I have referred you to "Existential Comics" before. Philosophy and jokes. The Greatest Ambition of Philosophy - Existential Comics This time the "joke" involves Gregory Sadler, also known as "The philosophy guy on YouTube." He has just completed a massive project, ten years of half-hour YouTube videos both reading to us and explaining Hegel's most obscure work (that is a high bar), THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT. Here is a link to the final video of that series. Half Hour Hegel: Phenomenology of Spirit (Absolute Knowing, 808) - YouTube Enjoy (I guess). The comic is much more fun than the reading. But sample the latter, it may cure you of any desire to go into Hegel further.
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Someone asked on the question-and-answer site Quora, what are the differences between Hegel and Marx with regard to their understanding of the State? My answer: That’s a complicated question. You’re deep in the weeds here. But here is where you might start research on Hegel in particular: https://www.iep.utm.edu/hegelsoc... Very short course. For Hegel the State is the third moment in the usual dialectical triad, where the family is the thesis and civil society is the antithesis. Both are subsumed into the State. You don’t know what this means because it isn’t how normal folk talk? I’m with you. You can delve more deeply into what he meant by the terms involved, but it won't change that. For Marx the State is the executive committee of the ruling class. See the difference? Marx didn’t use the dialectical terminology that, as a Hegelian, he knew perfectly well how to throw about, when it came time to DEFINE the state. Marx did talk like normal folk in defining the state, a...
This is fun. It comes from 2014 but, heck, in the history of philosophy, what's four years? Flavorwire compiled a list of the harshest philosopher-on-philosopher insults in history. Here's the link: http://flavorwire.com/469065/the-30-harshest-philosopher-on-philosopher-insults-in-history Their number #1 was Schopenhauer on Hegel: "Hegel, installed from above, by the powers that be, as the certified Great Philosopher, was a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense.” My personal favorite on the list is another dig at Hegel, coming though from Bertrand Russell: "Hegel’s philosophy is so odd that one would not have expected him to be able to get sane men to accept it, but he did. He set it out with so much obscurity that people thought it must be profound. It can quite easily be expounded lucidly in words of one syllable, but then its ab...
This is a shout-out to Thom Brooks and Sebastian Stein, the editors behind a new anthology HEGEL'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY from Oxford University Press. Brooks is a professor of political philosophy at Durham University. I may have mentioned him in this blog before, because he has his own blog that regularly comments on Brit and Eurozone politics in a way I find stimulating. Stein is with the philosophy department of the University of Heidelberg. Other than that, I know nothing about him at all. But I'm not surprised Hegel is taught in Heidelberg. And I know little about the book, except what one can gather from a review by Timothy Brownlee of Xavier University, at NDPR: https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/hegels-political-philosophy-on-the-normative-significance-of-method-and-system/ It seems from that review that one of the big questions underlying the book is whether what one thinks of the value of Hegel's political philosophy rises and falls with what one thinks of the v...
William James made the following points about Hegelian philosophy in an 1882 article. 1. We cannot eat our cake and have it; that is, the only real contradiction there can be between thoughts is where one is true, the other false. When that happens, one must go forever, nor is there any 'higher synthesis' in which both can wholly revive. 2. A chasm is not a bridge in any utilizable sense; that is, no mere negation can be the instrument of a positive advance in thought. 3. The continua, time, space, and the ego, are bridges because they are without chasm. 4. But they bridge over the chasms between represented qualities only partially. 5. Their partial bridging, however, makes the qualities share in a common world. 6. The other characteristics of the qualities are separate facts. 7. But the same quality appears in many times and space. Generic sameness of the quality wherever found becomes thus a further means by which the jolts are reduced. 8. But between different q...
I have sometimes before mined Yahoo!Answers for posts here when I've been lazy. So I am lazy today. Someone on YA asked for the "reasons for the Holocaust." I said the following: It's a complicated question. Contra some of the others who have answered, I don't believe one should focus too much on Hitler personally in responding to this question, to "what happened at Linz" as Auden said. My strong suspicion is that if Hitler had died of some childhood disease, the whole thing would have happened in much the same way with some other front man, and we'd be talking about that other guy's childhood! I think you have to start by taking Hegel seriously. Hegel was the figure in the history of thought who most clearly represented a wrong turn, and a specifically German wrong turn at that. Hegelians who prefer the color red became one sort of totalitarian and Hegelians who preferred the color brown became another. And Jews became the victims of...
Last summer, Valdi Ingthorsson, of Lund University in Sweden, released a book on the philosophy of time, with the title McTaggart's Paradox. https://rdingthorsson.wordpress.com/summary-of-mctaggarts-paradox/ I will provide some background material on the subject he is discussing, in Part I of this two-part discussion. In the second,which I hope to have ready by this coming Thursday, I'll speak to what Ingthorsson brings to this table. But let's start, as Ingthorsson does, with John M. E. McTaggart, a philosopher who flourished a century ago and who in 1908 published a landmark essay on the subject of time. http://www.ditext.com/mctaggart/time.html "McTaggart's paradox" is a key argument of his for the unreality of time. If I understand it the gist is this: in order for time to be real, the past and future have to exist in parity with each other (and with the present). Yet that can only be the case if time is not real, that is, if events of...
My sometimes random web-surfing has just brought me in contact with what seems to be a thing in the world of psychotherapy. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) apparently takes its name as a mutant of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which is well established. David M. Clark of Oxford was a pioneer in CBT, in the 1980s, merging the already established (but until then adversarial) cognitive and behavioral approaches, originally with the idea of helping people cope with trauma and anxiety disorders. That much I knew. What I didn't know until recently was that this, too, gets the dialectical twist from the see-saw brigade. Hegelian badness looms over everything. Just one word: Aaaaargh.
Donald Trump is the President-elect of the United States. The markets have been gobsmacked by this. They clearly didn't see it coming. Neither, as it happens, did I. In fact I consider it more than a bit scary. But allow me to try to intellectualize a bit as a defense mechanism. A few days before the election, I noticed this: Click. "Superstar Marxist Philosopher Just Endorsed Trump" runs the headline to which you come if you do click that. Somehow this doesn't surprise me. As I believe I've mentioned here before, Zizek is the sort of Marxist who tries to get behind Marx chronologically and conceptually, to get himself back in touch with the original Hegelian inspiration. This is a not uncommon move among the intellectuals of the continent, motivated perhaps by the fact that understanding the distinctive post-Hegel aspects of Marxism, the stuff that Marx himself studied for long days in the library of the British Museum to master as he poured over the...
A year or so ago I discovered that one of my relatives was reading some heavy-duty intellectual named Slavoj Zizek. Since she is merely an impressionable half century or so of age and her reading must be monitored, I asked her who Zizek was. She told me I could read about him on Wikipedia, and even sent me a link to the relevant article. I should mention that we've had philosophical differences before -- she was once an admirer of Ayn Rand, and I tried to persuade her that Randianism was crap. She now sees that it was crap, but I don't get any credit for my efforts at explaining this to her before she was ready. Instead, she thinks of me as an officious intellectual meddler, and does things like referring me to Wikipedia for accounts of her recent reading material. I read, but wasn't satisfied by, the Wikipedia article. There's more about Zizek in a Routledge publication, "Fifty Key Postmodern Thinkers." It is arranged in reference-work fashion, alp...
The name "Gillian Rose" recently flitted across my screen for reasons I won't try to unravel. But it flitted across in a context that suggested that this was the name of an important near-contemporary philosopher with whose name I ought to be familiar. So I did the easy thing and checked with Wikipedia, where there is an article that describes her (1947-1995) as a sympathetic interpreter of Adorno, who went on from interpreting other people's views to expounding her own -- but went on in a manner that, from such a brief summary as the wiki article provides, is incomprehensible to me. With a little more internet searching, I found a characterization of her as someone who had moved away from Adorno only to find herself back with Hegel. Unless anyone among my readers can explain to me why I should continue my inquiries, I will consider the matter of Gillian Rose to be a closed file.
An unexpected side-effect of the KING v. BURWELL decision, upholding the subsidy component of the Obamacare statutory scheme, may be that it weakens Chevron deference . I mentioned this point (too) briefly in my own discussion of King v. Burwell in this blog. I'll quote myself here: The court could have used Chevron reasoning, after all - it could simply have said, "in such matters of statutory construction, we defer to the administrative expertise of the relevant executive officials." That would have left the scheme in place, but would have left it subject to being overturned if the Republicans win the next election and the partisan loyalties of the relevant administration officials change. But it didn't. What I should have said there was that the majority opinion, by Justice Roberts, actually went further than simple non-reliance on Chevron . the language of the opinion seems to limit the scope of Chevron. "The tax credits are among the Act's ...