/lit/ - Literature

>Has any worthwhile philosophy been published int the last 50 to 100 years that hasn't been tainted by Marxism or isn't complete nonsense?

Yes.

>>2684035

>Marxism
>complete nonsense

pick one

>>2684041
why isn't it nonsense?

>>2684035
Have you ever read a book in your life? Are you retarded?

>>2684069
I haven't read any modern philosophy.

That doesn't mean I haven't read a book in my entire life.

I don't understand where you get this bullshit.

L. W.

>>2684051

why IS it nonsense?

op here im now typing on my kindle

>>2684099
because only the far far left support it and its content on undermining society.

>>2684079

Since are a complete beginner in philosophy, here is a list of 20th Century philosophers to look into:

Gottlob Frege
Alfred North Whitehead
Bertrand Russell
Ludwig Wittgenstein
G. E. Moore
Rudolf Carnap
Hans Reichenbach
Alfred Tarski
Carl Hempel
W.V. Quine
J.L. Austin
John Rawls
Hilary Putnam
Noam Chomsky
Donald Davidson
David Lewis
Saul Kripke
Daniel Dennett
Derek Parfit
Philip Kitcher
Elliott Sober

None of these authors write about "Marxism" (or politics in general) and they certainly do not write "complete nonsense" (for that, you would need to talk to a Frenchman).

AAAAAAND we have proof that morons can type.

>>2684142

Sure is deep & edgy in here.

andrea dworkin

>>2684144
Self-referential post, right?

>>2684144
lol whats wrong bro? i told you im typing on my kindle.

>>2684142
>Chomsky
>not a dirty Marxist

>>2684181

>Chomsky
>implying not social anarchist

>>2684142

>list of 20th Century philosophers

>No Heidegger, Arendt, Husserl

>>2684184
>Chomsky
>Let's ban all porn
>anarchist
Seems like quite the freedom lover...

>>2684200

That's just 'cause he's from a different time. Other than that he's got some good ideas.

>>2684181
Yes, Chomsky does write a great deal about POLITICS - but not political PHILOSOPHY, to any great extent.

In the list above, I am referring only to his writings on the PHILOSOPHY of LANGUAGE and MIND.

(And as an aside, he is an anarchist not a Marxist).

>>2684200
He doesn't support banning porn, you retard.

>>2684199
Correct - no obscurantist horseshit has been included.

>>2684211

Go to bed.

Gonna throw in Pirsig for MOQ.

>>2684200

he doesn't like porn very much because he thinks it degrades women. but he has never called for the thing to be banned.

>>2684219
But I don't know you...

>>2684211
Postmodernism has certainly gotten out of hand stylistically, but the philosophers you accuse of writing "obscurantist horseshit" all have extremely detailed and comprehensive systems of ideas that could be explained to a layman with only a little effort.

Heidegger can be particularly frustrating to read, but it's important to take his admittedly obscure style into context. According to him, ordinary language is steeped in a tradition that constantly conceals the nature of being, and in order to gain a better understanding of our existence, a new vocabulary is necessary.

That much seems to have been proven false by the wealth of commentary that illuminates Heidegger's ideas in plain English. Regardless, it's undeniable that Heidegger had many well formulated and important ideas, and it's inexcusable that first-rate philosophers such as Russell have dismissed him as a charlatan along the lines of, say, Lacan - who really was a charlatan.

>>2684136
>and its content on undermining society.
This is serious?
You can't judge it without having read into it.

>>2684248
I have a PHD in Philosophy and I will freely admit that I have no idea what Heidegger is talking about. Best rule of thumb: If you can't write it clearly, you don't understand it yourself.

>>2684248

>Russell
>first-rate philosopher

>>2684231
>>2684210
I'm sorry, 'eliminate the conditions in which women can get these jobs' sounds a little bit more discreet.
He is calling out for government intervention of some sort. Doesn't sound very anarchist if you ask me.
>>2684207
Social anarchism is a branch of Marxism...

>>2684273
Just fuck off. He is not a political philosopher, so any discussion of his personal politics is irrelevant to this topic.

>>2684258

sometimes. sometimes, though, its a lack of effort on the part of the reader. and that's usually the case when wannabe analytic philosophers judge continental philosophy. when they attack it, it's usually a superficial stylistic issue ("obscurantist" is the word that usually gets thrown about when this is the case) and the reader shows no attempt to try to engage with the points or arguments being made. its as if they convince themselves that all these words are just randomly being placed on the page (in b4 postmoderngenerator), when even just a little attempt to follow the story that is being told is enough to figure a little bit out.

>>2684258

You do not have a PhD in philosophy you toad.

>>2684258
I freely admit that Heidegger's earlier writings are almost impossible to understand without a prior understanding of his philosophy. However, there are lots of "for dummies" type guides to Heidegger that provide a clear, if simple explanation of his ideas. Assuming that you actually do have a Ph.D in philosophy, though, you should have no trouble understanding a book like Dreyfus's Being-in-the-World, which provides a complete and accessible commentary on Being and Time. You might not agree with Heidegger, but I'm sure that you could understand his main points with just a little bit of effort.

I would write up a rough summary of his philosophy myself, but it would be hard to do justice to his ideas in such a short amount of space. If you have a specific question, I'd be glad to answer it.

EARLY 20TH CENTURY
Adorno and Horkheimer: Dialectic ofthe Enlightenment
Arendt: The Human Condition
Austin: How To Do Things with Words; Sense and Sensibilia
Blondel: Action
Dewey: Experience and Nature, Art and Experience
Frege: The Foundations of Arithmetic; "Function and Concept; "On Sense and Meaning"; "Concept and Object" in Collected Papers on Mathematics, Logic, and Philosophy
Gilson: Being and Some Philosophers, The Unity of Philosophical Experience
Heidegger: Being and Time (selections), Letter on Humanism
Husserl: Cartesian Meditations, Logical Investigations, 1, 11, Vl
Lonergan: Insight
Merleau-Ponty: Phenomenology of Perception
Popper: The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Ch. I-VIII, X; The Logic of Scientifc, Discovery, and "Science: Conjectures and Refutations"; The Open Society
Rahner: Spirit in the World
Russell: The Philosophy of Logical Atomism, The Problems of Philosophy
Ryle: Concept of Mind, Dilemmas
Sartre: Being and Nothingness, Existentialism is a Humanism
Whitehead: Process and Reality, selections
Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations
Contemporary Philosophy
Davidson: Truth and Interpretation
Derrida: Speech and Phenomena, Writing and Difference
Foucault: Discipline and Punish or History of Sexuality I & II
Gadamer: Truth and Method
Habermas: Discourse Ethic, Theory of Communicative Actions I
Hacking: Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science
Kuhn: The Structure of Scientifc Revolutions and Lakatos and Musgrave, Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge
MacIntyre: After Virtue, Three Rival Verions of Moral Enquiry
Quine: Word and Object, From a Logical Point of View
Ricoeur: Time and Narrative 1, Oneself as Another
Taylor: Sources of the Self

>>2684286

Not that poster, but what's the best place to start with Heidegger?

>>2684283
I am squarely in the analytical camp, yes. Believe me, I tried to get into the continental stuff, but at some point I came to the realization that the emperor has no clothes. In a truly "difficult" subject like higher mathematics, you need to expend a good deal of effort just to achieve a basic literacy or competency in the subject, let alone actually contribute something new. That's not what we're dealing with in the case of "continental" philosophy. What they do over there is closer to poetry than to rational inquiry. Are you familiar with the "Sokal Affair"? In a nutshell, I'm with Sokal on this.

>>2684303
Dreyfus's Being-in-the-World is phenomenal. He retains much of Heidegger's syntax while still explaining things in a clear and concise way.

If you want to jump straight into primary writings, I would go with The Question Concerning Technology or Introduction to Metaphysics. Don't touch Being and Time until you have a firm grasp of Heidegger's terminology and ideas.

A rudimentary understanding of Descartes and Husserl would also be beneficial.

>>2684310

Yeah, Sokal invalidates all continental philosophy. Ok. Real smart.

>>2684313

Great, thanks.

>>2684310
The Sokal Affair seems to get brought up a lot when it comes to criticizing continental theory. What exactly does it criticize and is it fair to say that the criticisms extend to every continental philosopher?

>>2684310

>What they do over there is closer to poetry than to rational inquiry

implying that's not the path to any real advances in human knowledge

implying alan sokal isn't a pencil necked dweeb who should get pushed into his locker

>>2684321

this huge dork spoofed a critical theory article to prove that the hard sciences are really really mad that any other fields of study exist

>>2684315
Sokal doesn't "invalidate" anything. The kind of nonsense he is talking about was never "valid" to begin with. It's self-refuting wankery at best, unintelligible gibberish at worst.

>>2684310
1. A high barrier to entry does not determine the sophistication of an intellectual or artistic medium. The fact that a child can scribble on a piece of paper does not invalidate the merit of fine art.
2. "Rational inquiry" is not necessarily superior to poetry. I suppose it comes down to what you consider the purpose of philosophy to be, but even if your goal is to attain "truth," there are a host of unstable and potentially dangerous assumptions behind that notion.
3. Sokal's polemics are clever, but ultimately, he is only attacking a strawman. He picks on a handful of critical theorists, each notorious for their flowery and obscure style, and then proceeds to group all non-analytic philosophy under that label. Not only does this serve to promote the analytic tradition as the sole constituent of "real" philosophy, it cleverly evades the critiques of scientific rationality provided by earlier thinkers such as Nietzsche and Heidegger.

>>2684323
You sound upset.

>>2684327

i'm furious

Douglas Hofstadter-Godel, Escher, Bach; I Am A Strange Loop

>>2684035
>Has any worthwhile philosophy been published
nope.

God you're a moron. Sure, marxism is obsolete and all that, but you can't exclude part of their critique in philosophy.

If you want to read some shitty bubble-thinking faggot stay in the old line of sociology started by Comte and Durkheim, sure, that's extremely obsolete, but you asked for it.

>>2684326
1) You invoked the "high barrier" argument, not me.
2) I never made any claims about the "superiority" of one field of human activity over another (whatever that means). However, if the goal is a rational, explanatory understanding of reality, then the best tools are philosophy and science - not poetry. Poetry fulfills other human needs.
3) Talk about a "strawman"! Sokal never proposed any of sweeping generalizations that you attribute to him.

>>2684333
xD

>>2684339
1. I wasn't arguing that the high barrier to entry makes Heidegger a superior thinker. Rather, I view his obscurity as a personal shortcoming that has regrettably alienated many people from his philosophy.

2. Why should philosophy be a "tool" for the rational understanding of reality? If anything, philosophy should be about how to live, as that is a question that the natural sciences cannot touch.

Philosophy has always dealt with ethical and metaphysical issues. It seems egostical to limit the scope of philosophy to questions of language and logic, even if you consider such questions to be the most important.

3. While Sokal only directly attacks a certain sect of postmodernism, he does so through a defense of scientific rationality, and it's implied that *every* critic of the scientific method is somehow stupid or defective.

Sorry for the late response, I'm extremely tired and hardly able to piece together a sentence at this point. I won't be making any further responses, but I do hope that you come to expand your philosophical outlook at some point in the future. Analytic philosophy does what it sets out to do very well, but there is more to philosophy than just that, and it shouldn't be discounted merely on the basis that it differs.

>>2684358
no but really name one thing philosophy has done for the world.

>>2684411

Well, science. For starters.

>>2684085
6th response should have closed the thread. Wittgenstein. there you go. I'm not even going to read the rest of the thread.

>>2684414
actually i think science was responsible for that.

>>2684431

Yeah, nah. Philosophy spawned science.

>>2684434
That is like saying apes spawned mankind.

>>2684442

Precisely.

>>2684431
Science caused science!
How scientific of you!

>>2684445
You don't see people lauding our ape ancestors for the accomplishments of mankind. Because that's retarded.

"Science" is a rather recent outgrowth of natural philosophy.

>>2684450

Science and philosophy are inextricably connected.

>>2684458
No.

>>2684459

Oh? Do go on...

>>2684459
You're out of your element, dipshit.

>>2684463
Science parted with philosophy a long time ago. I don't see how this is not obvious; their methods and results are completely different.

Cultural stalinism is everywhere

>>2684463
well, you don't need philosophy to run biological experiments, or physics calculations. why on earth would you say they are "inextricably connected."?
at best there may be philosophical implications for scientific discoveries, but science has not in the past, nor needs philosophy.

Science and natural philosophy are the same thing. The idea that they can be distinguished from each other methodologically is quite recent.

>>2684475
You don't need scientists to run calculations and experiments either. You just need someone or something that follows instructions.

>>2684486
you people are so desperate. Oh no, philosophy is completely fucking useless? What do I do? Oh I know, I'll say it is the same as science and leech from it all it's accomplishments.

lel

Science can only describe matter, and there are many wrong-headed scientists who think that matter is all that there is.

>>2684487
but the instructions are science

>>2684489
Oh look, little Corky is trying to learn how to troll! How cute.

>>2684494
you have obviously never taken a science class. there is also energy, photons, and forces which are not matter

>>2684494
fucking religiousfags
eat shit

>>2684489
this kind-of argument is pointless, and betrays your own lack of philosophical understanding.

if its a perspective they lack, then simply rehearsing "you don't get the perspective" manages only to solidify the initial division.

either read more philosophy and learn to argue more persuasively, or--better still--really learn to pick your battles and reserve your courage for more lasting problems.

>>2684497

Very interesting. Definitely more interesting and useful than the ideas of David Hume, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. Yep.

>>2684505
i agree. math and science creates satellites, buildings, and the computer you are using. they have done nothing but contribute to your own mental masturbation

>>2684509

Have you read much philosophy?

>>2684509
>implying Wittgenstein and Russell's work in Logical Atomism didn't help build the foundation for modern developments in computation and AI

Fuck off back to /sci/ and tell 'em.

Palahniuk.

>>2684511
enough to know plato was a nazi and the rest didn't actually accomplish anything to significant fields of study
>>2684512
>build foundation
you mean sit in a chair and think instead of actual work?

>>2684509

Have fun with your immature and coarse view of the world, mkay?

>>2684525
mine has tangible accomplishments and betters society, while yours ponders non existent quadries

>>2684528
You can't have "accomplishments" without a values system. What does that sound like? OH WAIT, PHILOSOPHY.

And society can't actually be 'bettered'. People with Iphones and yachts are not necessarily better people.

You clearly have a negative (and inaccurate) impression of what philosophy is, and you're beyond anyone's help at this point.

>>2684531
but iphones and yachts are better than endlessly arguing over made up metaphysics

>>2684535

And what is metaphysics, pray tell?

I'm almost embarrassed to be responding to what seems to be a very obvious troll.

>>2684528
>mine has tangible accomplishments and betters society

Wars that cause untold millions of deaths, overpopulation, catastrophic destruction of the natural environment, societies absorbed entirely by material development and the creation of ever more potent tools of destruction. Impressive list of accomplishments there. Granted, all of this was made possible in the first place by certain shitty philosophies.

>>2684539

You can't judge Philosophy as a discipline based on the "shitty" examples of it.

>>2684258

Humbly disagree. The Continental Philosophers are sometimes quite well-written; take Schopnhauer and Nietzsche as examples of this. Sometimes a more flowery, or 'ornamental', approach to prose in philosophy can be wonderful. Some existentialists, Kierkegaard is a great example, like to embody their work with passion as well - he is quoted as having some strange fascination with his pen (i.e. writing). Analytic philosophy is absolutely wonderful for the fastidiousness that is reasoning coherently and cogently, but sometimes there needs to be works that have that degree of abstraction and inspire you with their tangents. Passion and staring at the maelstrom of existence, from a more philosophical plateau than regular literature, seems to inspire many. To suggest it is vapid would be, in my opinion, inane.

>>2684542
>You can't judge Philosophy as a discipline based on the "shitty" examples of it.

Oh, I'm not. I was criticizing the modern 'scientific' outlook and I made a reference to the strands of philosophical thought that helped produce it.

If I want to figure out whether Alain Badiou is as good as people claim, is Being & Event the place to start?

>>2684539
what about housing, electricity, your computer, bridges, cars, and other fun things?

Ladies and gentleman, the one, the only, the Voegelin

>>2684557

Your guys have seemingly met an impasse regarding where reasoning has left us. It would be silly to say that technology (extensions of the mind) and reasoning (a faculty of the mind) are not now inextricable. We have allowed our minds to extend into different substrates than just what is neuronal and we can no longer articulate ideas without relying on technology. This has been both a productive and destructive relationship.

>>2684564
>your guys
stopped reading there
actually i thought what you said was reasonable

>>2684566

Lol, thank you. And I have no idea why I said 'your guys' though. Ah well.

Philosophy can do many things for us that science can't, such as:
Semiotics, Ethics, Phenomenology, Ontology, and Existentialism

That being said, every time you start a goddamn philosophical conversation anywhere near the US or Britain it becomes a pissing contest. A sublimation of the lower drives with weak motherfuckers trying to dominate other weak motherfuckers via their intellect.

>>2684258
Malick didn't even finish his studies on Philosophy, and he has done several, well recieved, translations on Heidegger.

Why is it hip to be right-wing among young people nowadays?

>>2684599

Ron Paul made it cool.

>>2684599
it's "hip" to not give a shit about stupid things, which means not being "politically correct", which to americans means being right wing

>>2684523
>is a utilitarianist
>claims philosophy is useless while promoting his own philosophical viewpoint
Pity science never taught you how to think you fucking retard.