Let us take another look at an issue we discussed both last week and the week before: the unity of science, and the issue of the demarcation of science from non-science. There are three intertwined ideas here we have to look at all at once: induction, causation, science. The problem of induction has been a constant in philosophy since David Hume (pictured). I can encounter a thousand white swans without ever having encountered a black swan. This should not necessarily give me confidence in the proposition "swans cannot be black". How, if at all, does the accumulation of examples produce a conclusion? Consider, too, causation. I hit a pool ball with the off-the-rack stick a thousand times. The ball always moves forward in the direction of my tap. It never blows up. Should this give me confidence in the proposition that it will never blow up? Relatedly, should this be enough for me to call my tap the cause of the ball's subsequent forward momentum? And such...
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Philosophers continue to wrestle with Freudian psychoanalysis. Case in point, Rudolf Bernet, a French thinker. In 2013, Bernet wrote a book on the subject which was widely praised, but which has only just now been translated into English under the title Force, Drive, Desire: A Philosophy of Psychoanalysis, and published by the Northwestern University Press, focusing on Freud on the one hand and Lacan on the other. I'm looking today at a review of the book in the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews , which tells me that one of Bernet's purposes is to create a philosophical etymology of the idea of "drive," or as Freud would have written it "trieb," from Aristotle to the point at which Freud and later Lacan picked up on it. [And since Freud's image is all to familiar, I have provided one of Lacan above.] If I can trust the reviewer -- Daniel J. Smith of the University of Memphis -- Bernet has a Heideggerian background. This means he "...
My first impression about Jorjani was that he sounded like Heidegger. I'm happy to report that my instincts did not betray me: he cites Heidegger as in influence in this strange article: https://www.righton.net/2016/11/05/world-religion-of-the-future/ As you can see if you follow that link, the article appears on a website called "RightOn" which proudly calls itself reactionary, promising to put the "action" in "reactionary." Let's use this to look at Jorjani a bit. The article is called "The World Religion of the Future." It kicks off with Heidegger, and a story about a Japanese student of his, who in 1919 introduced Heidegger to aspects of Zen Buddhism. Then there's a long bit in which Jorjani is just quoting and sometimes paraphrasing Leo Strauss on Heidegger, without giving us any clue whether he thinks Strauss was right. Then we're really just trying to hold on tight as a train of thought zigs and zags through the...
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...
All this digging about in the dusty corners of a building whence I am departing has dug up some books that I bought years ago, put aside essentially unopened, and never got back to. One of these is THE NAZI CONSCIENCE (2003), a book by a professor of history at Duke University about the various intellectual veneers created for National Socialism during its heyday. So I'm skimming it now. Koonz links Martin Heidegger,Carl Schmitt, and Gerhard Kittel as three tenured intellectuals, none of whom had supported Nazism before 1933, each of whom clambered in his own way on board the bandwagon. "The reactions of these three quite different men illustrate the ecumenical attractiveness of a charismatic force so plastic that listeners could fashion their own myths of the Fuhrer. To Heidegger, Hitler was authenticity personified, to Schmitt he was a decisive leader, and to Kittel, a Christian soldier," three ideas that "converged on one point -- the desire for moral rej...
My recent reading (although in this case it is more like a skimming) includes a work on Heidegger's philosophy, by Herman Philipse. Philipse is concerned, among much else, with the differences between Heidegger and an important precursor, Friedrich Nietzsche. Heidegger criticized Nietzsche, and Philipse believes the criticisms were ill-founded, and that Nietzsche was the greater philosopher of the two. Here's a link: Google Books. I merely "skim" works on, or within, the continental traditional of philosophy these days, because life is too short, and it is the Anglo-American tradition that deserves such time as I can give to more careful reading. Still, for those of you who may judge differently, here is a sample of Philipse: "Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche aims at answering two questions: (1) What is Nietzsche's fundamental stance ... within the history of Western metaphysics? and (2) did Nietzsche ask the proper question of philosoph...