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Dank (pg. 17)
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| wotyzoid |
| quote: | Originally posted by Mr.Mystery
Not really. |
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| wotyzoid |
I'm sorry, I'm kind of pushing it. Let's dial it back.
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| SYSTEM-J |
| quote: | Originally posted by Woony
More importantly, when you take concepts from a more emperic realm into the philosphical realm, it doesn't matter if they become empirically debunked |
Hey, maybe not for you. Whenever I read someone like Laura Mulvey talking about cinema in terms of Lacan's mirror stage, I can't take it seriously. Your meme from earlier introduced me to "Mathematics (Badiou)". I'd never heard of Badiou before, but this little passage from Wikipedia made me laugh out loud:
| quote: | Several critics have questioned Badiou's use of mathematics. Mathematician Alan Sokal and physicist Jean Bricmont write that Badiou proposes, with seemingly "utter seriousness," a blending of psychoanalysis, politics and set theory that they contend is preposterous.[18] Similarly, philosopher Roger Scruton has questioned Badiou's grasp of the foundation of mathematics, writing in 2012:
There is no evidence that I can find in Being and Event that the author really understands what he is talking about when he invokes (as he constantly does) Georg Cantor's theory of transfinite cardinals, the axioms of set theory, Gödel's incompleteness proof or Paul Cohen's proof of the independence of the continuum hypothesis. When these things appear in Badiou's texts it is always allusively, with fragments of symbolism detached from the context that endows them with sense, and often with free variables and bound variables colliding randomly. No proof is clearly stated or examined, and the jargon of set theory is waved like a magician's wand, to give authority to bursts of all but unintelligible metaphysics.[19] |
No amount of exhaustive attentive reading, and no known quantity of have-cake-and-eat qualifiers about it being an epistomological/ontological/metaphysical invocation rather than literal statement will ever, ever make me get on board with this kind of . |
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| Woony |
| I was just contesting the idea that poststructuralism, any philosophy really, is bunk per se because it relies on empirically outdated concepts. If a given concept is applied in smart or elegant way is whole nother question and in that regard it doesn't matter where it comes from, empirically based or not. Even if we grant that poststructuralism is worse at applying concepts than other disciplines that doesn't invalidate the use of borrowed and outdated non-empiric concepts in general. |
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| Woony |
| For the record, as part of my research I recently stumbled upon a book from some woman from the 80s that tried to analyze european witchcraft with psychoanalysis. It was one of the biggest pieces of crap I've ever read :p |
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| Lira |
Wait, are you a post-graduate student/post-doc/lecturer?
Also, I feel most of this discussion could be answered with this book:
It's on my to-read list, but I've barely had the time to read the stuff in my field, let alone this :( |
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| Woony |
No no, just for my BA thesis (history). I'm starting a masters in philosophy this fall. I don't know if I can or even want to make it as an academic :p The system is absolute ass here for everyone that's not a professor, you literally can't survive off teaching (25 euros for a seminar sitting, apparently this is global for all of german academia) or tutoring (~400 euros a Semester) unless you get a permanent position. I was recently talking to a girl that's doing a PhD in psychology and she's basically working full time for one of the biggest medical institutions in the Country and she's getting paid basically nothing because she hasn't get a permanent, salaried positon.
Grad school doesn't really exist here in the same way, you do your masters and then you try to apply for a PhD (and some kind of grant...) if you want to continue. Oh and if you ever want to become a Professor you have to basically write another dissertation (Habilitation) after your PhD. They've been trying to get rid of the Habil. for like 20 years but prussian traditions are strong here :gsmile: |
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| Lira |
| quote: | Originally posted by Woony
No no, just for my BA thesis (history). I'm starting a masters in philosophy this fall. I don't know if I can or even want to make it as an academic :p |
Yeah, it's not an easy path. Wife and I made it, but there's so much we had to go through it's not even funny... Not to mention she's currently working in Manaus (which is as far from Brasília as Moscow is from Berlin).
| quote: | Originally posted by Woony
The system is absolute ass here for everyone that's not a professor, you literally can't survive off teaching (25 euros for a seminar sitting, apparently this is global for all of german academia) or tutoring (~400 euros a Semester) unless you get a permanent position. I was recently talking to a girl that's doing a PhD in psychology and she's basically working full time for one of the biggest medical institutions in the Country and she's getting paid basically nothing because she hasn't get a permanent, salaried positon. |
It's a completely different ballgame here, but that's probably because we need more graduate students, and from what I read Germany is a bit saturated if you want to get into academia.
I was paid 485 euros a month to do my Masters, and 560 euros a month to get my PhD... which is not bad considering the cost of living in Brazil is not that high. The tricky bit is actually landing a job afterwards. Although I was trained in linguistics, I eventually settled for Japanese language. I'm a weird fit there :p
| quote: | Originally posted by Woony
Grad school doesn't really exist here in the same way, you do your masters and then you try to apply for a PhD (and some kind of grant...) if you want to continue. |
Same here, actually, we've followed something called the "Prussian model". Probably something commie, judging by the "russian" in it :D
| quote: | Originally posted by Woony
Oh and if you ever want to become a Professor you have to basically write another dissertation (Habilitation) after your PhD. They've been trying to get rid of the Habil. for like 20 years but prussian traditions are strong here :gsmile: |
Thank God we didn't go full Prussian :p |
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| Woony |
| No no, "prussia model" means that you literally modelled your academic System after the 19th century burocratic authorarian Military-state of prussia - the Germany that caused WW1 :gsmile: |
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| Lews |
| quote: | Originally posted by Woony
But in the beginning you didn't give me any evidience to go off except stating that it's nonsense with no explanation for why that is. And empiric evidience tells me that in that case, 90% of the time people that state that poststructuralism is complete nonsense are analytics and do not know what they are talking about - am I not being a great analytic? :p Maybe I was wrong for going by empiric experience but dude, dealing with this all the time when most of the people saying that kind of stuff haven't even tried engaging with it gets ing tiring. I've been involved in way to many of these arguments with people that have absolutely zero interest in actually engaging with it. If you had started with what you said about it in your last posts, I wouldn't even have bothered. |
Of course I didn't - we were discussing memes! Why would I bother responding to -post memes with an in-depth deconstruction of post-structuralism? When you commented that you disliked people dismissing post-structuralism without engaging with it because of their preconceived beliefs, I responded that I had engaged with it and still dismissed it. You then responded by saying that it shouldn't be dismissed just because it was difficult to get through.
I assume/hope you realise that, this entire time, you have displayed a strong tendency to only see criticism of post-structuralism in the binary (analytic) terms of analytic/continental disagreement, while I have been attempting to deconstruct that divide by showing that things are more complex than that ;)
| quote: | Originally posted by Woony
But you started out saying it's nonsense without any of these disclaimers. That's the same as saying it is worthless. I just get really triggered by the word nonsense, because when it used, generally, there is no disclaimer. |
Again, I said it's mostly nonsense, not completely nonsense, and that was when were basically just discussing the memes.
| quote: | Originally posted by Woony
I wouldn't even call logical positivism complete nonsense and that's about as discredited as a philosophical system can get. |
Logical positivism is completely nonsense, since it invalidates itself immediately. When a view invalidates itself on its own grounds, that's rather problematic - see, eg, my above views on post-structuralism ;)
| quote: | Originally posted by Woony
As I've said before I wouldn't disagree, that given your definition of post structuralism, it's inherently going to self destruct but I think your characterization of post structuralism is unfair because I don't think this idea of deconstructing it all and building the system to end all systems was ever really it's main goal. Maybe people got to that conclusion when they marathon read all of Derrida as some kind of deconstruction instruction bible but people stopped doing that 15 years ago, deconstruction is totally out of style even within continental philosophy. Maybe the Richard Rorty essay I posted earlier is a bit favorable but it was published in a post-structuralist journal and it's conclusions about what this approach can do are very mild. In any case, many of these texts are too fragmentary to support such a grand system anways - above all they encourage you to take what you like and then run and go to do your own thing - I believe that they were smart enough to be self-aware that they were also sabotaging their own positive system with their negative approach, so that can't have been the main goal. Like I've said, despite all the proclamation of the failure of the project of deconstruction etc. the main project of poststructuralism has already suceeded in that it has invoked meta-level discussion and self reflection that wasn't even a thing previously. Even the staunchest critics of poststructuralism are more careful and reflective with great statements and grand narratives than they were before it and thus I think it's already proved it's usefulness. |
Well, in 2014-2015 I did take an MA that was half philosophy involving a hell of a lot of post-structuralism and deconstruction, so I wouldn't really say it's unfair of me to attack post-structuralism on those grounds. There's an awful lot of terrible deconstruction being published in a lot of post-structuralist journals - hence my initial statement that most of post-structuralism is nonsense, despite, as I clarified, there being some value in some works of some authors. |
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