Pedantic Struggles: The All Encompassing Philosophy Thread™

[simple schoolboy]

Spoiler: racist language, depending on your beliefs regarding the hierarchy of oppression.

Spoiler: show

Supposedly some of the ramblings of Matthew Harris, the Duke Philosophy phd that apparently lost his mind and threatened to shoot up UCLA.

Maybe Mickey can help enlighten us on how crazy the typical Philosophy phd is compared to their peers.

[Mickey]

You would have to be absolutely deranged to get a graduate degree in philosophy these days.

[simple schoolboy]

You would have to be absolutely deranged to get a graduate degree in philosophy these days.

Do you think his lecture section was entertaining or nah?

[BurtReynolds]

Philosophy is a dangerous pursuit.

[E.H. Ruddock]

I don’t want to think i want to feel

[Mickey]

You would have to be absolutely deranged to get a graduate degree in philosophy these days.

Do you think his lecture section was entertaining or nah?

I imagine they were like reading a Burt Reynolds post.

[simple schoolboy]

No Duke snub?

[Mickey]

Duke is a very fine racist institution, I'm sure this isn't their fault.

[BurtReynolds]

Is he related to Elliott Roger?

[simple schoolboy]

Students are too easily triggered these days.

Is there a name for this particular flavor of "I'm justified in murdering anyone at all times." Black Nationalism?

[simple schoolboy]

Is he related to Elliott Roger?

This dude is into Jewish girls specifically. I don't think Elliot Rogers was that picky.

[BurtReynolds]

[Rob]

You would have to be absolutely deranged to get a graduate degree in philosophy these days.

This isn't directed at you, but I went through a "podcast phase" a few years ago. The ones that stuck were the ones that viewed today's politics from an historical perspective, and then the ones that lamented the lack of good philosophers in the last couple hundred years.

[BurtReynolds]

[BurtReynolds]

[BurtReynolds]

You would have to be absolutely deranged to get a graduate degree in philosophy these days.

This isn't directed at you, but I went through a "podcast phase" a few years ago. The ones that stuck were the ones that viewed today's politics from an historical perspective, and then the ones that lamented the lack of good philosophers in the last couple hundred years.

things get bogged down with language over the last hundred years or so, but we're coming out of it I think. There are a lot of great ones in that period though.

[Rob]

The dorkiest thing to do in this sub-forum is quote EV lyrics, but there is something going on in the lyrics to Present Tense... a generic question that is meant for philosopher types. The song is meant for the rest of us, but what he's asking... It doesn't really seem like this modern age is conducive for spiritual type philosophy.

[BurtReynolds]

The dorkiest thing to do in this sub-forum is quote EV lyrics, but there is something going on in the lyrics to Present Tense... a generic question that is meant for philosopher types. The song is meant for the rest of us, but what he's asking... It doesn't really seem like this modern age is conducive for spiritual type philosophy.

There is a pervasive sort of scientism or physicalism in modern society that dismisses anything that isn't included in the "scientific" model of existence, ignorant to the fact that science is by design and necessity limited to certain aspects of being, or to a certain way of observing reality. It can't account for immediate, subjective experience, for example (even in soft sciences like psychology). Excluding this experience can result in many useful discoveries and tools, but too many confuse the usefulness of science for an ideology or Truth that can give us a complete model of existence and a morality to live our lives by.

Ed is a doofus, but he is grasping at the existential there, without relying on any fixed ideas (like bullshit notions of the "power of love" or whatever he usually does) to guide him. It's a cool song.

[Mickey]

You would have to be absolutely deranged to get a graduate degree in philosophy these days.

This isn't directed at you, but I went through a "podcast phase" a few years ago. The ones that stuck were the ones that viewed today's politics from an historical perspective, and then the ones that lamented the lack of good philosophers in the last couple hundred years.

I should be clear here--I am exclusively talking about the academic discipline of philosophy, the types of research and pedagogy that are reproduced within this institutional form. US philosophy departments have by and large either been left behind by the kinds of pursuits that used to occupy Philosophy but have new institutional framings (i.e. a good deal of philosophy of mind questions are now examined in neuroscience) or they jettisoned areas of research in the analytical philosophy turn in the late 20th century, which have since been picked up and pursued (with great success!) in other realms (much of continental philosophy now lives in literary studies, comparative literature, or cultural studies departments, other threads have been picked up by political science, anthropology, or religious studies). So philosophy as an institutional academic pursuit is, to my eye, pretty bankrupt, asking increasingly meaningless questions about an increasingly small field of knowledge. But philosophy as a broader discourse is doing just fine, if you know where to look,

[Mickey]

Like, for instance, what Burt's talking about--the critique of the scientific or empiricist model of knowledge. That *is* being critiqued (and it should be!), it's been critiqued for decades, but that critique is being made by sociologists like Bruno Latour or political scientists like Sylvia Wynter, neither of whom reside(d) in capital-P Philosophy departments.