What you’ve written above literally states, and I quote, “I am very receptive to the concept of truth.”
You can’t show that I’m wrong.
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Hmmm…yes, rules for “proper thinking”
I’m not sure how I feel about that. Maybe i will have another look at it, and see if a little more light shines.
I think “human-centered” relies more on our emotions than our intellect?
If you have no preference for this way of thinking over that, for this statement over that statement, then nothing we say will make a difference.
I have no intention to show that you are wrong.
Yes you do.
Nobody is not saying nothing.
lol, wow, that is a mind-f*ck
I suppose I do have a preference. I like statements that are holistic, and take all of humanity, in all its glory, into account.
Where does moodiness fit into Wittgenstein’s theories?
it’s a form of life.
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This thread doesn’t distinguish analytic philosophy from continental philosophy. It distinguishes those who rely upon reason with those who don’t, doing a disservice to continental philosophy to suggest it is comprised of the latter.
It would be unfair to call this view a rationalist nihlism because that characterization makes it sound like it might have pedigree. I prefer to call it unrigorous laziness masquerading as depth.
Who was it - who pointed out the absurdity of distinguishing a method (analytic) from a location (continental)? Bernard Williams likened it to dividing all cars into four-wheel drive and Japanese.
So if the OP doesn’t make that distinction, that’s a positive.
yes, but, a philosophy that does not take into account the effect of music on humans is incomplete
In the Tractatus music is treated as signal processing:
4.014 A gramophone record, the musical idea, the written notes, and the sound-waves, all stand to one another in the same internal relation of depicting that holds between language and the world. They are all constructed according to a common logical pattern. (Like the two youths in the fairy-tale, their two horses, and their lilies. They are all in a certain sense one.)
4.0141 There is a general rule by means of which the musician can obtain the symphony from the score, and which makes it possible to derive the symphony from the groove on the gramophone record, and, using the first rule, to derive the score again. That is what constitutes the inner similarity between these things which seem to be constructed in such entirely different ways. And that rule is the law of projection which projects the symphony into the language of musical notatio
With the Investigations it had become an embodied participation in a shared activity:
5 27. Understanding a sentence is much more akin to understanding a theme in music than one may think. What I mean is that understanding a sentence lies nearer than one thinks to what is ordinarily called understanding a musical theme. Why is just this the pattern of variation in loudness and tempo? One would like to say “Because I know what it’s all about.” But what is it all about? I should not be able to say. In order to ‘explain’ I could only compare it with something else which has the same rhythm (I mean the same pattern). (One says “Don’t you see, this is as if a conclusion were being drawn” or “This is as it were a parenthesis”, etc. How does one justify such comparisons?—There are very different kinds of justification here.
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I saw the argument from that example as being the lyrics are existentialist in nature and that they speak to the human condition in substance, as opposed to the music that was added thousands of years later outperforming the words just through their visceral effect.
Although that said it’s made considerably easier when you get to choose the criteria for what shit is.
How is this unrigorous laziness? Continental philosophy is a very ambiguous subject, and the ambiguity of it is what makes it ‘rigorous’ in the sense that it is not easy to explain continental philosophy well without putting in the effort to learn it well. Analytical philosophy on the other hand is what I would consider more straightforward and therefore ‘unrigiourous’.
Yes I agree with Banno that the distinction is difficult to make because they overlap quite a bit, but stripped down to the aims and the means of it, analytical philosophy can be distinguished by its use of diagrams to explain logic, while continental philosophy is mostly made up of how the philosopher/author wants to explain their point. Analytical philosophy strips away much of the need of an author to explain themselves, the loss of personality in their writing is what makes me most disappointed at analytical philosophy.
I wasn’t calling Continental philosophy a lazy man’s sport. I was saying a poster here was justifying a lack of rigor with a convulted theory that rigor itself was the suspect tool of the evil analytics. I called that masqueraded laziness.
I don’t equate that poster’s definition of Continental philosophy with what it actually is.
An interesting fact is that both terms, “analytic philosophy” and “continental philosophy”, were pejorative in the early years of their use, ways of Othering.
I’d intended to read Christoph Schuringa’s recent book, A Social History of Analytic Philosophy: How Politics Has Shaped an Apolitical Philosophy, but I’ve been dissuaded by some reviews and by interviews he’s done.
Anyway, apparently it makes a big deal of the fact that American analytic philosophy was heavily sponsored by Cold War think tanks like the RAND Corporation. Quine, Davidson and others were supported in this way.
At this point, the card-carrying analytic philosophers will defensively sharpen up their accusations of fallaciousness—the applicable one would be the genetic fallacy, I think—but I wonder if the concerns can be dismissed so easily.
It makes me think of Abstract Expressionism, which was sponsored by the CIA to help ensure Western cultural superiority against the Soviet Union (with its Socialist Realism). Now, I don’t think less of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko just because they benefitted from this CIA campaign (unknowingly)—but can philosophy, whose very medium is ideas, be equally innocent?
Probably, yes—depending on how political the philosophy was. But wouldn’t we be right to be suspicious that their theoretical preoccupations gained in status and importance owing to their compatibility with the ideology of the American government and military?
There’s a review of Schuringa’s book that makes the point that there is no single doctrine, or even method, common across analytic philosophy. However…
The fact that neither analytic nor continental philosophy has a distinct philosophical essence does not mean, however, that there is no distinction between them. Not all real distinctions are philosophical distinctions. […] But what is lying behind the distinction, if not doctrine or method?
[…] it is a distinction between two loose collections of historical traditions constituted not by doctrine or even style, but by different series of canonical texts and ways of reading them. Some texts—by Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein—belong to both series, but the difference is in the way they are read, what is emphasized, and what is ignored.
On this way of thinking analytic philosophy emerges, not as the house philosophy of neoliberalism, nor as the favored intellectual exercise of a certain obnoxious personality type, but rather as a contingent, historically constructed sequence of texts, together with a way of reading them.
— Tim Crane, “Bloodless Pedantry”
So what is this way of reading the texts? Uncharitably you might say it’s a way of reading texts without admitting that that’s what you’re doing. The way that texts are interpreted, absorbed, and critiqued in the analytic tradition is in the form of more or less disembodied arguments. Or you might say it’s a way of reading texts unhistorically.
I’m not sure Crane ever actually identifies what this “way of reading” is, but in any case, a claim that analytic philosophy, even though it’s contingent and historically constructed, still has a way of reading its texts, amounts to the claim that it has a method, something he already denied.
That was an inconclusive ramble.
From Simon Critchley, Oxford Uni Press, intro;
Continental philosophy is the name for a 200-year period in the history of philosophy that begins with the publication of Kant’s critical philosophy in the 1780s. This led on to the following key movements:
1. German idealism and romanticism and its aftermath (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schlegel and Novalis, Schleiermacher, Schopenhauer)
2. The critique of metaphysics and the ‘masters of suspicion’ (Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Bergson)
3. Germanophone phenomenology and existential philosophy (Husserl, Max Scheler, Karl Jaspers, Heidegger)
4. French phenomenology, Hegelianism, and anti-Hegelianism (Kojève, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Bataille, de Beauvoir)
5. Hermeneutics (Dilthey, Gadamer, Ricoeur)
6. Western Marxism and the Frankfurt School (Lukacs, Benjamin, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas)
7. French structuralism (Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Althusser), poststructuralism (Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze), postmodernism (Lyotard, Baudrillard), and feminism (Irigaray, Kristeva)
For Rorty who has his foot in both camps “analytic and non-analytic philosophy” writes:
…you may conclude that Hegel and Heidegger are, at best, failed poets and, at worst, self-infatuated obscurantists. If this is your reaction, you will be in good company. You will have many eminent contemporary philosophers on your side. A willingness to define one’s terms, list one’s premises, and argue in a straight line is regarded by most admirers of Russell as essential to doing good philosophy.
For admirers of Hegel and Heidegger, however, requests for definitions and remises are symptoms of unwillingness to let philosophy attempt its transformative task.
Given all these differences between analytic and non-analytic philosophy, one might wonder whether there is any point in treating Frege, Russell, Hegel, and Heidegger as in the same line of business.
The two sorts of philosophers have, in fact, often tried to excommunicate each other. Analytic philosophers often describe Hegel and Heidegger as “not really doing philosophy.” Hegelians and Heideggerians typically rejoin that their analytic colleagues are intellectual cowards who feel insecure outside a familiar professional environment.
This exchange of insults has been going on for some fifty years and seems unlikely to cease.
My own view is that all four of the thinkers I have just mentioned are usefully grouped together. This is because they were all trying to answer questions first formulated explicitly by Plato: What makes human beings special? What do we have that the other animals lack? What self-image will do proper justice to our uniqueness? (Philosophy as Poetry)
Analytic philosophy regards human logic as the highest authority, holding that everything must be confirmed through logic to count as correct. What it fails to grasp is that logic is merely the condition for interaction between people — not the foundation or the ceiling of philosophical cognition. The fact that logic cannot define what is correct or erroneous already makes this clear. Continental philosophy, by contrast, preserves the traditional mode of philosophical thinking, and assigns logic a far lower status. Ontology itself is transcendent; it cannot be demonstrated by logic. Gauss said: “I have the result, but I do not yet know how to arrive at it.” Einstein said: “Innovation does not come from logical thinking, even though the final product conforms to a logical structure.” Many scientists have confirmed that their creative insights were never the outcome of logical reasoning. Rather, the result comes first, and logic is only then used to articulate and verify it.