructed sentences you've ever read. As a result, he's sort of like a Rorschach test for bad academics: they can read whatever they like into him, using his lexicon of deconstructionist buzzwords as they will (he couldn't even define "deconstructionism"). And indeed, I don't think he'd even have disputed this claim, except for the "bad" part. He seems to have consciously embraced the fact that his deconstruction techniques can be used to find just about any message in just about anything: after all, if all texts are driven by hidden contradictions (that are somehow "violent"), then it's just a matter of picking up on the side of the contradiction that you feel is most important. If a fellow deconstructionist happens to have written some anti-Semitic articles, for instance, you can show that they weren't really anti-Semitic. Which brings us, of course, to the matter of his focus on texts. To the best of my knowledge, he seems to have spent his entire career struggling mightily to avoid making a single intelligible claim about the real world that might be true or false and thus provable or disprovable. In the interpretation of texts he found a subject that was completely subjective and impervious to rigorous argument - Hell, because contradiction is the whole point, you are not even committed to basic internal consistency. This moves him firmly out of the realm of philosophy.
Aside from the whole citation still needed, you need to explain why we're writing off the Continental Tradition or waving our hand and ignoring those people because I hear Continental Philosophy (and other traditions) is still pretty big in places that are not the United States (and even the United States to a lesser extent).
For this, will you just grant that I don't accept "bigness" to be a valid measure of philosophical rigor, and that I don't want to fight the whole analytic-continental battle here and now?
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Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
If quantum mechanics is solipsism, why was I able to use it this week to correctly predict spectroscopic data in lab? If you don't realize what this means about the legitimacy of quantum mechanics, you really don't understand science.
For this, will you just grant that I don't accept "bigness" to be a valid measure of philosophical rigor, and that I don't want to fight the whole analytic-continental battle here and now?
As long as Continental = psuedo-philosophy, I'm not sure how you can do that.
The redefinition of Philosophy as a purely rigorous logic applied to speculative fields is well, exactly what I called it. It's fine if that is what you want to do in the modern era, but it does not square well with the entire history of what are conventionally called "philosophers." Many of them had rigor and logic, some not so much, in either case it wasn't the only significant thing they were doing, and not the sole reason they are still honored today.
1. @pstmdrn: As a training language master myself, I now own a Ferrari, and the best part is that someone else is insuring it. My point, yes, language has a powerful influence over perception of reality, but no matter how many times I brag about my Ferrari, it doesn't mean that I own a Ferrari in this reality (although if driving games or toy models did count towards the meaning of car that is being implied, then I'd own a Lamborghini or two). And the problem with the word "reshape" is that it implies that you can deconstruct reality and then reconstruct events outside perception as you see fit.
Well, language is the means which society uses to describe reality, so it is naturally one of the best places to begin when wanting to change reality. Historians and publicists often use this type of reality shaping to have events or personalities become something new. Some aspects of reality are more fixed in their being, so they are resistant to change in this manner. Much of it is based in getting people to change perceptions of something, because that is all reality truly is, a perception of something unknown. (we don't even know what reality truly looks like, since we can only see light bouncing off physical matter of reality.) It is not the quickest or even most powerful way to change reality, but it works.
The reason Derrida focused on texts is because texts are where philosphers lay down the foundations that people use to lay the laws of existence. If you can disrupt instabilities in these texts, you can reveal weaknesses in the philosophical laws that hold our society together. His most relevant works are excellent for cases such as these. He was skeptical of binary opposition, that one idea or thing has primacy and it is set against its opposite as the norm. Reality is not set up in this way, a series of two-sided concepts which one is right and the other wrong. Western society has often promoted that Men are the sex that matters and women are secondary, or that heterosexuality is norm and everyting else is a perversion of the norm. Things are a bit more complex than that, thankfully.
Reality is no fixed thing and as we we progress into the post-modern age the mutability of exitence becomes more and more apparant. I was introduced to Derrida through litarary criticism, but I realized he was linked to other philosophers I admire, Lacan, Hegel, Heidegger, and he led me to discover Lyotard and Focault. Those writers have really helped me attain a sort of mastery over the Post-Modern environment, harnessing its raw contradictions as tools and rising above its dystopian elements.
My work with the severely Autistic has led me to beleive that they are beings perceive who reality in a completely different way than non-autistics, with comepltely differerent rules. Though our two realities overlap with some commonality, they are interacting in a different realm as it were. I fully advocate that physical spaces should not only be designed for people that experience reality in the way we do, but also be designed with people, like those with Autism, who live in a different reality. It's like putting wheelchair ramps for those in a wheelchair. It's kind of like saying one perception of reality is better than another and forcing people to be a certain way.
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. So as long as it is addressing those issues and helping people come to a personal understanding of existence, it can't really be pseudo.
*I am not a Rand fan/apologist, it is just a common title or remark for her works. I've only read "Anthem" when I was heavy into dystopias in high school.
Others, such as feminism, become too ivory towered and try to build a new language out of something that's fairly common like sex and human relationships. Rather than adopting languages as an intersection between various sciences and philosophies to help normalize aligned concepts the school tried to reinvent verbiage. Eventually we end up with stuff like zhe and the whole privilege bit, which doesn't help much because the argumentation style descends into talks about "well you have privilege, but you're just not *aware* enough of it. Which makes it into a contrite argument.
The same with anarcho-capitalism, where "everything that government does is a moral hazard." I'm frankly not really impressed with that form of anarchism, as some of the basic structures for the argument tended to not be able to answer some fundamental questions. Those that drifted closer to the nightwachman approach to government were better served, but that placed those people into the min anarchist camp. When you can't really explain how to deal with humans on a wide scale you fail. At the very least there are min anarchists that have argued for the decline of nation-states and the rise of city-states which is a lot more fair because of how much GDP a city has on a nation-state. That and capped with the old neo-confederate ideology that the Civil War was totally about state's rights added another inflexible argument in light of primary documents.
The ideologies get trapped in these little bugbear dillemas with doctrine or as acting to midwife for an overfocus on one area and a lack of focus on others that affects more people like domestic violence.
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
Individualities may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.
Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
Oh, Jacques Derrida. He's a pseudophilosopher who's inexplicably read in some of the darker and more gullible corners of the academy.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Pseudophilosophy is, more or less, saying things that sound deep to stoners. And that's pretty much what Derrida does. No thanks.
Rand, on the other hand, isn't even a poor philosopher. She's actually a pretty decent one. She's no more wrong than most philosophers (most philosophical points that have ever been made have eventually been discredited). Rand is a poor writer - her "storytelling" (which is both compelling and horrible at the same time) gets in the way of the good bits of philosophy. She's also anti-philosophical as an individual, and Objectivist movements tend to treat her work as canonical rather than as subject to discussion or debate. But her philosophical contributions are significant when you shed the, uh, crud.
Derrida is an excellent resource for destabilizing a variety of texts. One of my favorite Academic activities is to find magic, mythology and occultism hidden in a variety of non-mystical texts. Derrida's method of peeling away layers of language, like you would peel an onion, to reveal things beneath the surface is extremely useful!
I love Ayn Rand's writing, but I hate her philosophy. She presents it excellently, her ideas just sicken me.
[Clan Flamingo]
I'm not sure I need to add anything to this:
It's not that her conclusions are wrong, it's that her methods are poor. She launches vicious, hyperbolic attacks on arguments she has misinterpreted, most notably those of Immanuel Kant. And her thinking is everywhere heavily contaminated with the fallacy of the false dichotomy. There are other libertarian philosophers who argue for much the same conclusions and do so much more cogently. Robert Nozick springs to mind. His Anarchy, State, and Utopia is an important work in political philosophy and ethics, discussed relatively respectfully even by philosophers who utterly disagree with it. Rand's essays are practically unread.
Like I said, her essays are practically unread.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Rand also called herself a Romantic in a Donahue interview(it's on youtube), which has other issues associated with that as well. Equally, having one aspect I've found rather annoying is that just because she saw there for the Bolshevik Revolution and her dad's business was seized by the government doesn't make her necessarily the go to person for everything communist or capitalist.
I feel that the main attraction to her is her antagonistic spirit, her ability to move upwardly in society with tact, simplicity of her message, and the tract towards rugged individualism. Which tends to be a problem with American society, since it wasn't so much the rugged individualist that made society rather the urbane Renaissance Men like Franklin and some of the lesser known individuals and tended to be more community oriented than some of the modern right tries to paint them as.
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
Individualities may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.
Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
I mean obviously yes, this is how Rand operates. I don't agree that this invalidates her work as serious philosophy (moves it into the category of 'pseudo-philosophy'), though, in much the same way that Nietzsche's manner of writing and argumentation is both far from the norms for philosophical writing and frankly pretty much obscurantist a lot of the time. Neither writer really fits into mainstream philosophy (Nietzsche has been more aggressively rehabilitated than Rand has in recent years, though), but they're both right there on the fringes and have a lot to offer if read carefully.
I guess it just comes down to how much weight that label of pseudo-philosophy has. If you label something as pseudo-science, nobody looking for any kind of deep scientific understanding of a subject is going to pay attention to it. Rand deserves to be read carefully and cautiously. This is as opposed to, say, Derrida, who has nothing interesting to say. Personally, I'd reserve the label of pseudo-philosophy for people like Derrida, but I don't know of any broadly accepted razor to use for deciding whether something is or isn't pseudo-science, and if we're having a semantic disagreement over where the line falls, hopefully I've provided enough insight into my own thoughts on the subject for you to identify that fact (Otherwise, we can have a big debate over whether Rand actually brings something to the table, but I feel like that's a whole other thread).
Recall that I said Rand was a poor philosopher, not a pseudo-philosopher.
Also, Nietzsche, among his many other virtues, was a lot more fun.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Fair on both points.
I don't understand this. From my understanding Derrida is a controversial figure, and I think there would be no controversy if there were nothing of interest. The stance that Rand should be read and Derrida should not be, seems based on personal interest. So am I correct in assuming: "I call Philosophy things that I like. I call Pseudo-Philsophy things that I don't like."?
This statement also seems to confirm this. "Although his writing is often obscurantist, I label Nietzsche a Philosopher because he is fun to read (or rather his ideas are fun)."
Oh, hogwash. There is no controversy about Derrida among professional philosophers. His popularity springs from those in less rigorous disciplines that - how to put this delicately - produce people like pstmdrn.
I don't like Ayn Rand. I call her a philosopher.
Nietzsche wasn't obscurantist, he was a prose poet. Difference.
Okay, maybe he was a bit obscurantist.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
By professional philosophers do you really mean those in the "analytic" tradition?
The thing about like/dislike equals philosophy/pseudo-philosophy was not directed at you in particular, but point well taken. Perhaps, "like" isn't the best term to use.
I think this whole debate is actually better centered around someone like Derrida than Rand (I sort of regret mentioning her to begin with, as she seems to evoke such strong feelings regarding her work), though regretfully I know little of both thinkers and cannot comment much. But I think (in my not very knowledgeable opinion) that Derrida highlights* a general dislike of a tradition or approach to philosophy, that one either likes or dislikes, and is therefore more or less apt to label that tradition (or thinkers within it) as pseudo-philosophy. I'll quote (from Wikipedia entry on Derrida, so take it for what its worth) this regarding his (Derrida's) influence:
"His output of more than 40 published books, together with essays and public speaking, has had a significant impact upon the humanities,[4] particularly on Anthropology, Sociology, Semiotics, Jurisprudence, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies in general. His influence in the academe in Continental Europe, South America and all countries where continental philosophy is predominant, is enormous; becoming crucial in debates around Ontology, Epistemology (specially concerning Social Sciences), Ethics, Esthetics, Hermeneutics and Philosophy of Language."
Is that influence just an outright lie then? Or is he less influential than the article hints?
Edit: Or is that influence not important, as it's in a less philosophically rigorous discipline like "pstmdrn"?
*Edit 2: By this I mean 'talk or discussion of Derrida' and not 'what Derrida means in such and such a book'.
And for the most part the debate revolves around whether to build from the system to the world (Kant) or from the world into the system (used to be called inductivism).
Or to put it a different way, the ultimate quandry is that no one knows whether the system is whatever the results say it is (with varying criteria for what counts as 'results') or whether there is some idealization which subsumes all of the results generated in nature.
The easiest example of this I've heard is the Pauli Exclusion Principle. Why can't two fermions occupy the same quantum state simultaneously? Why -- because of the Paul Exclusion Principle. As Pauli was noted for saying "Thats not right! Its not even wrong!" (welcome to positivism)
On the other end of the spectrum you get the Shrodinger wave equation which is said to be "real". Ok..
(and now you're pretty close to tossing in the long tradition of Skepticism starting with the greeks who wanted to puruse problems like "what is the cause of the cause of the cause of the..")
Its interesting to see that probability theory is basically the latest iteration of this dispute playing out, but its extremely ad nauseam at this point.
Marx says that 'Philosophy died with Hegel' (or perhaps more accurately Feuerbach?). I say that philosophy isn't dead..but it should be.
He also said that the point of philosophy is not to explain the world but to change it. For the most part this amounts to "pass the excedrin and get on with your life"
(that last statement being in NO WAY anti-intellectual or a rejection of theory/ideology)
Pseudo philosophy would be best illustrated by parody - Stewie Griffin, smoking pot in Amsterdam: "Dude, you know what I think? I think we only die because we think we have to. Whoa." *waves hand in the air*
That's parody and it goes a little too far, but it's the difference between things that can hold up to a careful examination (they might turn out to be wrong, but they're at least meaningful) and things that merely sound deep. Derrida is in the latter category. Granted, doing that stuff professionally is quite hard; you have to be obscure enough in your writing that people don't just catch on to the fact that you have nothing to say.
Marx was wrong about this. There is interesting, worthwhile philosophy being done today. As an example topic - what would count as a "conscious" AI? As another - moral relativism has undergone a significant resurgence over the last couple decades, where 50 or 100 years ago it was dismissed more or less out of hand.
Some topics in philosophy get played out. That doesn't invalidate philosophy; there are new topics opening up all the time.
In any science, if you dig deep enough, you arrive at principles that can only be established empirically. In classical quantum mechanics, the Pauli principle is one of those things. However, if you move to relativistic quantum mechanics, on which the Standard Model is based, Pauli's principle is actually derivable from the spin-statistics theorem. Further advances will further subsume the principle, making it a consequence of simpler axioms rather than an axiom unto itself.
So according to the best current science, you're just wrong, but even if we rewind to the time of Pauli, it's not clear to me how this creates a dichotomy between your two ideas about the ontology of natural systems.
Pauli arrived at his principle by adhering to the idea that the system is whatever the results say it is. He looked at the results, saw that fermions couldn't share spin states, and codified it as an idealization that was meant to subsume all the results. Later, it was subsumed by a better idealization. But that isn't a contradiction -- it's clear evidence that we're on the right track!
In other words, the real ontology of natural systems is actually something like the union of both of your non-contradictory halves: the system is what the results say it is, and there is an idealization that properly subsumes all the results.
What are you driving at here? This is a category mistake at best. What would it mean to say that the Schroedinger equation was "not real?"
By the way, not to put you on the spot, because you're far from alone in this, but attempting to use misinterpretations or non-interpretations of scientific concepts like Pauli's principle or the evolution of wavefunctions by Schroedinger's equation to bootstrap nonsensical philosophical ideas surely falls under the heading of pseudophilosophy.
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
In many disciplines, ones approach is bound to look strange, stilted, or contrived if taken out of its historical context (that is, who the author is engaging). Often the author either sees no good reason to alter the lines of argument of the original (especially if they are being critiqued) or they are left the same on purpose to establish a contrast. On rare occasion they are preserved because the author thinks they are correct, even.
So while I think virtually all "philosophy of physics" is sheer sophism and that most of the examples are about on the order of Philip K Dick "brainbenders", you can't deny that there is a large positivist school of thought in the so-called hard sciences that produces many silly statements which essentially invoke a circular authority (see Pauli example or modern "computerism" for lack of a better word). Like I said, its the easiest/readiest example which almost never means the BEST example.
On the right track to what? is your question. And the answer is (drumroll) "ontology" and no surprise there. And what is ontology? Well, its an attempt to explain the entire world which is the point of philosophy which I'm sure "is interesting" but..is not different than the thinkers of antiquity sitting around the campfire (this is, it is social, ideological, and relative no matter its own pretensions to the contrary). And now our definition of worthwhile -- which is what is truly at issue -- is far more restricted and limited.
So, I really am following the dictum that the point of philosophy is not to explain the world -- I'm not trying to establish or address "two different ontologies of natural systems" as you put it. The split exists and has dominated the course of philosophical thinking and while it is worth critiquing, I am trying to make the case that it is can't BUT be sophism and, whats more, show how it has descended into sheer parody in its modern incarnation.
But, yes, I think the only way to escape its clutches is to reject it (which, again, is not the pomo nonsense you seem to be concerned about) and when it goes, so does all of the baggage it carries with it like "ontology" (which is not pseudo-philosophy only because that really is the point of philosophy..it 100% is sophism which only ultimately ends in solipsism)
As for what is "real"..c'mon categories? Are you an archivist? Logic and theory correspond to reality..and not the reverse.
Yes.
Yes. It's like Däniken's Chariots of the Gods: enormously influential in the fringe community, but not relevant to those who are actually trying to get some real work done. (Though at least Chariots of the Gods provided us with the inspiration for Stargate.)
No, it isn't.
I think that science is social, ideological, and relative, and I will continue to think that no matter what protestations it makes.
Do you see the problem with your argument here?
You can't reject philosophy without doing philosophy to explain why.
And a category mistake is just that: an attempt to ascribe some property to a thing that cannot have it. Like, to use the famous example, ascribing a color to an idea. "C'mon categories?" does not constitute a sound refutation of this notion, nor does it defend you from the objection Crashing00 raised to your statement.
It is becoming clear that you are not as well informed on this topic as you think you are, and you are attempting to bull your way through the conversation with sarcasm and bluster. Please stop.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Before I tear into this, I will preface this with I don't know Derrida very well. In fact, I don't know Derrida at all. And there's where my skepticism towards this statement stems from because I have no opinion, but you haven't given me anything substantial to accept your statement as QED. All I have is this:
Two things:
1. @pstmdrn: As a training language master myself, I now own a Ferrari, and the best part is that someone else is insuring it. My point, yes, language has a powerful influence over perception of reality, but no matter how many times I brag about my Ferrari, it doesn't mean that I own a Ferrari in this reality (although if driving games or toy models did count towards the meaning of car that is being implied, then I'd own a Lamborghini or two). And the problem with the word "reshape" is that it implies that you can deconstruct reality and then reconstruct events outside perception as you see fit.
2. @Blinking Spirit: You're expecting me to make too big of a leap to accept this as evidence for Derrida to be a pseudo-philosophy. All that this post reads to me as is an exaggeration of the power of interpreting language to define reality. First, I accept that language has the power to "reshape" reality, but only as how we come to interpret it. Language is how we interpret actions and express those interpretations, and if the language changes, then those interpretations are capable of changing as well. In short, yes, I'm saying that you need to add something to that.
I'd say... Citation needed... and perhaps a false correlation (or at the least a correlation you haven't demonstrated) with pstmdrn.
Aside from the whole citation still needed, you need to explain why we're writing off the Continental Tradition or waving our hand and ignoring those people because I hear Continental Philosophy (and other traditions) is still pretty big in places that are not the United States (and even the United States to a lesser extent).
But in summary...
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
~~~~~
It's not an example at all; at least not of anything relevant. The Pauli exclusion principle is, at worst, as thoroughly empirically grounded as gravity, and at best it's actually a theorem. In no sense can it rightly be regarded as circular.
Do you see what you're doing here? This is pseudophilosophy.
In your previous post, you made an incorrect but intelligible claim about the ontology of natural systems. This is to your credit, and as much as you may wish to deny that you were talking about the ontology of natural systems, that is what those words you wrote meant whether you like it or not.
I attempted to give you some good reasons to suspect your assertion was not correct. If you were smart you would simply have agreed with me, but you could even have intelligibly disagreed and we'd still have been doing philosophy.
Instead we get this. The goalposts have been radically shifted (apparently we're talking about the futility of philosophy as a whole now?), you deny the plain meaning of English words, you repudiate the intelligibility of the only intelligible claim that was actually on the table, only to immediately reassert the same claim in more or less the same words without addressing my counterclaim at all, and after all this you actually accuse the other side of sophistry.
Normally I wouldn't respond at all, but since we're talking about pseudophilosophy, it couldn't hurt to have another in vivo example at hand, I suppose.
The Schroedinger equation, like all other equations, is an abstractum. It is not the sort of thing that can be "real" or "not real." By asserting its unreality you have committed a classical category mistake, or perhaps simply uttered a tautology if you want to look at it that way. Either way, you made no intelligible claim for discussion. I was attempting to get you to rephrase your objection or problem with Schroedinger's equation in a way that was intelligible. I am starting to believe that the likelihood is very high that my hopes are in vain.
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
We have so far been having a casual conversation about names like Derrida, Rand, and Nietzsche from a basis of mutual familiarity with their styles. What I've been saying about Derrida hasn't really been aimed at people who don't know him. But if you want in, all you have to do is ask. No need to get snippy.
There are a few problems with Derrida. The first is that he really is obscurantist. He employs undefined and often undefinable terms liberally in some of the most godawfully constructed sentences you've ever read. As a result, he's sort of like a Rorschach test for bad academics: they can read whatever they like into him, using his lexicon of deconstructionist buzzwords as they will (he couldn't even define "deconstructionism"). And indeed, I don't think he'd even have disputed this claim, except for the "bad" part. He seems to have consciously embraced the fact that his deconstruction techniques can be used to find just about any message in just about anything: after all, if all texts are driven by hidden contradictions (that are somehow "violent"), then it's just a matter of picking up on the side of the contradiction that you feel is most important. If a fellow deconstructionist happens to have written some anti-Semitic articles, for instance, you can show that they weren't really anti-Semitic. Which brings us, of course, to the matter of his focus on texts. To the best of my knowledge, he seems to have spent his entire career struggling mightily to avoid making a single intelligible claim about the real world that might be true or false and thus provable or disprovable. In the interpretation of texts he found a subject that was completely subjective and impervious to rigorous argument - Hell, because contradiction is the whole point, you are not even committed to basic internal consistency. This moves him firmly out of the realm of philosophy.
Also, his hair was ridiculous.
For this, will you just grant that I don't accept "bigness" to be a valid measure of philosophical rigor, and that I don't want to fight the whole analytic-continental battle here and now?
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
As long as Continental = psuedo-philosophy, I'm not sure how you can do that.
The redefinition of Philosophy as a purely rigorous logic applied to speculative fields is well, exactly what I called it. It's fine if that is what you want to do in the modern era, but it does not square well with the entire history of what are conventionally called "philosophers." Many of them had rigor and logic, some not so much, in either case it wasn't the only significant thing they were doing, and not the sole reason they are still honored today.
Well, language is the means which society uses to describe reality, so it is naturally one of the best places to begin when wanting to change reality. Historians and publicists often use this type of reality shaping to have events or personalities become something new. Some aspects of reality are more fixed in their being, so they are resistant to change in this manner. Much of it is based in getting people to change perceptions of something, because that is all reality truly is, a perception of something unknown. (we don't even know what reality truly looks like, since we can only see light bouncing off physical matter of reality.) It is not the quickest or even most powerful way to change reality, but it works.
The reason Derrida focused on texts is because texts are where philosphers lay down the foundations that people use to lay the laws of existence. If you can disrupt instabilities in these texts, you can reveal weaknesses in the philosophical laws that hold our society together. His most relevant works are excellent for cases such as these. He was skeptical of binary opposition, that one idea or thing has primacy and it is set against its opposite as the norm. Reality is not set up in this way, a series of two-sided concepts which one is right and the other wrong. Western society has often promoted that Men are the sex that matters and women are secondary, or that heterosexuality is norm and everyting else is a perversion of the norm. Things are a bit more complex than that, thankfully.
Reality is no fixed thing and as we we progress into the post-modern age the mutability of exitence becomes more and more apparant. I was introduced to Derrida through litarary criticism, but I realized he was linked to other philosophers I admire, Lacan, Hegel, Heidegger, and he led me to discover Lyotard and Focault. Those writers have really helped me attain a sort of mastery over the Post-Modern environment, harnessing its raw contradictions as tools and rising above its dystopian elements.
My work with the severely Autistic has led me to beleive that they are beings perceive who reality in a completely different way than non-autistics, with comepltely differerent rules. Though our two realities overlap with some commonality, they are interacting in a different realm as it were. I fully advocate that physical spaces should not only be designed for people that experience reality in the way we do, but also be designed with people, like those with Autism, who live in a different reality. It's like putting wheelchair ramps for those in a wheelchair. It's kind of like saying one perception of reality is better than another and forcing people to be a certain way.
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. So as long as it is addressing those issues and helping people come to a personal understanding of existence, it can't really be pseudo.
[Clan Flamingo]