Now showing: all 9 of all notes tagged with philosophy | show yours
Sort options:
newest first |
oldest first |
group by author
Recent tags:
women
violent
sub-culture
sociology
communication
media
mass
politics
panics
moral
panic
bbfc
violence
horror
censorship
journalism
self-regulation
online
cyberspace
context
Philosophy and death
Albert Camus is straight to the point:
There is but one truly serious philosophical question and that is suicide.
Active Self
quote: "The self is not an entity but an activity. Self-consciousness ... is both theoretical (inasmuch as it is knowledge) and practical (inasmuch as it is activity)."
So Gorner can help to tie in transcendental idealism in the German tradition to the modernist reflexive project of the self.
Tags: idealism identity philosophy self
interesting but not really about south park
This is a collection of essays based around South Park. I didn't find it particularly useful becuase the authors often just use something from South Park as a jumping off point to talk generally about a subject. For example, a chapter begins by mentioning a South Park episode that deals with attitudes to drugs, but this is just a starting point for the author to write about attitudes to drugs.
This means some of the chapters are quite interesting, but as a study of South Park it's only occasionally useful. It can also be quite annoying how the authors feel they have to try and throw in a few South Park references to be cool (and justify the title of the book) when it's not really needed for their argument.
Still, it's quite an enjoyable read, talks about some interesting issues, and introduced me to some philosophy.
Tags: culture identity philosophy south-park
Mad raving in French
I only just started reading this book, which purports to dissect philosophy from the normally-rejected position of naive realism. And already in the introduction, in which the author acknowledges the place of 'bullshit' in postmodernism, I'm in stitches, not least because of this line:
"Of course, things are always worse in France, where philosophy seems to have gone all but raving mad"
Hear fucking hear
Tags: bullshit philosophy postmodernism
The world and its existence
Really interesting book with some (key) flaws.
Nelson has a problem with modern philosophy: according to her, it is peopled by loons who think the world doesn't exist, and that attempts to assert that it does are doomed to absurdity. She attributes the rise of postmodernism to this philosophical position, which she argues is directly attributable to Hume's empirical scepticism, and those who have followed.
The book mostly consists of a dialogue between a 'naive realist' student, and a philosophy professor who advances the anti-realist and sceptical positions, and over the course of the dialogue, makes a persuasive case that the world does, indeed, really exist, and that 'abduction' is the way to justify such a belief.
The book, aimed apparently at philosophy students before they are horribly corrupted by the philosophical canon, succeeds in getting across a good explanation of ideas such as representation, infallibility, certainty, and other philosophical and logical problems, though it does rather require some familiarity with those ideas - it's not great for starting philosophy from scratch.
The weaknesses arise because the canonical position is not presented as strongly as someone who actually believes this stuff might have argued it, so in this sense the dialogue doesn't work brilliantly as a refutation, even though it does help to make the debates readable.
I also think the author fails to address the significance of linguistic practices in constructing the world, and certainly often ignores the extent to which meaning shapes the world we are able to consider. To talk about the difference between 'facts' and 'language' is a moot point; so even if the external world really exists, I wonder to what extent it is meaningful to say it 'exists' without an observer and their language to describe it so. Our presence, as linguistically constructed beings, makes us responsible to it. Without language, we are absent, so to what extent can we be responsible to something we are absent from?
'Linguistic communities' are dealt with extremely briefly, though I suppose they are not the main beef of the book. Nevertheless, if you want to dispense with postmodernism, you need to address linguistic communities in some other way.
The book concludes with some interesting and arguable points about the various philosophical schools' relationships to totalitarian thinking: since, if 'reality' is consensual, so the argument goes, such schools can be used to justified tyranny. This, however, is a debate about how to draw the foundations of ethics, rather than the foundations of ontology. So the final (tacit) assertion of capitalism and competition as corresponding to philosophical freedom suits the Ayn Rand school objectivists who are proclaiming this book elsewhere on the web. I think their celebration is premature.
I do, however, enjoy being reassured that actually, the world, does, almost certainly, exist.
Tags: language objectivism philosophy postmodernism realism scepticism social-construction
Metaphors of Consciousness
A number of the texts I've read that treat the subject of phenomenology in an introductory way nevertheless tend to take a number of things for granted. This opening chapter is useful then, because it clarifies a number of the aspects of terminology which can be confusing.
The notion of 'intentionality' is dealt with usefully, not least because in phenomenology the term doesn't refer to the common usage or meaning of 'intention' as something that is 'meant' or 'planned'. Intentionality in phenomenology refers to a 'structural' relationship in experience between a conscious subject and the world of which they are a part. The fact that we refer to our conscious activity and the 'objects' at which our attention is 'aimed', disguises a much more fundamentally inseparable, continuous reality - if I am 'involved in' chopping firewood, my mind, my arm, my axe, my eye, the wood, the block, the air, the world are more fundamentally at one than traditional Cartesian understandings of the world give credit. It is this unity of experience that the notion of phenomenological 'intentionality' seems to try to grasp.
There is also a good exposition on the philosophically useful metaphor of 'figure/ground' here. The figure/ground conceit provides a model for talking about perception and focus which illustrates some of the nature of consciousness - particularly Jamesian ideas of stream of consciousness (also described in this chapter).
Finally, the authors of the book provide a cursory survey of some of the more common metaphors used in various domains (literature, psychoanalysis and psychiatry, philosophy, academia, etc): stream, flight, train, chain, symphony, fugue, monologue, story, state, mode, level, field, horizon... - all of these descriptions of consciousness hint at the multiplicity that characterises something human beings do constantly when awake, yet struggle to capture in words.
Tags: embodiment figure-ground metaphor phenomenology philosophy
Before Being and Nothingness
Nausea (1938) was written 5 years before Sartre's philosophical work Being and Nothingness (1943), but there's a precursor to the thought here.
"... we find it so difficiult to imagine nothingness. Now I knew. Things are entirely what they appear to be and behind them... there is nothing."
Live or recount
"... a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it."
A stunning couple of pages in Nausea in which Sartre suddenly spears the illusion of meaning that we grasp from thin air and try to smother over the yawning abyss of existence. We narrativise existence, construct and impose meaning onto experience - but Sartre recognises we can only do so in retrospect:
"...people talk about true stories. As if there could possibly be such things as true stories; events take place one way and we recount them the opposite way. You appear to begin at the beginning [...] in fact you have begun at the end."
When we 'recount' our lives, we try to seek out the pinnacles and troughs, the 'annunciations' and 'promises', as though they were events there to be recognised and named, rather than conjured and created retrospectively.
"We forget that the future was not yet there; the fellow was walking in a darkness devoid of portents."
It is a Nietzschean moment, where Sartre manages, as he said was his intention, to follow the consequences of atheism to their conclusion. Without any inherent order to experience, we create our own illusion of order; but examination reveals the futility:
"I wanted the moments of my life to follow one another in an orderly fashion like those of a life remembered. You might as well try to catch time by the tail."
Fascinating, even a digital eternity later.
Any writing on computers and the internet tends to have a short shelf life. The internet is the fastest evolving form of technology we have, and it doesn’t take long for ideas to become obsolete. Life on the Screen nevertheless makes for a fascinating read, particularly from the perspective of someone who didn’t experience the internet and computer culture at the time Turkle describes and analyses. First published twelve years ago, the world of computers in the 1970’s, 80’s and early 90’s she discusses is like a mythical epoch of computing history, and is enthralling for that. Her ideas about how modernist and post-modernist ideals clashed over the direction of computer development and their role in shaping how people think are intriguing and help create a context in which it is easier to understand the roots of one’s own philosophical leanings shaped by immersion in the internet age.
Although some of her ideas about the nature of self expression through the freedom that anonymity gives online may seem optimistic or perhaps even naive by today’s more cynical standards, in them we can see the roots of online phenomena we take for granted. The IRC chat room begat the social networking site, the MUD role playing games begat MMOs, the hobbyists and hackers begat the hardcore “power users� of today’s computing culture, and those early “bricoleurs� (or intuitive users)defined the standards of user experiences for which future software would be designed. It’s like a history lesson, and like any good history lesson, it helps you understand the way things are today. In the fast moving online world where just a few years are an eternity, it can be easy to lose track of the origins of ideas. Turkle’s work has managed to avoid becoming obsolete; it is still relevant and definitely worth reading for anyone interested by the philosophy of the digital world.
Tags: history identity internet media-participation philosophy