/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.12521063]

What do we think of the internet's biggest philosopher?

[Anonymous No.12521072]

>wasting your time with internet personas
every judgement of his is poisoned by his massive ego
I prefer any 4chan comment over his "philosophy"

[Anonymous No.12521090]

>>12521072
Why don't you skype him and show the world how retarded he is?

[Anonymous No.12521108]

>>12521072
considering the state of this website, I guess that says a lot about this guy

[Anonymous No.12521113]

he is more of a salesman than a philosopher

don't beat ya kids
iq good

[Anonymous No.12521117]

Charlatan beta

[Anonymous No.12521124]

>>12521090
skype is botnet

[Anonymous No.12521176]

not a philosopher
his iq is low

[Anonymous No.12521184]

I've always been scared away from him by his idiot followers. I regularly read great literature. Should I waste my time with Molyneux?

[Anonymous No.12521186]

>>12521072
Really this. The intenet is drowning in sophistry and it's turned kids into idiots. The universities are at least partly to blame though for pushing critical theory insanity

[Anonymous No.12521192]

>>12521184
http://freedomainradio.com/#2668

[Anonymous No.12521227]

>>12521063
molyneux is angry

angry about elves

[Anonymous No.12521258]

>>12521063
While I agree with some of his points I can't help but regard how much of a massive tool he is, and how his toolish-ness has affected internet discussion.

[Anonymous No.12521261]

this is a pretty good line tho

[Anonymous No.12521267]

>>12521063
He doesn't understand syllogisms. I can't even fathom how retarded and egotistical you have to be to call yourself a philosopher and not understand syllogisms. He's without a doubt the worst of these IDW motherfuckers.

[Anonymous No.12521293]

>>12521063
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CM_--di7L8

[Anonymous No.12521323]

>>12521063
He is no philosopher. Has not a single original and notable idea.

[Anonymous No.12521327]

>>12521063
Who? Lenin?

[Anonymous No.12521332]

>>12521327
no, Mussolini

[Anonymous No.12521336]

>>12521323
wrong
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZvTXFxPwb0

[Anonymous No.12521364]

>>12521261
that is literally the most run of the mill basic observation about fascism
this shit gets taught to you in fucking high school

[Anonymous No.12521389]

>>12521364

[Anonymous No.12521416]

>>12521336
bitchute.com/video/5PF7YF66APmE/
Look at how Molymeme reacts to criticism of his bullshit
He deleted the video a couple days ago when people saw through his pathetic whining

[Anonymous No.12521422]

Suspiciously not engaging the JQ at all. It would be fine if he completely shut up about it but he seems to cuck for them from time to time which is sad.

[Anonymous No.12521426]

>>12521063
Ben Shapiro, just by the numbers and monthly ad revenue

[Anonymous No.12521508]

Remember when he was on JRE? Also, how fucking low is the threshold to be a philosopher? Do I literally just have to say things other people will parrot?

[Anonymous No.12521533]

he fucked up Fable III terribly

[Anonymous No.12521567]

>>12521332
My man looks like he's tweaking hard right here.

[Anonymous No.12521584]

>>12521186
>Le lefty universities ruining society

[Anonymous No.12521701]

>>12521113
Yes, and a non-pc newsman. In these ways he is very important, and I wish he would double down on those valuable pursuits and discard his embarassing pretense of being a philosopher.

[Anonymous No.12521702]

>le white genocide face

[Anonymous No.12521706]

>>12521702

[Anonymous No.12521824]

Bump I dislike molymeme

[Anonymous No.12521834]

>le one dolla man

[Anonymous No.12521840]

>>12521824
>>12521834
error 404 argument not found

[Anonymous No.12521895]

>>12521840
found the cult member

[Anonymous No.12522166]

Heil Stefan!

[Anonymous No.12522177]

>>12521416
>bitchute.com/video/5PF7YF66APmE/
This is so bad. Normally he is clever about hiding his sophistry but this is just lame. I don't know how you could be so lacking in self awareness.

[Anonymous No.12522859]

>>12521072
ur mom have big gay lmao

[Anonymous No.12522942]

I like him but so much of his content is trash. His videos on McCarthy, Marx, the fall of the Rome, intelligence and IQ, etc. are all pretty great in my opinion, but he just keeps doing call in shows that are basically just Jerry Springer pseudo-therapy garbage. He's supposed to be a big famous philosopher but I'm getting sick of hearing him talk for several hours at a time with people who can barely form coherent and concise english sentences about their parental abandonment issues.

I donate to him in the hope of getting more presentations, but every month there's more garbage. Three hours long, featuring Stef and a man with an indecipherable and incomprehensible accent, who is incapable of listening or responding properly, stuttering and mumbling about why he can only get off when his girlfriend sets his pubic hair on fire.

[Anonymous No.12522947]

>>12521416
>>12522177
The video's up and the comments are tearing him a new asshole.

[Anonymous No.12522982]

>>12522942
/thread

[Anonymous No.12522983]

we need a /yootoober/ and /self-help/ board

[Anonymous No.12522986]

>>12522942
>Three hours long, featuring Stef and a man with an indecipherable and incomprehensible accent, who is incapable of listening or responding properly, stuttering and mumbling about why he can only get off when his girlfriend sets his pubic hair on fire.

I never listened to the guy because he seems like the very definition of a pseud, but I have to be honest here and say that this sounds hilarious.

[Anonymous No.12522992]

>>12521072
>wasting your time with centuries dead autistics
I don't watch molymeme or any "e-celeb" really but this line of reasoning is retarded

[Anonymous No.12523001]

biggest as in biggest forehead?

[Anonymous No.12523008]

>>12522942

because he's not a philosopher, that should be obvious to you by now. and if he is, then he's not a good one

[Anonymous No.12523014]

>>12522942
>His videos on McCarthy, Marx, the fall of the Rome,
those are laughably bad

>He's supposed to be a big famous philosopher
lmfao, to whom exactly? only among 4chan's edgy brainlets he's even considered a philosopher at all

[Anonymous No.12523018]

What happened between him an JF?

[Anonymous No.12523032]

On behalf of the right wing delegation, I move to exile Stefan Molyneux and his fans. All in favor say aye.

[Anonymous No.12523538]

>>12521063
If you want to know what he is about as a “philosopher” you only need to read about 30-40 pages of a text like Univerally Perfered Behaviour.

By then it’s two things are obvious; first is that he writes exactly like a first-year who thinks he’s a genius but isn’t, and second is that he hasn’t even done the basic ground work of investigation required to attempt to answer the questions he’s trying to answer.

It’s deeply ironic that despite being a person who constantly talks about the superiority of western thought and the need to defend the west, in that book at least he does very little engaging with the long tradition of western philosophy. Call me a conservative but I don’t think a philosopher is just somebody who thinks about stuff, a (western) philosopher is somebody who engages the western philosophical tradition and tries to answer philosophical question through the critque and expansion of those who have come before us.

The result is that he fumbles around trying to rediscover the connection between epistemology, Metaphysics, and ethics. He manages to say some extremely Phil101 stuff about epistemology that sounds basically like he’s parroting Ayn Rand’s ‘objectivist epistemology’ but then seems to act like he’s done his own Copernican revolution in philosophy.

He is not a philosopher. He is a political pundit, taking swipes against thinkers he hasn’t read, with no engagement with the actual texts.

And seriously, read as much on any of his books as you can stomach if you want to see for yourself.

[Anonymous No.12523633]

>>12523538
I haven't read UPB, but can you give me an example or two of what, specifically, is wrong with it? Also, are you saying that someone should only be considered a western philosopher if their work is built upon previous western philosophers? I don't think I need to explain the obvious chicken vs. egg contradiction there.

[Anonymous No.12523658]

>>12521063
The Molymeme phenomenon is fascinating to me. I just can't understand why people watch his videos. They seem so boring, with his autistic listing of facts on powerpoint for 2 hours.

Seriously, someone please explain it to me.

From all the Youtubers with similar political views who are more entertaining, why Moly?
You can even point me to one of his good videos if you like.

[Anonymous No.12524138]

>>12523658
You're on /lit/. You should be able to figure out that something can be interesting without being entertaining. Yeah, if you're not interested in X, you're not going to sit through a two hour long powerpoint presentation on X, no shit. Some of us are interested in the information he's providing, and seek it out.

[Anonymous No.12524329]

>>12523633
There is a load of uninterogated ideas that he’s relying on. He appeals to ‘scientific method’ as a means of ascertaining ‘truth’ but totally ignores that there is a century of controversy in the philosophy of science over what exactly that means, if anything at all. Just appealing to a simple idealized version of science is a huge ask considering how much importance he puts on it. Also he presents ‘the scientific community’ as being an example of successful anarchic organization that works without governing bodies because all agents autonomously work according to a principle (the scientific method), but having spent time at a university I don’t think you can actually abstract out all the institutions that science involves. Universities, private laboratories, government agencies (NASA etc), academic journals, book publishers, and field specific governing bodies like the APA or IUPAC play a non-trivial role in the functioning of science.

It’s in Part One where there is an utter brain scramble of ideas. He distinguishes ‘facts’ from ‘preferences’, and gives us criteria for each but importantly he doesn’t give us a definition. I’d also dispute his criteria, because it’s not inconceivable to test the ‘fact’ of a person’s preference through observation of their behaviour. If a person routinely chooses Rock music over jazz or in general never makes any effort to listen to jazz or attend jazz shows even when they have the opportunity to, if that was the case I would be comfortable saying that we have “objective” evidence of a preference. He misses the point that a ‘fact’ is a statement that relates objects to each other or objects to properties.

He holds language to be a transparent medium for the transmission of truth, with only a one sentence justification that does nothing to address the scope of the problem. Its the very question that everybody from Heidegger to Derrida to Wittgenstein was concerned with, and Molyneux basically just says ‘eh, how big a deal could it be!’ and moves on. If the fundamental nature of language was unimportant to his case then he should have just ignored it, but rather than saying ‘the nature of language is unimportant’ he just says ‘language works like this, let’s move on’. It’s another major unexamined piece that a good philosopher would commit more energy to addressing.

He sets out to defeat relativism but a few pages in he already succumbs when he introduces ‘accuracy’ as an important category, as well as when he swerves to take a pragmatist stance on the ‘truth’ of scientific theories when he mentions sailors using Newton rather than Einstein.

Also in the first section he brings up both scientific ‘proof’ of something being true and mathematical proof of something being true. Most philosophers would consider those to be two very different kinds of knowledge, and two very different ways of coming to acquire knowledge.

[Anonymous No.12524373]

>>12523633
>>12524329
Specifically that scientific knowledge is inductive while mathematical knowledge is deductive. While people like Putnam and Quine have argued that mathematics is ‘quasi-empirical’ Molyneux makes no reference to their argument nor even seems aware of those basic categories of inference.

He also seems unaware that we hold scientific “truths” to always be tentative, because future evidence could always contradict.


This pic related is the random non-sequitur he uses to not address the non-transparency of language.

[Anonymous No.12524380]

>>12521063

He's a fascist, anything he says is bullshit that has the agenda of normalizing ideas associated with the larger fascist sphere. If you see his real persona where he screams about women being evil you see how crazy he is.

I've seen people trying to dissect him but after seeing numerous channels like him as well as various forum trolls play the same cult tactics game you gain wisdom and a lot of the stuff these guys have to say is usually just BS to advance an agenda. Sometimes wisdom is better than trying to intelligently dissect something.

[Anonymous No.12524449]

>>12523633
And I’m saying that ever since there has been a widely recognized ‘canon’ of ‘western philosophers’, if you attempt to think philosophical problems without serious engagement of that tradition you can’t be reasonably called a ‘western philosopher’.

That’s how we define ‘outsider art’ anyways. It’s art made by people in our society that lacks any reference to the canon, and thus exists ‘outside’ the tradition.

People like Thales and Plato weren’t western philosophers when they were alive, they only became that retroactively when the tradition of critique, commentary, and innovation coalesced and included them.

I can think of maybe two philosophers of any merit who consciously sought to ‘start fresh’ with no reference to anything that came before, those being Descartes and Wittgenstein.

With those two exceptions (plus Thales, the very first) all philosophy in the west is conducted ‘in dialogue’, in the form of a massive dialectic, of thinkers considering the ideas of others and responding to them.

[Anonymous No.12524495]

>>12524329
>>12524373
Call me a brainlet, but I don't think I understand what you're trying to convey. From what I can tell, Molyneaux's point is that there's a theoretical point of perfect accuracy, a way to describe something exactly as it is, and we can use science and philosophy to navigate our way toward that point. What we call a 'fact' or 'truth' is wherever we currently see ourselves to be relative to that point. For example, if we're trying to determine whether an animal is a horse or a house cat, we could test it by using our knowledge that horses can be ridden and house cats can't. If we sit on it and it dies, we know even if it's not a house cat, it's significantly more likely to be that than a horse.

"Horse" and "house cat" are terms we have invented to label things, and just like how our position relative to the point of perfect accuracy may shift, so too may the definitions of these terms. However, for the sake of argument, we have at least agreed that a horse is potentially rideable while a house cat isn't. This isn't making a statement about the thing itself, but our term. We're not arguing whether that animal really is objectively a horse as we know it, but whether it objectively meets the criteria for being labeled with the term "horse". I believe that's what he means when he's talking about the objectivity of language. The definition of a term is not subjective, therefor whether something meets the definition isn't either. When he's talking about science or "the scientific community" demonstrating objectivity, I think he means that things can be tested whether they fit our definitions (like sitting on something to see if it dies), not whether 'facts' are solid and set in stone.

I could be talking nonsense, though, so let me know.

>>12524449
>if you attempt to think philosophical problems without serious engagement of that tradition you can’t be reasonably called a ‘western philosopher’.
Define "reasonably".

[Anonymous No.12524516]

>>12521108
not the person youre replying to but yeah, i went through a Molyneux stage and God saw that I got through it very soon.

He is really really bad, he mistakes having an extremely strong, manipulative conversational arm as being intelligent. he also only tends to converse with callers stupider than him

[Anonymous No.12524549]

>>12521063
Jordan Peterson? Meh, he's gud, bro.

[Anonymous No.12524667]

>>12521124
what's a VM?

[Anonymous No.12525148]

>>12524495
>>12524495
My understanding is that he’s trying to create grounds for an ‘objective’ stance, by which he means one that is universally valid for all observers at all times, existing outside any particular mind. The moment we say that ‘why you need to know’ is important you are taking on a pragmatist epistomology, which is anti-realist.

When you get into the bit on horses and cats we run into the more basic problem of what makes a thing a thing. My bigger point is that questions like that have volumes of debate dedicated to them, all of which Molyneux ignores. Russell’s Theory of Definite Descriptions, Kripke’s causal theory, and developments of that by Putnam in his ‘twin earth’ paper, these ought to be considered when.

You might be right that he’s shifting the problem from being about ‘the world’ to being about the truthfulness or statement, but that seems to be a more sophisticated point than the one he’s writing. He doesn’t cleanly distinguish between his discussions at the level of language and at the level of the world itself, because he seems to think that language captures the world transparently, so there is no distinction to be made there.

[Anonymous No.12525259]

>>12525148
I should say, I've read the Art of the Argument, which provides some clarity on whether he's talking about 'the world' or 'the statement on the world' so I couldn't honestly say whether his explanation in UPB is sufficient for the point he's making. It seems to not be from what you're saying though.

If I had to take a guess, I would say that his popularity is crippling him. So many people are accepting his ideas uncritically that he doesn't refine them as well as he should. If more people were like you and saying things like "Oi, Molly, what about all this shit that already covers what you're talking about" or "You're being too vague, it sounds like you're talking about something else entirely" then the book itself would probably be better.

I think he's a better philosopher than writer, but I'm a n00b to philosophy so what do I know? He could be on 'just touch a stove lmao' level and I'm over-interpreting it.

[Anonymous No.12525594]

>>12521389
Brilliant! A visionary! The greatest thinker of our age!

But seriously please post more.

[Anonymous No.12525616]

>>12523658
You're spot on. I don't watch him often, but his titles and thumbnails seem to indicate something provocative and edgy and every time it's just the same boring thing for two hours sprinkled with some arguments so bad that you'd think he was false flagging.

[Anonymous No.12525817]

>>12521508
Yup back when he still referred to himself as a racist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFxU5veg0Cw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Xq_ZYB8rew
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTRY7pUdENw

[Anonymous No.12525828]

>>12522942
If Plato was alive and had a youtube channel, it would pretty much look like Freedom Alternative. Pseuds here don't get it because they idolize contrapoints and that british manchild with the skull logo .

[Anonymous No.12525848]

>>12522942
>I donate to him

[Anonymous No.12525859]

I love him!

and pic related

[Anonymous No.12527142]

>>12521261
My man said it better

[Anonymous No.12527152]

Doesn't he hate Catholics? If he hates the Catholic Church then I hate him by default.

[Anonymous No.12527183]

>I'm an empiricist!
>I visited a country, now I'm white nationalist
He's a shill playing the long game or up his own ass.

[Anonymous No.12527276]

>>12521261
>literally 'War is Peace' phrased so brainlets can understand it

[Anonymous No.12527299]

>>12521063
dangerous lack of self awareness

[Anonymous No.12527318]

>>12525828
Yeah, this guy looks like the next Plato

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WatERCz61p4

[Anonymous No.12528498]

>>12527318
kek, i meant to say freedom radio but lucian from freedom alternative is a legitimately great political commentator and i've been following him for years.

[Anonymous No.12528515]

>>12521063
>philosopher
Climate change ending the species doesn't sound so bad after all.