For the posters here that are interested in continental philosophy, I have a question:
Can you state any ideas from the thinkers associated with this tradition that you believe were meaningful advancements to human thought?
If possible, please do it without telling me that I won't be able to even slightly comprehend a summery unless I read some thinker's entire body of work and that of everyone who influenced them, and please try to do it without comparing these ideas to those found in analytic philosophy.
I'm just wondering what are the ideas that make these thinkers and the discourses they were involved in worth exploring?
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Philosophy ain't right or wrong. It just is
1009. Scientists still swear up and down that there's a fundamental difference between the classical behavior of the universe at macro scales, and the quantum behavior observed at the micro level, but that's only because the type of scientist who understands the micro levels has not the faintest clue of how the macro levels operate, and vice versa. Take for example the double-slit experiment. Its philosophical significance is that the particle's behavior is ultimately dominated by the observer's will; the particle will simply go wherever the scientist consciously wants it to go, depending on how he sets up the experiment, and the only conclusion the scientist will arrive at, no matter how many times he runs the experiment, is his own will. And this is where the quantum mechanists throw their hands up in the air and despair, pathetically exclaiming that "THAT'S NOT AT ALL HOW REALITY FUNCTIONS AT THE MACRO LEVEL, THIS IS A BRAND-NEW, RADICALLY DIFFERENT TYPE OF BEHAVIOR!" And yet isn't that precisely how pyschologists observe that people function under examination, in interviews for example? Doesn't the way the interviewer poses the question radically alter the type of answer he gets? Don't people always end up getting the types of answers they are looking for, at the end of the day? Isn't the infinite way in which statistics can be interpreted "a type of wish-fulfillment" as Baudrillard has strikingly noted? So there is no fundamental difference between the macro and quantum scales, it just takes a genius who understands both to connect the dots and reconcile the apparent contradictions.
Tons more here: http://orgyofthewill.net
And your reading list is here: http://orgyofthewill.net/read
>Take for example the double-slit experiment. Its philosophical significance is that the particle's behavior is ultimately dominated by the observer's will;
Stopped reading there.
Husserl and epistemology/psychology/sciences. Derrida and literary criticism. That is about it.
you're stupid
Hegel got us to semiotics and was a huge influence on Pierce. With the information theoretic turn in biology those ideas have been pretty crucial to framing what life is, how it began, and how we could make synthetic life.
Hegel's idea of the public self I've seen referenced in neuroscience/origins of consciousness.
He shows up as a direct inspiration in information science too.
I've seen his ideas as a primary reference point in biology and mathematics too.
Obviously he had a huge influence in theology and politics, grandfather of Marxism, Fascism, and the liberal state lol. He was the main reference point for Fukuyama's End of History as well.
And not to violate your rules, but analytic philosophy was started as a reaction to Hegel so he's a key influence there too.
>Hegel got us to semiotics
Locke made use of the word Σημειωτική a century before Hegel was born, and Peirce's categories were taken from Kant, not from Hegel.
Pierce is obviously influenced by Kant and Hegel, but he's much closer to Hegel which is something he said in his papers. Plus, the triads!
But yes, Locke and Kant were both very important too, in very many areas. Locke is cited all the time in physics vis-á-vis haecceity, particle identity and thus ways of measuring the number of distinct quantum states in a system. Also substratum metaphysics which is connected to this.
Kant you see in neuroscience even more often than Hegel, although they basically reduce Kant to "muh noumenon vs appearance," without paying much attention to the rest. That said, he's in ethics all the time.
I pick Hegel here because he's the funniest person to ask "what did he do that changed the world?"
No other man outside Aristotle during scholasticism so fully dominated philosophy for a period. And yes, that period was followed by an equally long one where it became in vouge to say Hegel was schizo word salad, but that's also a reaction to him. But obviously you don't get Hegel without Kant, so it's not about maximum influence, it's just about how silly it is for the guy who was the inspiration for both Marxism, fascism, and arguably modern liberalism, to be listed under "did he do anything?" Hell, neocons were claiming Hegel's mantel and his idea of historical progress into the Bush II era, and now he is a popular right wing boogey man, the evil sorcerer behind Marx, the final boss of leftism.
It's comical how one man can leave such a shadow on history when so few people actually read him. He's like Buddha's shadow in the cave in Nietzsche lol.
Hell, I've seen IQfyizens try to seriously convince people that everyone with politics that moved beyond 1750 is just a golden of Hegel.
BTW, there are good an bad reasons for the "rediscovery" of Hegel in mathematics and the science and the growing influence of Pierce in biology to physics.
The bad reason is that they are both famously obscure and difficult to interpret so people can win (or at least no lose) arguments by claiming people who disagree with them misunderstand the source material. There are also very different versions of each floating around. There is a Marxist Hegel, a mystical one, and a right wing Hegel, and such a huge body of work that you can essentially pick three philosophers out of one (sort of like the distinct strains of Platonism).
With Pierce you have less variation, but you get the one who focuses on the uniqueness of life and primacy of mind for people who want semiotics to account for the subject/object "epistemic cut," and use him to support some form of type or predicate dualism on the one hand. On the other you get the pansemiotic Pierce for whom all is a chain of sign, interpretant who becomes sign, etc. People looking to information theoretic approaches of explaining reality from physics up like this Pierce. This you get Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness showing up in articles on the evolution of quantum states, which the folks in biosemiotics abhor. You also get unification with folks like Deacon.
Then there is the good reason, which is that they both have systems that offer hope for a unified "theory of everything." Pierce's is much less definite, but that's a perk for people who want flexibility. With the collapse of positivism, the received view of scientific theories, and unhappiness with the mathematical view (indeed, some formulations of this have self described physicalists seemingly falling into idealism), people are looking back for other ways forward. I could see how a formalization of the dialectical could be very helpful here, so this interest actually makes sense. You can have a "rediscovery" because this sort of thinking was exorcised from the sciences a long time ago and people are now realizing that the premises for doing so were deeply flawed.
There is also a wave of books coming out that embrace a sort of "scientific idealism," Pinter, Hoffman, Davies, etc. These are recreating the seeming contradictions of Kant re: access to the noumena, so I think we'll be seeing more folks jumping back to Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Bradley, etc. to look for paths towards unification.
At least I hope this trend keeps up, because my current stack is absolutely brutal and I don't want my own attempt to miss the boat. Especially since, not pictured here, is my arduous reading list to try to understand local symmetry through quantum chromodynamics, which was the worst slog I think I ever put my brain through.
>No other man outside Aristotle during scholasticism so fully dominated philosophy for a period. And yes, that period was followed by an equally long one where it became in vouge to say Hegel was schizo word salad, but that's also a reaction to him. But obviously you don't get Hegel without Kant, so it's not about maximum influence, it's just about how silly it is for the guy who was the inspiration for both Marxism, fascism, and arguably modern liberalism, to be listed under "did he do anything?" Hell, neocons were claiming Hegel's mantel and his idea of historical progress into the Bush II era, and now he is a popular right wing boogey man, the evil sorcerer behind Marx, the final boss of leftism.
My question wasn't so much "did he do anything?" and more "what were the specific ideas that were so important?" It is a substantially different question.
>neocons were claiming Hegel's mantel and his idea of historical progress into the Bush II era, and now he is a popular right wing boogey man
this isn't contradictory as you think. neocons are rabid proponents of modern liberalism. stop being direction brained.
>Hegel got us to semiotics and was a huge influence on Pierce. With the information theoretic turn in biology those ideas have been pretty crucial to framing what life is, how it began, and how we could make synthetic life.
Anybody who tries to reduce Peirce's philosophy to a naturalistic system is missing the spirit of Peirce's work. Yeah, Peircian metaphysics could brilliantly explain the origins of life, but Peirce's metaphysics are built on his epistemology, which radically posits that it could all be chance, without explanation. That's probably why biosemiotics promises so much and yet reveals so little, as its commitment to naturalism often ignores the mystical and transcendent turn in Peirce's system.
Continental philosophy asks and explores deep questions about the human condition, art and history while analytic philosophy gets bullied and laughed at by STEMgays.
>Can you state any ideas from the thinkers associated with this tradition that you believe were meaningful advancements to human thought
Solving the problem of the one and the many. Understanding the meaning of life and what this means for the course of humanity.
Plato (99% of what you need if you read him deeply enough, charitably enough, dispassionately enough, ironically enough, balancing multiple tensions in your head, etc.)
Hobbes
Voltaire
Rousseau
Kant
Schopenhauer
Hegel
Schelling
Peirce (not quite continental, but close enough)
Heidegger
Deleuze
It's just an endless cycle of ironman Plato dunking on everybody and mysticism being proven superior to philosophy again and again. So, pick your religion and stick with it.
Good list. Except for maybe Hobbes these guys stood the test of time.
Hobbes is one of the end bosses if you read him carefully enough. you NEED to read him, if only to refute him. also, lots of brilliant metaphors in there.
so humanist figured life out huh. i wonder why humanists keep saying that and non-humanists never acknowledge that humanists are the goat
I'm anti-humanist.
trash except deleuze
t. lives in terror of the form of the good
I read all of these posts and I'm going to vomit. If this is American academia then I am not surprised you're unable to keep your people in check.
Happy 4th of July.
I just wanted to see f people could elaborate on why they think these thinkers are valuable, and at least a few people made an effort.
Maybe the responses will get better if this thread makes it to Euro hours.
I'll try to state what are generally considered the intellectual advances according to academia of some.
Hegel made historicism prominent. Ideas or consciousness moved history. Influenced Marx in particular. He argued forcefully against kantian formalisms. Created the grandest all-encompassing system of man, the state, history and Freedom/Being.
Nietzsche argued forcefully against enlightenment thought in science and rationality. He avoided structural analysis and put more emphasis on art and the history of values and their import. Atheistic but not materialist. Seemed to have a 'will to power' concept underlaying his philosophy.
Heidegger argued against rational representation as a form of metaphysics in the modern epoch that conceals Being as Being. Ontology had been forgotten through history. Argued against 'Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche' in particular.
>Nietzsche argued forcefully against enlightenment thought
...And romantic thought, and nihilist thought, and scholastic thought, usw.
Thats correct but academia which is the metric im using to adjudicate relative worth, usually neglects those aspects in favour of his perspectivism in regards to science.
why not just some plato and see if you find it interesting? if you do, aristotle has some more shit to say about it & so on. how do expect to grasp “meaningful advancements” without knowing the first thing about the history of the field or its modes of investigation? you’re like a child asking to explain romance to them without any yucky stuff.
Damn, I guess I was right in assuming that most of the people interested in this type of thing were totally full of shit.
Advancements? These people actively poisoned human thought and brought us to the absolute state we are in today. Trannies are the final consequence of all continental philosophy
>nothing could possibly be so complex that you actually need to attend to the subject matter itself rather than speak of it using analogies for simpletons
Not only is it clear you've never been serious about """continental""" philosophy OP, but you've never been serious about mathematics either.
>Eeyup, if it ain't clear to Cletus here on the farms in Kansas, it ain't philosophy
kys
Of course, modern mechanics and mathematics and thus nearly all of modern science came out of "continental" philosophy (aka philosophy). You wouldn't have had Bacon's philosophy of experimentalism, the mathematics and mechanics of Descartes and Galileo, Kepler's and Newton's astronomy, political and ethical philosophy of every variety leading to modern social and cultural sciences, scientific psychology and anthropology as distinct from theological conceptions of man and soul, etc., if it hadn't all been immersed in every sort of philosophy they could get their hands on.
That's one of the main reasons the Renaissance was such a frenzy to recover ancient sources, so people could see as many philosophical proposals for how the world works and how to think about it as possible. Many of these now seem "obviously" harebrained to us, but Hobbes' reductive materialism, Gassendi's eclectic atomism, Locke's associationism, etc., all paved the way for things we find more "obviously" true today. But not before going through other harebrained forms, like French materialism and associationism a la Condillac, all sorts of pantheisms and panspsychisms and animisms as explanations for life and cosmology, etc.
The modern critical tendency of "continental" philosophy largely rose out of the need for auto-critique and self-clarification after two centuries of leapfrogging and semi-intentional advances in philosophy and natural science as a result of this efflorescence. The 18th century had already reacted against the 17th's century "esprit de systeme," the spirit of erecting mutually exclusive total metaphysical systems, but the 18th century was felt by the generation of Hegel and Schelling to have become philistine, materialistic, atheistic, "sophisticated" but shallow. Schelling read pretty much every single scientific treatise then available and mastered everything he could, and tried to see if it was time yet for the human mind to achieve a synthetic, holistic view of nature and to penetrate to its inner secrets. Hegel followed in Schelling's wake in his own way.
The idealist and romantic quest for the absolute failed, but in failing it ended up creating practically the entire structure of modern thought. The generation of Kant and Schelling and Hegel was like a volcanic eruption of genius and the subsequent 150 years was basically picking up the major chunks of earth thrown up and working out their implications more systematically than the founders had been able to. Ideas like the relativity and historicity of knowledge and culture (Kant, Herder), knowledge and experience being modal and multi-faceted rather than reducing to simple and unitary "ideas" (compare the absolute poverty of the treatment of "ideas" even in subtle thinkers like Hume as late as the 18th century, to transcendental psychology and phenomenology), reflexivity and recursivity as a central problem of epistemology, our whole modern vocabularies and meta-vocabularies for talking about problems of "reference" and "adequacy."
Ironically even the philosophical movements hardest for ordinary people to understand, like Hegel's idealism, end up creating concepts useful for radically opposed movements, like materialists and empiricists. Hegel's idealism and Schelling's intellectual intuition also remain as regulative ideals or extreme expressions of certain possibilities. The tools developed in all this sifting and self-reflection allow us to do what Hobbes and Descartes couldn't, namely, look at any set of philosophical ideas and deconstruct them to see what motivated them, what parts in them are essential and what parts are accidental, what parts could still be useful. The 17th century was the era of radically mutually exclusive cosmologies, the 19th and 20th centuries were the era of learning how to lay an entire era's worth of cosmologies on a table and see their underlying structural commonalities, their underlying assumptions, how people come to see in certain ways and perhaps lose the ability to see in other ways, why science arose in the way it did at the times it did, perhaps why science is stuck in the ways it is currently stuck (leading some people to go back and try pantheism, pansychism, absolute idealism, etc. all over again, but this time maybe with the benefit of hindsight and self-awareness).
"Science" doesn't spring fully formed from "reasonableness," there are periods of human history that last thousands of years in which eminently reasonable people never manifest curiosity about their world. True curiosity requires speculation and speculation requires seeming wrong or kooky in the hindsight of later centuries.
>meaningful advancements to human thought
Not really how philosophy works
Nietzsche broadly discussed human nature and all the accompany behaviors that were taken for granted by the enlightenment thinkers. Whether or not you find his positions on the matter convincing, many later continental thinkers seem to engage with different aspects of his thought, even those in analytic philosophy who deal with topics relevant seem to be turning the page to some of his more rigorous arguments and ideas.
Heidegger has had a huge influence on the humanities beyond the scope general philosophy. The one I see most often cited in Archaeology papers is his concept of ‘dwelling’ from his later thought. But overall turning ontology from a mere survey of problematizing objects into problematizing how humans articulate and relate to the world around them was pertinent to later thinkers like Sartre and Derrida, whose influence themselves has a big reach beyond pure philosophy.
Sartre is bizarre because he was probably more influential in getting people to disagree with him on justabout everything he wrote about. Probably because his core philosophy is a bizarre mishmash of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger and applies it back to enlightenment conceptions of the individual. Disagreeing with Sartre can be done in many ways, but many people were nonetheless influenced by him in someway.
Foucault more or less continued the Nietzschean project of examining human nature, and more or less came to the conclusion that fields of power articulate and control the ways we think, act, and speak. This notion has been massively influential in social science, but less so in academic philosophy.
Derrida more or less worked within the phenomenological tradition and responded to structural anthropology but applied it to linguistic and semiotic affairs, and majorly contributed to English departments and women, gender, and sexuality studies with his notion of Deconstruction. Deconstruction is broadly a method of taking apart notions taken for granted, using something’s own articulation to dissect the ways in which they are used and what their broader implications are.
Deleuze is basically the new Hegel in terms of how people in Continental philosophy approach metaphysics, namely that if you want engage with the topic you must either respond/dissent to some of his key commitments. What makes him so influential is that he basically provides an engineering manual for concepts and does not outright moralize on what someone ought to do with them. Part of this is from his influence from Sartre, diverging from practical freedom to pure intellectual freedom. You can find Deleuze’s influence in women, gender, and sexuality studies, film studies, literary studies, political science and as the barrier for entry for contemporary thought like Accelerationism and (along with Hegel and Kant) for continental neo-rationalism.
Whether you think they meaningfully advance human thought is another question entirely.
Good answer.
This is the type of thing that I was looking for when I made the thread. Thanks for actually trying. I will admit other posters did try in their own creative ways, but this is the sort of thing I was looking for.