The line of Hegel you posted isn’t particularly difficult to understand. My first reading is that he is essentially saying that philosophy must concern itself with statements of a universal quality. He then juxtaposes it with sciences like anatomy which only deal with particular observations but don’t make universal claims, and even doubts whether such fields even properly rise to the level of science. I think the peoblem a lot of people have is that certain writers assume that you’ve read the entire Western canon (this is what education basically used to consist of). The terms Hegel are using are very simple to understand if you’ve familiarized yourself with the prior reading. I think it’s also fair to say that Hegel is not very clear, however not being a very clear writer is different from not making arguments whatsoever.
Its a premise of an argumemt—it doesn’t need to be proved one way or the other for there to be a valid argument. I don’t think most Hegel scholars are going to disagree on the core beliefs of Hegel. Him being difficult to understand is also not a valid reason to think he has no arguments.
It's not just about universality. It's about understanding the truth as a process, not as a result, when Hegel says "The truth is in the whole", he is talking about the movement, the process by which we grasp the truth. In both the PhS and the SL, he shows how from inmediate knowledge, sense certainty must sprung onto, by it's own deficiencies a new category or form of apprehending reality, every new gestalt of consciousness and notions is not something new, completely different from the one we left behind, instead each category carries on with what we learnt from the previous one. This type of movement is impossible in natural sciences because they deal with finite and contigent facts, organisms life process act like concepts, which means, that nature is free, according to Hegels, but they do so as concepts opposed to consciousness, that's why when you're trying to find necessity in nature, you end up finding a bundle of finite things that don't show any type of logical necessity. That doesn't mean that nature doesn't have quantity, being for itself, essence, or any other category that preceeds it, but empirical objects, stand over against us as the other of self-consciousness (spirit).
Just to complete the picture we should say that the extended Other is - as said in the PhS and the SL - far beyond itself in its form of apprehension, as exemplified by the cold categorization of the natural sciences, i.e. a tearing of flesh in Spirit. Understand that, as such, there is not, but as much as it is, it is said, but said however, is not that as much as it is said.
Thanks for this. This is the first comment I’ve seen that specifically addresses any particular aspect or example BB provided. As you indicate and demonstrate, Hegel could have been far more direct and clear.
However, I’m not sure that there’s any argument in this particular passage. Simply stating that philosophy should be universal in contrast with areas of inquiry concerned with nitty-gritty particulars doesn’t strike me as an argument at all. Rather it seems to be just a pronouncement, a conclusion with no premises or connecting logic.
That isn’t to say Hegel doesn’t make arguments, and BB doesn’t claim as such. Rather, he argues that they seem to be rare and often muddled, after encountering very few in print for the field in general and discussing the material with continental philosophers in person
BB does assert that Hegel is only presenting vibes and sentiment, and isn't saying anything specific. But Hegel is saying something specific. He's characterizing the difference between philosophy and other kinds of science, specifically anatomy.
How on earth could one paragraph tell us whether Hegel makes arguments rarely? Why would we expect the second paragraph of the book to make an argument? The paragraph he quotes from Parfit doesn't make an argument either!
Easy champ. Try reading. I didn’t say that it does. The OP said that unclear writing isn’t the same as not making any arguments “whatsoever.” That’s clearly a straw-man claim that BB never made, instead saying they’re rare in his experience. It would be great to quantify the claim rigorously, but in the meantime we’re left with cherry-picked and random samples, of which I’ve seen none proferred
Sorry if I jumped to conclusions. What is the relevance of these sentences you wrote?
"However, I’m not sure that there’s any argument in this particular passage. Simply stating that philosophy should be universal in contrast with areas of inquiry concerned with nitty-gritty particulars doesn’t strike me as an argument at all. Rather it seems to be just a pronouncement, a conclusion with no premises or connecting logic."
It may have been in error, but, while the OP Max didn’t explicitly say that the passage had an argument, it seemed like he meant that it did. Why? After clarifying the passage and agreeing that Hegel could be clearer, he then mentioned that a lack of clarity shouldn’t be conflated with a lack of argument. That suggests, but doesn’t make explicit, that’s what he thought of the passage: it was unclear, but there was an argument there. Hence I thought I would respond to that, in case he did mean it.
That certainly could be a misinterpretation on my end, but Max then separately replied that he does in fact think there’s a real argument (which I am skeptical of), though it’s still unclear whether he thought that initially or not
Based on reading the two of you, it seems like you are using “argument” in different ways. Max seems to be using it in the sense of a definite claim, independent of support; you seem to be using it in the sense of a claim accompanied by support. Neither of you is right or wrong; both of your meanings of “argument” are supported by the dictionary, so this just seems like a case where even people attempting to be clear can misunderstand each other. Of course, it’s hard to make oneself fully clear in a single comment (or a single paragraph, say), so given more room for discussion and more contemplation of each other’s words, you would likely reach an approximate understanding of what each other meant. The implications for the current debate are left as an exercise for the reader.
This is a serious problem throughout these posts. In the first post, BB posts a paragraph from Butler which begins "As a result...", and then goes on to assert that Butler's paragraph does not constitute a coherent argument. Of course it doesn't; the opening phrase indicates that it a conclusion to a line of reasoning, and no attempt is made to criticize that line of reasoning (which would constitute the argument) before asserting that no coherent argument is made.
That’s fair, though he’s illustrating different aspects with the different passages (total lack of clarity, poor writing, long word-salad sentences, non-argument arguments, etc). Of course, given that the thesis is that there are rarely discernible arguments, I’m not expecting to see one in the examples, and his response would hopefully be there was none just prior either (or else he’s being disingenuous, which I haven’t found from him).
But more importantly, there have been zero such examples proffered by all who criticize. At least from what I found in looking over the comments to both as of this afternoon, I came across zero counter-example passages that demonstrated an argument or clearly written, simple sentences without obfuscating verbiage. If you have such examples, do please share
I suppose what I am highlighting is the idea that you can quote a paragraph and say: Ha! Look! There's no argument.
Of course there isn't; it's a paragraph. It's a step in an argument. At least with respect to argumentative or inferential coherence, it's inherently disingenous in most cases to simply select a paragraph and assert it doesn't constitute an argument.
Nevertheless, see my comment below for why primary works from "continental" authors often seem to not be presenting straightforward arguments.
For interpretations of continental authors which do have a clear argumentative structure, you could check out Dan Watts' article in *Mind* 'Kierkegaard on Truth' or Katsafanas' book on Nietzschean constitutivism.
I am struggling to take seriously the idea that adequately answering this challenge is going to involve participating in a paragraph-by-paragraph tit-for-tat. I work and study in a continental department and the idea that continental philosophers just aren't concerned with argumentative structure or reasonable inference is... Utterly insane?
Thanks for the references. I agree, the first post was clearly sloppy and trolling (& I say as much in my comment below). I don’t believe he makes such an egregious error here as what you point out from the first post, but I could be wrong.
From what I’m gathering from here and your post below, though, you agree with BB that primary “continental” philosophers don’t generally have a clear argumentative structure; you simply think it makes sense given their motivations.
I think where you two might disagree more is on whether most continentals have a clearly interpretable argument. BB mentioned the multiplicity problem: that many continentals confidently interpret the arguments of other continentals in very different ways, in contrast to interpretations of analyticals, which tend to be more clustered. He could, of course be quite wrong, but it seems like an empirical question that could be tested in principle at least
I think there is an argument in this passage and now that I’ve reread it I I will attempt to reconstruct it. The claim which Hegel is responding to is “the mere process of bringing it to light [universality] would seem, properly speaking, to have no essential significance.” Hegel, on the contrary, argues that if the scientific character of so-called sciences like anatomy is called into question by philosophy on account of its methods (i.e: dealing with collections of particulars) then the method of philosophy itself must likewise have essential significance and must be dealt with universals. You can deny the soundness of these claims or the concepts they rely on but by my lights this is a valid argument.
That may be the case, but I don’t read it that way. He starts off with “Moreover, because philosophy has its being essentially in the element of universality…” He states that, rather than argues for it. He then uses “on the other hand” twice—perhaps circling back to his initial statement?
I would say that it’s still unclear whether there’s a real argument, based on BB, myself, and the fact that it took you several readings to conclude there’s a real argument. That, minimally, further highlights his unclear writing.
In fact, even if there is an argument, given our different readings, we may be back to another of BB’s critiques: different people end up with vastly different interpretations of the same work. I’m certainly not such a professional philosopher that would qualify here, but it would be interesting to provide the passage to 5 different continental philosophers and ask for their interpretations to have a quick test of that
The phenomenology of Spirit, and the science of logic are very tightly packed arguments with only a few asides. Kant is by that standard a much looser philosopher than Hegel
Yes, but this is trivial. To paraphrase another part of this article, continental philosophers using layers of abstraction and obscure language to say things that are either trivial, easily contradicted by simple examples, or outrageously false.
Thank you. I don't like continental philosophy and I don't like Hegel, but I thought it seemed he was saying something substantive, so it appeared to me to be a poor example.
I feel like there are a number of different points mixed up here. It's hard to deny that there is a strain of 20th century philosophy that's very obscure and incomprehensible (call it postmodernism if you will). But is it fair to equate that with continental philosophy as such, especially if you define it sufficiently broadly to include people going back as far as Hegel? There are all sorts of continental philosophers post Hegel who wrote well. Nietzsche certainly did; I've read less from Schopenhauer and Marx but judging from what I did and from their influence on lots of writers, they did too (there is a reason Marx is very quotable). Are they not continental philosophers? Is being obscure part of the definition of continental philosophy? And to turn it around: C. S. Lewis is certainly clear but he's hardly an analytic philosopher.
Of course one might say that the people mentioned above are still much less clear in their meaning than the average analytic philosopher and maybe that's fair. But they are also far from Judith Butler and probably shouldn't be treated as the same thing. But I think there is a more important question underlying all this. Style cannot be fully separated from substance and not all truths can necessarily be expressed in the same language. The clarity afforded by analytic philosophy comes at the price of a narrower range of thoughts that can be thought in that language. One could argue that with some of these people being obscure comes from the fact that they are struggling to develop the words to express things that cannot be straightforwardly expressed in ordinary language. As Einstein supposed to have said, things should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Bad scholarship is bad scholarship whether it's "analytic" or "continental". This article, for example, is bad scholarship because it asks the question "Why is 200 year old translated from German metaphysician not as easy to read as an English utilitarian from the 80s?".
"There are many things to be said here. The first is that the people doing linear algebra have clear successes."
What are the "clear successes" of analytic philosophy of the past 30 years?
Has a single person’s life been improved by mastering Kripkean S5 modal logic? Has anyone outside a philosophy department benefited from debates about whether tables exist or are merely simples arranged tablewise? Have the hundreds of pages of ink spilled on Gettier cases changed anything about how real people think and make decisions?
I challenge readers to name a single analytic philosopher of the past 30 years that shaped a new discipline, inspired a major scientific paradigm shift, reoriented a humanities field, or transformed public discourse in any meaningful way.
By contrast, let's look at the "clear successes" of continental philosophy:
- Phenomenology has been seamlessly integrated into modern 4E cognitive psychology and neuroscience.
- There are entire fields of therapy based on existential and phenomenological writings.
- Butler reshaped how we think about sociology and gender; Foucault transformed everything from sociology and political theory to criminology, sexuality studies, and public health.
- Derrida and Deleuze shaped literary theory, cultural studies, media theory, and film theory.
- Religion, theology, and hermeneutics took continental philosophy almost wholesale.
If continental philosophy was a bunch of worthless incomprehensible gibberish, we wouldn't expect this. But it's telling analytic philosophy seems to be largely consumed and understood by exactly one group of people: other analytic philosophers, who study analytic philosophy so they can get their PhD in analytic philosophy and teach analytic philosophy to other analytic philosophy students.
If the benchmark for philosophical success is “produced highly technical puzzles that only six other people on Earth care about,” then analytic philosophy is thriving. If it’s “changed how human beings understand themselves,” continental philosophy seems to be doing a lot of the heavy lifting.
A lot of impact on Phil of science too. I also want to double the point re psychoanalysis, bc many tie tightly to Freud and poetic/literature-centric extensions of Jung, Roger’s, etc. And for me, much of this argument slides right over into calling feminist philosophers trivial (which ime is empirically speaking a half-step from woke and a step from dangerous) bc they employ many techniques swept up as continental. No doubt there are other fields we’re skipping. That’s the primary danger of this exercise of assertions of both ad hominem and little or no worth anyway: where does that obviously true and obviously false assertion find its various bounds? Part of the implicit answer is that the general trowel work of castigation is far more important than delimiting applicability usefully. An attitude I experience regularly, and it’s toxic.
> Has anyone outside a philosophy department benefited from debates about whether tables exist or are merely simples arranged tablewise?
For what it's worth, that's also a traditional subject of debate for Tibetan Buddhist monks, which technically are not part of philo departments. Whether they benefit from it or not, I can't really say :)
I don't mean to just psychologize and dismiss your arguments. I want to be clear that this is not an _argument_ against anything that you're saying here, since I already wrote up my rebuttal, which basically agrees with a lot of what you're saying. Might just be worth considering.
"So now, let’s compare the theories: mine, according to which the field is mostly nonsense, and the pro-continental theory. The pro-continental theory must posit that many of the greatest geniuses of the last century—Chomsky, Williamson, Fine—developed a bizarre psychosis that left them unable to read perfectly intelligible texts…" [etc.]
It seems like you're doing lunatic/liar/lord here (Chomsky isn't stupid and he isn't crazy, so his critique must be right and the continentals must be mostly nonsense), but don't you run into the same problem from the other side? Lots of well-regarded philosophers and indeed much of the entire edifice of Western philosophy have found Hegel to be highly influential and important. Couldn't I borrow your "bizarre psychosis" mode of argumentation and say that, to claim the field is mostly nonsense, you have to suppose either that huge numbers of philosophy professors and other thinkers have psychotically imagined meaning where none can rationally be found, or that they're involved in a tremendous and not especially lucrative con? Neither of those seem plausible. Maybe this is a situation where different people prioritize different things, hold ideas to different standards, etc.?
When people dismiss theological arguments and miracle claims, one of the responses you make is that many of the smartest people in the world have believed in God and that theology has long been a well-respected field of study, so one shouldn't dismiss its arguments from ignorance. But what you're doing in these posts really seems like the dismissal of the Courtier's Reply, which in theological arguments you say is illegitimate.
Certainly that smart people think I'm wrong is some evidence that I am. But it is very puzzling--far more so, I think--if continental philosophy is serious and legitimate that so many very smart people just can't understand these basic texts.
What makes you call them basic texts? I have read "Introduction to X philosophy" texts that are quite readable.
I also just reject the linear/binary thinking that "Chomsky is smart, ergo comprehension is his whole deal, so if he can't understand it it isn't understandable." People fail to understand things for a lot of reasons, including annoyance with the writing style! A lot of very smart people misunderstand very famous books and plays and movies!
To Occam this, writing a book that means nothing and somehow building a career out of doing so at the time, and then having that nonsensical book sustain a massive field of study for centuries, seems like a much greater mystery than writing a book that means something that many specialists claim to understand but some smart non-specialists fail to understand.
My experience with this stuff in academia, both with fellow students who like it and profs who like it is if you ask them to put it simply, they cannot, and they act like it is not worth their time or effort, but they are very good at going back and forth with one another about the "essential absolute" or "nothing nothings" or "universality of spirit" whatever is under discussion.
Certainly there are some disciplines that requires complex jargon and specialized languages (e.g. physics) to do the work, but with philosophy the question becomes "what work is being done? Producing more philosophers who teach more philosophy courses to undergraduates, and anoint more doctoral candidates, who produce more philosophy who teach more courses?" Stark utility is not the only measure of function, but there is certainly a question to be answered.
You'll agree that it wouldn't make any sense for me to update my priors about whether continental philosophy makes sense based on the experiences that an anonymous person I don't know had with anonymous professors and students whom I also don't know. Have you tried reading introductory texts? For instance, Peter Singer (an analytic philosopher who I believe was influential on BB!) wrote "Hegel: A Very Short Introduction." https://www.amazon.com/Hegel-Short-Introduction-Peter-Singer/dp/019280197X
The question of whether useful work is being done is a separate question, and one that applies just as much to analytic philosophy as to continental philosophy, as far as I can tell.
I did an undergrad honours degree in philosophy at a reasonable respected North American University, and did some graduate work in ethics. I did this after a first career as a computer programmer in the engineering world.
I think that the most that can be done to save philosophy is what the lit-crits do, that is, recast it (and most everything) as a genre of literature, so asking "is this true?" is like asking "Is Hamlet true?" It's not true, it's literature, so the question is how it relates to other literature.
I agree that the question of "useful work" applies to all philosophy, but more generally to the University and to the disciplines without a scientific method (in the sense of Bacon, Linnaeus, etc. not in the sense of Hegel and the Germans calling everything under the sun "science" as in the sample quote above, as in Kant, etc.). IMO most of the departments should have been privatized along with theology, and disestablished---the reason they are not is primarily due to how public education picks up where public religion leaves off. Instead of publicly accredits priests, we now have publicly accredited English teachers, etc.
It's not that none of these thinkers have anything of value to say---as I said elsewhere, I think Derrida does a lot of good stuff about the University in his "Right to Philosophy" 1/2. It is simply buried in mountains of obscurantism, but that is true of all philosophy, because the genre requires the publication of books, and also articles, where the basic point is not very difficult to grasp, but then you have to pad the article with a couple of counter-points, etc. as a function of the genre's rules.
Basically, if Philosophy is "love of wisdom," then we have to decide if wisdom exists---maybe it doesn't, but that's not how you play the game, is it? I have known enough scientists in physics, chemistry, etc. who simply think philosophy is nonsense, because they do not need it to do their jobs. The historical pedagogical function of philosophy was as a way out of religious dogmatism, but that has not really been a thing for a long time, or, if it is (the University as dogma, etc.) then philosophy no longer really shows a way out of received wisdom, like "the University exists."
Hegel, Nietzsche were unclear enough that there are left-Nietzscheans, left-hegelians and left in such a way that they they seem to consider some major things said by Hegel or Nietzsche to support generally left-wing ideals but then there are also right-wing Hegelians, centrists, etc. Hegel was unclear enough that Schopenhauer wrote that there is more wisdom in every single page of Hume than entire collection of Hegel's writing. Kaufman understood Nietzsche differently than Marxist-Leninist political philosopher Domenico Losurdo. Nietzsche is considered proto-fascist by Losurdo and Nietzsche defenders claim that that is a misreading and Losurdo doesn't understand Nietzsche when he wrote a thousand page book on Nietzsche and he is an italian from Europe, so... not an American or British analytic guy.
Before contintental or analytic philosophy distinction, i can name some older philosophers like Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, Al-Ghazali, Mozi, Confucius, etc. who are much easier to understand than Hegel or Nietzsche or Kant. And there is not much dispute to what they ultimately meant.
Now, these days i am hearing terms like 'left-utilitarian' but when 'left-utilitarian' is said - it just means that the author means that - given empirical evidence, Utilitarian ethical theory would support socialism and/or communism instead of capitalism. Left utilitarians don't change utilitarian ethical theory fundamentally. When i compare this with Kantianism, there are Kantians who foundationally disagree with each other on what Kantian deontology entails regarding animal welfare, regarding criminal punishment, regarding lying to the Nazi.
Literally all welfarist consequentialists i encountered so far care about animal welfare and directly (saying that animal happiness matters and we care not because cruelty to animals would be bad for human virtue development but because animal happiness matters intrinsically).
I'm not arguing that Hegel et al. are clear to read; I certainly don't find them so. My claim is just that the methods BB is using to establish whether Hegel or any other philosopher has meaning are bad, and don't work. And I don't think your methods work either. To start with the silliest one, Schopenhauer slagging Hegel is just gossip, not argument.
Moving on to those with substance:
"Hegel, Nietzsche were unclear enough that there are left-Nietzscheans, left-hegelians and left in such a way that they they seem to consider some major things said by Hegel or Nietzsche to support generally left-wing ideals but then there are also right-wing Hegelians, centrists, etc."
How is this different from, say, Christianity? I don't think the New Testament is generally thought to be very unclear—it better not be, if our souls depend on it!—yet there are left-wing and right-wing Christians (also the Thirty Years War happened). Schools of thought mingle with ideologies in all sorts of ways; that doesn't necessarily mean the schools of thought are are poorly conceived.
"Left utilitarians don't change utilitarian ethical theory fundamentally. When i compare this with Kantianism, there are Kantians who foundationally disagree with each other on what Kantian deontology entails regarding animal welfare, regarding criminal punishment, regarding lying to the Nazi."
Now you're not talking about understanding the philosophers themselves; you're talking about applying them in novel situations. That's a separate problem, and not one that utilitarians are exempt from! Does utilitarianism entail longtermism? Concern for wild animal welfare? Different thinkers have different opinions! Indeed, BB is frequently in disagreement with fellow philosophers, as he would have to be just by expressing opinions!
I agree with your general point about analytic being a clearer style but I’m sorry: any German speaking philosopher who had been following the post-Kantian debates of the time would have had no trouble with that paragraph from Hegel. It's not a difficult passage at all.
Perhaps by quoting only one paragraph of Hegel written in German, Matthew did not get to the verbs, which are included only in the last chapter of the book. : )
I think everyone needs to go back to making fun of Americans and the English for being monolingual. Not because it's an actual flaw, but just as a reminder that other languages exist, and most are more complex than English.
To quote the classic: translations are either true, or beautiful. Never both.
Could you say what it means? I mean, Kant is another windbag, and if you read his Essay on Perpetual Peace, all of what he says happens within the establishment of peace, which opposes hunter-gatherer lifestyles, which is set up against the "status naturalis" of war. To justify this, he goes on and on about reason and how even if it is not natural, it is reasonably artificial, or some sort of artifice that is necessary for something he feels very strongly about---probably his place within the University bureaucracy.
Hegel is basically saying that a preface makes sense for something like anatomy because, in Kantian terms, anatomy is an empirical science: its general idea doesn’t yet give you the real knowledge, which lies in all the particular facts about nerves, muscles, and organs that follow, so an introductory overview doesn’t distort anything. The principle is provided from elsewhere. But philosophy, as Kant insists, is a rational science whose truth lies in a universal concept that already contains its particulars within it; the principle is the whole. So if you try to present philosophy’s “general idea” in a preface—before the movement of thought has unfolded—you end up offering the result without the rational process that alone makes it true. That’s why a philosophical preface feels odd or even inappropriate: philosophy can’t be summarized in advance the way an empirical science can, because doing so pretends to give the science while actually stripping away the very development through which rational cognition becomes genuine knowledge.
“Status naturalis” just means “state of nature”, a basic term in political philosophy, and all Kant is saying is that the artifice of human reason is necessary to suppress the natural human inclination toward war. I could parse that even from your garbled retelling of it. Do you just not like reading or what?
Parfit's text was not particularly good writing and requires additional context to parse just like all the continental passages you cite. Phrases like "each-we" are totally nonsense without such context.
As far as actual insights from continental thinkers I can list a number relating to Althusser and Saussurian semiotics as that's what I'm most familiar with.
1. We're socialized and ideologically trained by institutions (including school, family, church, unions, political parties) to reproduce our society.
2. You cannot exist outside of ideology, every human has one (a specific and imperfect worldview and your place in it).
3. You get specific ideological positions by being "called" into them (interpellated in his words) via specific utterances and actions (not pure internal contemplation).
4. The logic of the state is the relative maximization of its capacity for violence compared to all other actors in society.
5. There are certain sciences which will never be accepted by ruling ideologies if the object of that science is related to the justifications of that ideology.
6. Words and symbols get their meaning via their correlations and anti-correlations to other words and experiences.
7. The meaning of such words and symbols can be found in studying human material culture and mapped to approximate our semantic or semiotic field.
Committing to hyper simplistic and formulaic reasoning because that’s how you think you do The Enlightenment is pretty on the money for someone who likes Jeremy Bentham Tbf
Let’s not forget that Bentham was the guy whose Archimedean foundation of ethics was so janky that it required JS Mill to overhaul to resemble a viable theory of ethics
I think sidgwick did better than both mill and Bentham with respect to welfarist consequentialism (Utilitarianism). But Bentham was pretty ahead of his time in terms of his political views and he arrived at them due to his ethics. He also cared about animal welfare directly compared to Kant, Hegel, and deontologists around that time.
I like some of the thing Bentham had to say on slavery, women, etc but not his method. He also had a bad take on usury. The problem is his ethical thinking strives for universality by stripping itself of complexity
True, but Bentham was older than Karl Marx and socialism at that time was at infancy. Bentham was also in support of lgbtq+ rights much before it was okay to do so such that his friend kept it hidden until his death.
Additionally, Utilitarianism or welfarist consequentialism always seemed like best justification for socialism and violent revolution compared to deontology because only consequentialism justifies killing a few to save the many.
I am a Marxist-Leninist and i believe that consequentialism is the best justification for my political ideology instead of deontolology. Deontology would always get in the way maximizing the wellbeing of overwhelming majority (the working class, the poor) because it violates the deontological rights of the few (the rich and their private property). Robert Nozick is famous for showing how deontolology doesn't actually support even Rawlsian social liberalism or social democracy and that deontolology can be coherently built to support libertarian capitalism. Robert Nozick 's book "anarchy, state, and utopia" is acclaimed to be a powerful response to Rawls (whether you take socialist or social liberal interpretation).
I am a Marxist-Leninist because i see the success China and socialist market economy of China and Vietnam so far. China has shown that the state or the government based socialism of Marxism-Leninism is very good and powerful for increasing the quality of life for the working class and the poor.
I'm more of a left hegelian virtue ethicist myself, I don't find either deontology or utilitarianism convincing although i think parts of them are appealing. Interestingly there was a lot of neo-kantians on the socialist left too. But I think while all three enlightenment schools of ethics (utilitarianism, deontology, contractarianism) have real advantages in advancing equality (especially Bentham as you say), I think their ethics ultimately seek rigor by oversimplifying moral questions and making it formulaic. I think virtue theory can take up whats true from deontology and utilitarianism as parts of ethics, like egalitarianism, but not reducing all of ethical theory to utility or rational duty.
As an aside, I wrote a book on what I take to be Marx's ethics from my dissertation
First of all: Bentham’s Bulldog is an arrogant undergrad and it shows. (Imagine using linear algebra as your prototype of something “hard” and “confusing”; you might as well use fractions). Developmentally appropriate enough, I suppose - I was one too once - but not really worth engaging with in this mode. That said, I do think a more modest version of his position here is justified: continental and analytic philosophy really are substantially different activities which happen to share a name, and it’s as reasonable to prefer the norms of one over the other as it is to prefer either over the norms of, say, history or philology or economics. And it is not particularly fair to treat the virtues of each to you as exclusively being theirs: the consilience of the humanities is not as strong as that of the sciences, but it does exist, and most insights worth preserving can be found in many fields.
Phrases like "each-we" are totally nonsense without such context.
Of course. But “each-we dilemma” (not just bare ‘each-we’, which in isolation actually fails to refer) is plainly nonsense in a way that, say, “phenomenon” is not. One is an ordinary english word put to extraordinary usage; the other is a novel compound, and an awkward one, and all the better fit to purpose for it. It is far easier to proceed with a false understanding of one than of the other. Is this to some extent a failure of the reader’s education, or perhaps their choice of translation? Sure. But ours is a broken world and a braindead academy, and refusing to face up to that is not a virtue. There is value in forcing readers to, dare I say it, notice their confusion.
We're socialized and ideologically trained by institutions (including school, family, church, unions, political parties) to reproduce our society.
Well, sure, maybe. It of course has to be the case that most people who went on to have intellectual descendants were, but this is basically tautological. Whether that fact still holds this late in the day - whether cultural evolution is still in the driver’s seat, so to speak - is very much an empirical question, and so not really the sort of thing philosophy can hope to answer. It’s a fruitfully provocative position, to be sure - but if you’re creative enough, almost anything can be.
You cannot exist outside of ideology, every human has one (a specific and imperfect worldview and your place in it).
Duh. But this is old news for analytics: what do you think Two Dogmas of Empiricism was really all about?
You get specific ideological positions by being "called" into them (interpellated in his words) via specific utterances and actions (not pure internal contemplation).
I’m not confident I know what this means but insofar as it’s claiming “knowledge” “production” is a social process - again, no shit. Shadowboxing against the young and foolish A.J. Ayers does no one any good.
The logic of the state is the relative maximization of its capacity for violence compared to all other actors in society.
Once again, a provocative thesis, but is it a true one? That’s for future historians to say. For my part, I am open to the possibility that there are only two or three real states on Earth, but I find it hard to see how, failing that, Costa Rica or Cuba can be said to be a capacity-for-violence-maximizer.
There are certain sciences which will never be accepted by ruling ideologies if the object of that science is related to the justifications of that ideology.
Given a sufficiently strong account of what it takes for an ideology to be “ruling”, this is trivial; given a weak one, it is false. Which are we dealing with? The answer is necessarily extremely fuzzy, of course, which is acceptable - but only insofar as we regard our social-”scientific” concepts as tools for action and not as real facts. This is not the viewpoint of the stereotypically analytic-brained, and fair enough: the genuinely scientific is not the whole of worthwhile human activity, but neither is it nothing.
Words and symbols get their meaning via their correlations and anti-correlations to other words and experiences
It seems odd to credit this continental philosophy when it - or at least the groundwork for it - long predates the split. You could do much worse as a summary of Hume’s epistemology, for instance. And if on the other hand you want real formal rigor and not just vibes before you assign any credit, then fair enough - but then Saussure is still very much not your guy.
The meaning of such words and symbols can be found in studying human material culture and mapped to approximate our semantic or semiotic field.
In principle, yes, sure, use is meaning. In practice? Have you seen experimental subjects recently? Lol. Lmao, even.
>But “each-we dilemma” (not just bare ‘each-we’, which in isolation actually fails to refer) is plainly nonsense in a way that, say, “phenomenon” is not. One is an ordinary english word put to extraordinary usage; the other is a novel compound, and an awkward one, and all the better fit to purpose for it. It is far easier to proceed with a false understanding of one than of the other.
I don't think analytic philosophy is in a position to argue that it is using novel words for uniquely suited purposes, I'd say that many of it's high profile claims, such as the hard problem of consciousness, are based on using natural language with a specialized context to conflate several things together. As I've argued in these posts:
>It of course has to be the case that most people who went on to have intellectual descendants were, but this is basically tautological.
Not really, Althusser was using this explicitly to argue you need alternative institutions to socialize and ideologically train people into creating a new society, in this case being the communist party. Also, in a practical sense, it means you can map out where ideology is being produced in a physical sense if you pay attention to where people are putting in the labor to actually articulate something.
>Duh. But this is old news for analytics: what do you think Two Dogmas of Empiricism was really all about?
The fact that we're speaking of ideology here means we can plug this concept into a study of culture and society in a way that the typical discourse about "biases" as a neutral thing cannot.
>I’m not confident I know what this means but insofar as it’s claiming “knowledge” “production” is a social process - again, no shit.
Not just social, but particular, citing Pascal Althusser notes how it's the act of kneeling and praying that really makes one a believer, going through the actions of your role, whether a policeman, priest, unionist or news anchor is a part of what creates your ideology and sense of self.
>Once again, a provocative thesis, but is it a true one? That’s for future historians to say. For my part, I am open to the possibility that there are only two or three real states on Earth, but I find it hard to see how, failing that, Costa Rica or Cuba can be said to be a capacity-for-violence-maximizer.
Some states have more or less means, let's not forget that Cuba invited the deployment of nuclear weapons onto its soil lol. And this relative maximization means that it creates forces in two directions, to maximize the amount of violence capacity the state has, but only relative to everyone else. If increasing the state's violence came at the cost of increasing everyone else's they wouldn't do it. For sure, there will be empirical exemptions, but the idea is that this is a historical structure, where we see a tendency for rising maximum relative violence over time.
>but only insofar as we regard our social-”scientific” concepts as tools for action and not as real facts.
I wouldn't agree with that, Althusser is explicitly speaking of real facts which ideology creates blindspots around.
>And if on the other hand you want real formal rigor and not just vibes before you assign any credit, then fair enough - but then Saussure is still very much not your guy.
Saussure was a rigorous linguist, and his point against atomistic notions of meaning seems to be something people like Chomsky reject to this very day.
>In principle, yes, sure, use is meaning. In practice? Have you seen experimental subjects recently? Lol. Lmao, even.
I've written extensively about how LLMs are proofs of this, basically vindicating a prediction Umberto Eco made in the 70s. I published a book on it this year, although you can find many of the essays on the AI tab of my blog as well.
Nice try. I apreciate it, and there are a bunch of good ideas here. I really don't mean to be snarky, but are the good ideas new?
I was just thinking of Francis Bacon's 4 Idols from around 1600. Two were:
Idols of the Tribe
Misleading ideas inherent in the mind of man. Not understanding statistics. Not thinking logically.
Idols of the Cave
Misleading ideas in the mind of an individual due to his temperament, education, etc. Thinking like an economist (“maximize surplus”), or an epidemiologist (“save lives”), or an engineer (“make it strong”) or a modern American. Plato’s Republic’s Cave Allegory.
The difference between Althusser and these earlier accounts of ideological biases is that he points out how all of this has to be produced materially, requiring people working, often getting paid to do so, to articulate and spread ideology. The point is exactly that it's not just some neutral thing we all have, it's organized in particular ways by particular institutions and activities.
Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content. The chances are that you would produce something like the following:
"We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously."
This is a quotation from the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, one of many fashionable French ‘intellectuals’ outed by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont in their splendid book Intellectual Impostures, which caused a sensation when published in French last year, and which is now released in a completely rewritten and revised English edition. Guattari goes on indefinitely in this vein and offers, in the opinion of Sokal and Bricmont, "the most brilliant mélange of scientific, pseudo-scientific and philosophical jargon that we have ever encountered."
It takes real talent to generate a long stream of bullshit like that. I know I wouldn't be able to do it.
See also "Letter from Yale" by Helena Echlin:
I am sitting in a windowless conference room. The walls are lined with sets of leather-bound books with gold-lettered spines. ‘The ode must traverse the problem of solipsism,’ a young man is saying. He pauses for a long time. Underneath the table, one leg is twisted around the other. A stretch of gaunt white ankle shows between trouser and sock. ‘In order to approach participating in.’ He pauses again, his body knotted like a balloon creature made by a children’s entertainer. Finally, in one rush: ‘The unity which is no longer accessible.’ My fellow students utter a long soft gasp, as if at a particularly beautiful firework.
‘Brilliant,’ says the professor. ‘Very finely put. But I didn’t quite understand it. Could you repeat it?’ I write the sentence down in my notebook, like everyone else in the seminar. _The ode must traverse the problem of solipsism before it can approach participating in the unity which is no longer accessible_. When I have pieced it together, I realise he is talking nonsense. I am struck by the thought that literary criticism – at least as it is practised here – is a hoax.
Great example Bill- do you know of his work? I’ve gotten enormous bits from him and Deleuze, despite following 30% of the time.
Part of the issue for me is that you implicitly assume this contradictory, poetic, unclear stuff, much of it near to or buried within social and individual psychology, should be held to the standard you exemplify in your EA thoughts on shrimp, reaching for logic and numbers bc that’s how one gets places philosophically- that’s how one avoids triviality and error. It’s a completely different animal. I’m not saying I like it, but I am saying you are enthusiastically tossing babies out with bathwater.
Dawkins is as much or more of an arrogant pompous pseudo-intellectual, pontificating about fields outside his area of expertise that he has no interest in trying to understand, as any philosopher he purports to criticize.
The Hegel inclusion to me seems misguided. Obviously, Hegel is not a "Continental Philosopher," because neither continental nor analytic philosophy existed when Hegel was writing; the divide is a phenomenon of the 20th century. I should also say Hegel is difficult in translation, but also in German--but it is more intelligible in German. Part of this is because, for anyone interested in post-Kantian debates in German philosophy, one would be intimately familiar with the way certain terms are used, and additionally, especially in comparison to Fichte or Schelling, Hegel uses far less jargon and neologisms to express philosophical content. He wrote in something closer to a vernacular usage of German than just about any of his prominent contemporaries. This gets lost in translation as what was once vernacular becomes "Hegelese."
Regarding the confusion around what Hegel really said, this largely has to do with debates not in Hegelianism per se, but Marxism and politics. 19th-century divisions in Hegel interpretation have a tendency to follow sectarian schisms--right Hegelianism versus the Young Hegelians--and 20th-century divisions follow sectarian schisms within Marxism. Karl Korsch's Marxism and Philosophy is an excellent little text on this.
I cannot really say anything about Analytic philosophy per se without making stark over-generalizations, even stylistically; after all, are Carnap, Rorty, and Cavell really a part of the same tradition? I would say the same thing is true about Continental philosophy, as it is broadly used in academia. Certainly, Foucault and Derrida would absolutely revolt at the prospect of being lumped in together with Hegel. Maybe the problem is that the categories we are using are poorly adapted to the phenomenon :)
Hegel is included because Hegel was the great bugaboo of 20th century analytics like Bertrand Russel, who (unfairly) saw him as the point when philosophy went wrong and so made rejection of his ideas a key part of his new movement. Nowadays of course there are plenty of analytics who take Hegel seriously, but Bentham seems both unaware of and uninterested in these.
Yes, and it should be added that Russell learned his Hegel from the highly suspect tradition of British Idealists, who seemed to want to turn Hegel into Parmenides. To paraphrase the greatest philosopher of the 21st century, they weren't sending their best people :p
As a side note, I am always amused by the incredulity with which certain partisans of so-called Analytic philosophy take towards the philosophical canon; in the course of my education, I was always under the impression that being well-read in and capable of understanding a wide range of intellectual discourses was something to aspire to. Philistine's new clothes, I suppose.
Okay now it’s clear you’re just rage baiting. You didn’t even bother to read the Hegel paragraph you chose as your example, you just picked one at random, assumed it must be incomprehensible and declared it so. You could have picked any of number of way worse passages from the Phenomenology, but you chose one where he’s just explaining why philosophy is a more universal discipline than anatomy. I appreciate the troll but you could put in more of an effort.
I feel a natural impulse to weigh in here and leap to a (partial) defence of "continental philosophy". I usually really enjoy reading your posts--I find them clear, interesting, and worth my time. These two, however, I found intellectually lazy and unsatisfying. I will forego being exhaustive and present my two main reasons for thinking this:
1. You show no curiosity in the communicative aims of philosophical work, outside of Making Really Clear Arguments. Now, to be clear, Making Really Clear Arguments is very important! But, I think your conception of the value of (or the work of *doing*) philosophy--which involves overfitting this ideal to philosophy as such--is impoverished.
2. You don't show any serious interest in the granularity that is being elided by a label like "continental philosophy". You make some noises at the beginning about being imprecise and then make no effort whatsoever to think through how this might modify your perspective. Consequently, and ironically, you end up making lazy inferences.
On point 1, I think it's helpful to ask the question: What the fuck is interpretation for?! And, to put a finer point on it, why do so many continental philosophers seem to want to force you to interpret them instead of making it easy? One thing that might be helpful to think about is the perlocutionary aim of a given philosophical work. Take Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, for instance; not only do they not try to Make Really Clear Arguments, but they are refraining from doing this deliberately. In both cases, they are trying to *do something* to the reader, to guide them through a process of both self-recognition and self-estrangement such that the reader can relate to, e.g., socially-embedded norms in a new way. My example here is particular to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, but in order to have a compelling account of why continental philosophy is bullshit you need some account of (a) whether or not the writing is oriented towards some perlocutionary aim other than merely persuading you, and (b) some account of how it fails to meet this perlocutionary aim or (c) some account of why the perlocutionary aim is bullshit. And, despite the particularity of my example, this is a point that would extend to other continental figures, especially those in the phenomenological tradition such as Husserl and Heidegger.
I also have some worries that you really are just misunderstanding some of the things you claim are obscure. Butler is genuinely a terrible writer, but you quote a passage from Butler on what it means to say that a person "is" a woman. I have absolutely no idea how your remarks on this passage--which you take to express a warrant for questioning Butler's competence on this point--gain any kind of critical traction on what Butler is claiming. So far as I can tell, you are straightforwardly agreeing with Butler.
On point 2, you present some really weak evidence for a very strong claim (viz., that *most* of continental philosophy is bullshit). You draw on a handful of writers for first-order evidence that *most* of continental philosophy is bullshit, the Sokal Hoax for some second-order evidence that *most* of continental philosophy is bullshit, and the remarks of Chomsky and Searle for further second-order evidence that *most* of continental philosophy is bullshit. The Sokal Hoax is a particularly egregious piece of evidence, even if I grant that the Hoax really does establish what it purports to establish. The Sokal Hoax purposefully targeted journals in *critical social theory*, and most of your examples come from Butler, a critical social theorist. Is critical social theory a core part of continental philosophy? Sure! I will grant that! Does critical theory constitute *most* of continental philosophy? I see no reason why that should be taken to be true. Are Butler, Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, and the critical social theorists representative of continental philosophy? I don't know, you haven't convinced me, notwithstanding remarks about other ephemeral and unspecified continental philosophers that you talk to who deny the existence of external reality.
Against your second-order evidence of Chomsky disliking Derrida and Searle apparently being incapable of picking up on a joke, I present the following second-order evidence, taking Hegel as an example: the philosophically serious work done on interpreting Hegel by the likes of, for example, Stephen Houlgate and Robert Brandom. On your account, this should either not be possible or be built on sand. This is absurd. Have you made any attempt to engage with this secondary literature before reaching such strong conclusions? Have you read any works at the intersection of phenomenology and philosophy of mind? etc etc. This isn't just a case of "read more lol"; it's a case of "You need some kind of account for how these endeavours are probably a waste of time." Moreover, you need some account for why some of the exemplars of analytic philosophy (e.g., Brandom with Hegel, Wittgenstein with Kierkegaard) didn't just write off these continental thinkers.
To be clear, this is *partial* defence of continental philosophy. I am not going to claim that continental philosophy wouldn't benefit from some of the clarity that comes with analytic philosophy. Equally, I think analytic philosophy could probably benefit by taking some things on board from continental philosophy. But my point here is that your argument is extremely weak and characterized by some pretty shoddy and overconfident reasoning.
Here is a passage taken at random from a canonical text in the analytic tradition. "We improved stimulus synonymy a bit by socializing it. We can do the same for analyticity, calling socially stimulus-analytic just the sentences that are stimulus-analytic for almost everybody. But analyticity in even this improved sense will apply as well to 'There have been black dogs' as to '2 + 2 = 4' and 'No bachelor is married'. Let us face it: our socialized stimulus synonymy and stimulus analyticity are still not behavioristic reconstructions of intuitive semantics, but only a behavioristic ersatz." Not impenetrable if you know the context in which Quine is writing but to those who do not, it is no better off than a chunk of Hegelese.
> Lastly, there is the Sokal Hoax, wherein many different nonsense papers were sent to continental philosophy journals. They were of different kinds—some about race and gender, while Sokal’s original piece was involved jargony science denial. A large portion got published. This sort of fraud is evidence for the unseriousness of the field. While there are bogus journals in other fields, the journals submitted to were well-regarded.
This is innacurate, the Sokal Hoax consistent of exactly one nonsense paper being submitted to one journal, Social Text. Maybe you're confusing this with the Grievance Studies Affair, by Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose. For the latter one, 20 studies were submitted, 4 were published, 3 were accepted but not yet published, 6 rejected and 7 were under review (the authors of the papers had to reveal their identity early because a journalist found out that their pseudonyms were fake).
I think people largely overestimate what the Sokal hoax has to say about postmodernism or continental philosophy. It was an N=1 experiment with no control group, and sokal assumed part of the reason the journal submitted his paper was that it agreed with their ideological biases, but although that may be true, if you don't try submitting a bogus paper that doesn't agree with peoples ideological biases to see what happens, you shouldnt really say that!
You correctly point out that other disciplines being bad doesn't make continental philosophy not bad, but its still good to do a comparitive analysis. The bogdanoff twins got a PhD in physics with a bogus paper, in 2005 3 computer scientists got a bogus paper submitted to a conference, and other people used the algorithms they had created to submit 120 bogus papers in other STEM areas. In 2017, one paper on microbiology using made up star wars nomenclature got accepted by 4 different papers. In 2013, a science journalist got his papers accepted at 157 journals (out of 304 attempts), even when they were filled with intentional reasoning errors, and randomly generated sentences of the type "molecule X from species Y inhibits growth of cancer Z" (as in, X, Y and Z were picked completely at random so them inhibiting a certain growth of cancer was just made up). Yes this doesnt mean it wasnt bad that that one bogus Sokal paper was accepted, but it shows its not something unique to continental philosophy, lots of joutnal in lots of different areas can let bs slip, even with peer review.
(I think in lots of the cases I mentioned the journals were well regarded, but I'm getting basically all this information from the video I linked, around 17 minutes in, I havent done a deep dive on each on so I could be wrong)
Seems like there are some true things that cannot be communicated using a logically coherent argument. But these philosophers really do seem like total gibberish… how terrible.
Bill, you actually like generating this coarse opinion, which in his mind will bleed into philosophers in a dozen fields you’re not particularly familiar with?
Hegel is not a continental philosopher. He wrote a full century before the term "analytic philosophy" was coined, and his writing led to several schools of thought that directly influenced the early analytics, e.g. the absolute idealists (AKA the British Hegelians), the neo-Kantian movement, and writers like Franz Brentano. Many of the early analytic philosophers were also in direct contact with phenomenologists (there were, after all, plenty of both in Germany and Austria). Michael Dummett's book "Origins of Analytic Philosophy" has lots of good information on this, and Dummett himself is a fascinating figure: his work is deeply rooted in Frege and Wittgenstein, but his approach to philosophical questions is miles away from post-Lewis metaphysics or the Parfit disciples who are now common at Oxford (but more on this later).
The split only really started when the positivists decided they alone had the correct understanding of philosophical method (even then their ethical outlook was heavily influenced by Nietzsche, Dilthey, etc.), and as a practical matter, the divide was intensified when many of the Vienna Circle had to flee Europe and begin writing in English (that Heidegger was an avowed Nazi didn't help matters either).
And, to be clear, "continental philosophy" is a catch-all term invented by the second and third generation of analytics to mean "that weird shit they do over in Europe." No one thinks of themselves primarily as "continental philosophers," they're phenomenologists or critical theorists or psychoanalysts (Freudian, Jungian, Lacanian, etc.) or post-structuralists or deconstructionists or so on. There is no reason to think a criticism of a few writers in a few of these schools (which is what your quotes of Derrida and Butler are) necessarily applies to all of them, and it would be odd if all these different movements were equally incapable of saying meaningful things, given that they are able to distinguish between themselves and have some idea of their points of agreement and disagreement.
As alluded to earlier, analytic philosophy has also grown progressively more diverse (think how much you'd roll your eyes if someone tried to cite their problems with Ayer or Wittgenstein or Quine as the reason analytic philosophy was worthless), and there are plenty of writers with analytic backgrounds who have found "continental" thinkers worthwhile. Apart from the early engagement that was already mentioned, there have been analytic phenomenologists, Marxists, and Hegelians working for decades now.
You have every right to think their main commitments are wrong or their arguments don't work, but there's nothing special about that in philosophy (indeed, this is what's going on in Scott's review of Foucault: he doesn't say he's spouting gibberish, he thinks he's wrong, as he thinks about any number of of philosophers, and you yourself have responded to Scott's critiques when you think he's missed the mark). And in any event, it's a far cry from name-dropping a few analytic heavyweights as proof they can be dismissed out of hand.
The line of Hegel you posted isn’t particularly difficult to understand. My first reading is that he is essentially saying that philosophy must concern itself with statements of a universal quality. He then juxtaposes it with sciences like anatomy which only deal with particular observations but don’t make universal claims, and even doubts whether such fields even properly rise to the level of science. I think the peoblem a lot of people have is that certain writers assume that you’ve read the entire Western canon (this is what education basically used to consist of). The terms Hegel are using are very simple to understand if you’ve familiarized yourself with the prior reading. I think it’s also fair to say that Hegel is not very clear, however not being a very clear writer is different from not making arguments whatsoever.
Yeah, the Hegel example was pretty clear, even if inelegantly written (or translated).
Its a premise of an argumemt—it doesn’t need to be proved one way or the other for there to be a valid argument. I don’t think most Hegel scholars are going to disagree on the core beliefs of Hegel. Him being difficult to understand is also not a valid reason to think he has no arguments.
It's not just about universality. It's about understanding the truth as a process, not as a result, when Hegel says "The truth is in the whole", he is talking about the movement, the process by which we grasp the truth. In both the PhS and the SL, he shows how from inmediate knowledge, sense certainty must sprung onto, by it's own deficiencies a new category or form of apprehending reality, every new gestalt of consciousness and notions is not something new, completely different from the one we left behind, instead each category carries on with what we learnt from the previous one. This type of movement is impossible in natural sciences because they deal with finite and contigent facts, organisms life process act like concepts, which means, that nature is free, according to Hegels, but they do so as concepts opposed to consciousness, that's why when you're trying to find necessity in nature, you end up finding a bundle of finite things that don't show any type of logical necessity. That doesn't mean that nature doesn't have quantity, being for itself, essence, or any other category that preceeds it, but empirical objects, stand over against us as the other of self-consciousness (spirit).
Just to complete the picture we should say that the extended Other is - as said in the PhS and the SL - far beyond itself in its form of apprehension, as exemplified by the cold categorization of the natural sciences, i.e. a tearing of flesh in Spirit. Understand that, as such, there is not, but as much as it is, it is said, but said however, is not that as much as it is said.
Thanks for this. This is the first comment I’ve seen that specifically addresses any particular aspect or example BB provided. As you indicate and demonstrate, Hegel could have been far more direct and clear.
However, I’m not sure that there’s any argument in this particular passage. Simply stating that philosophy should be universal in contrast with areas of inquiry concerned with nitty-gritty particulars doesn’t strike me as an argument at all. Rather it seems to be just a pronouncement, a conclusion with no premises or connecting logic.
That isn’t to say Hegel doesn’t make arguments, and BB doesn’t claim as such. Rather, he argues that they seem to be rare and often muddled, after encountering very few in print for the field in general and discussing the material with continental philosophers in person
BB does assert that Hegel is only presenting vibes and sentiment, and isn't saying anything specific. But Hegel is saying something specific. He's characterizing the difference between philosophy and other kinds of science, specifically anatomy.
Definitely agree, and your restatement of it certainly makes it clearer to those not versed in the terms and style of the time
How on earth could one paragraph tell us whether Hegel makes arguments rarely? Why would we expect the second paragraph of the book to make an argument? The paragraph he quotes from Parfit doesn't make an argument either!
Easy champ. Try reading. I didn’t say that it does. The OP said that unclear writing isn’t the same as not making any arguments “whatsoever.” That’s clearly a straw-man claim that BB never made, instead saying they’re rare in his experience. It would be great to quantify the claim rigorously, but in the meantime we’re left with cherry-picked and random samples, of which I’ve seen none proferred
Sorry if I jumped to conclusions. What is the relevance of these sentences you wrote?
"However, I’m not sure that there’s any argument in this particular passage. Simply stating that philosophy should be universal in contrast with areas of inquiry concerned with nitty-gritty particulars doesn’t strike me as an argument at all. Rather it seems to be just a pronouncement, a conclusion with no premises or connecting logic."
It may have been in error, but, while the OP Max didn’t explicitly say that the passage had an argument, it seemed like he meant that it did. Why? After clarifying the passage and agreeing that Hegel could be clearer, he then mentioned that a lack of clarity shouldn’t be conflated with a lack of argument. That suggests, but doesn’t make explicit, that’s what he thought of the passage: it was unclear, but there was an argument there. Hence I thought I would respond to that, in case he did mean it.
That certainly could be a misinterpretation on my end, but Max then separately replied that he does in fact think there’s a real argument (which I am skeptical of), though it’s still unclear whether he thought that initially or not
Based on reading the two of you, it seems like you are using “argument” in different ways. Max seems to be using it in the sense of a definite claim, independent of support; you seem to be using it in the sense of a claim accompanied by support. Neither of you is right or wrong; both of your meanings of “argument” are supported by the dictionary, so this just seems like a case where even people attempting to be clear can misunderstand each other. Of course, it’s hard to make oneself fully clear in a single comment (or a single paragraph, say), so given more room for discussion and more contemplation of each other’s words, you would likely reach an approximate understanding of what each other meant. The implications for the current debate are left as an exercise for the reader.
This is a serious problem throughout these posts. In the first post, BB posts a paragraph from Butler which begins "As a result...", and then goes on to assert that Butler's paragraph does not constitute a coherent argument. Of course it doesn't; the opening phrase indicates that it a conclusion to a line of reasoning, and no attempt is made to criticize that line of reasoning (which would constitute the argument) before asserting that no coherent argument is made.
That’s fair, though he’s illustrating different aspects with the different passages (total lack of clarity, poor writing, long word-salad sentences, non-argument arguments, etc). Of course, given that the thesis is that there are rarely discernible arguments, I’m not expecting to see one in the examples, and his response would hopefully be there was none just prior either (or else he’s being disingenuous, which I haven’t found from him).
But more importantly, there have been zero such examples proffered by all who criticize. At least from what I found in looking over the comments to both as of this afternoon, I came across zero counter-example passages that demonstrated an argument or clearly written, simple sentences without obfuscating verbiage. If you have such examples, do please share
I suppose what I am highlighting is the idea that you can quote a paragraph and say: Ha! Look! There's no argument.
Of course there isn't; it's a paragraph. It's a step in an argument. At least with respect to argumentative or inferential coherence, it's inherently disingenous in most cases to simply select a paragraph and assert it doesn't constitute an argument.
Nevertheless, see my comment below for why primary works from "continental" authors often seem to not be presenting straightforward arguments.
For interpretations of continental authors which do have a clear argumentative structure, you could check out Dan Watts' article in *Mind* 'Kierkegaard on Truth' or Katsafanas' book on Nietzschean constitutivism.
I am struggling to take seriously the idea that adequately answering this challenge is going to involve participating in a paragraph-by-paragraph tit-for-tat. I work and study in a continental department and the idea that continental philosophers just aren't concerned with argumentative structure or reasonable inference is... Utterly insane?
Thanks for the references. I agree, the first post was clearly sloppy and trolling (& I say as much in my comment below). I don’t believe he makes such an egregious error here as what you point out from the first post, but I could be wrong.
From what I’m gathering from here and your post below, though, you agree with BB that primary “continental” philosophers don’t generally have a clear argumentative structure; you simply think it makes sense given their motivations.
I think where you two might disagree more is on whether most continentals have a clearly interpretable argument. BB mentioned the multiplicity problem: that many continentals confidently interpret the arguments of other continentals in very different ways, in contrast to interpretations of analyticals, which tend to be more clustered. He could, of course be quite wrong, but it seems like an empirical question that could be tested in principle at least
I think there is an argument in this passage and now that I’ve reread it I I will attempt to reconstruct it. The claim which Hegel is responding to is “the mere process of bringing it to light [universality] would seem, properly speaking, to have no essential significance.” Hegel, on the contrary, argues that if the scientific character of so-called sciences like anatomy is called into question by philosophy on account of its methods (i.e: dealing with collections of particulars) then the method of philosophy itself must likewise have essential significance and must be dealt with universals. You can deny the soundness of these claims or the concepts they rely on but by my lights this is a valid argument.
That may be the case, but I don’t read it that way. He starts off with “Moreover, because philosophy has its being essentially in the element of universality…” He states that, rather than argues for it. He then uses “on the other hand” twice—perhaps circling back to his initial statement?
I would say that it’s still unclear whether there’s a real argument, based on BB, myself, and the fact that it took you several readings to conclude there’s a real argument. That, minimally, further highlights his unclear writing.
In fact, even if there is an argument, given our different readings, we may be back to another of BB’s critiques: different people end up with vastly different interpretations of the same work. I’m certainly not such a professional philosopher that would qualify here, but it would be interesting to provide the passage to 5 different continental philosophers and ask for their interpretations to have a quick test of that
The phenomenology of Spirit, and the science of logic are very tightly packed arguments with only a few asides. Kant is by that standard a much looser philosopher than Hegel
Yes, but this is trivial. To paraphrase another part of this article, continental philosophers using layers of abstraction and obscure language to say things that are either trivial, easily contradicted by simple examples, or outrageously false.
Well, to throw it right back at you your comment is not an argument :p
Thank you. I don't like continental philosophy and I don't like Hegel, but I thought it seemed he was saying something substantive, so it appeared to me to be a poor example.
I feel like there are a number of different points mixed up here. It's hard to deny that there is a strain of 20th century philosophy that's very obscure and incomprehensible (call it postmodernism if you will). But is it fair to equate that with continental philosophy as such, especially if you define it sufficiently broadly to include people going back as far as Hegel? There are all sorts of continental philosophers post Hegel who wrote well. Nietzsche certainly did; I've read less from Schopenhauer and Marx but judging from what I did and from their influence on lots of writers, they did too (there is a reason Marx is very quotable). Are they not continental philosophers? Is being obscure part of the definition of continental philosophy? And to turn it around: C. S. Lewis is certainly clear but he's hardly an analytic philosopher.
Of course one might say that the people mentioned above are still much less clear in their meaning than the average analytic philosopher and maybe that's fair. But they are also far from Judith Butler and probably shouldn't be treated as the same thing. But I think there is a more important question underlying all this. Style cannot be fully separated from substance and not all truths can necessarily be expressed in the same language. The clarity afforded by analytic philosophy comes at the price of a narrower range of thoughts that can be thought in that language. One could argue that with some of these people being obscure comes from the fact that they are struggling to develop the words to express things that cannot be straightforwardly expressed in ordinary language. As Einstein supposed to have said, things should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Bad scholarship is bad scholarship whether it's "analytic" or "continental". This article, for example, is bad scholarship because it asks the question "Why is 200 year old translated from German metaphysician not as easy to read as an English utilitarian from the 80s?".
"There are many things to be said here. The first is that the people doing linear algebra have clear successes."
What are the "clear successes" of analytic philosophy of the past 30 years?
Has a single person’s life been improved by mastering Kripkean S5 modal logic? Has anyone outside a philosophy department benefited from debates about whether tables exist or are merely simples arranged tablewise? Have the hundreds of pages of ink spilled on Gettier cases changed anything about how real people think and make decisions?
I challenge readers to name a single analytic philosopher of the past 30 years that shaped a new discipline, inspired a major scientific paradigm shift, reoriented a humanities field, or transformed public discourse in any meaningful way.
By contrast, let's look at the "clear successes" of continental philosophy:
- Phenomenology has been seamlessly integrated into modern 4E cognitive psychology and neuroscience.
- There are entire fields of therapy based on existential and phenomenological writings.
- Butler reshaped how we think about sociology and gender; Foucault transformed everything from sociology and political theory to criminology, sexuality studies, and public health.
- Derrida and Deleuze shaped literary theory, cultural studies, media theory, and film theory.
- Religion, theology, and hermeneutics took continental philosophy almost wholesale.
If continental philosophy was a bunch of worthless incomprehensible gibberish, we wouldn't expect this. But it's telling analytic philosophy seems to be largely consumed and understood by exactly one group of people: other analytic philosophers, who study analytic philosophy so they can get their PhD in analytic philosophy and teach analytic philosophy to other analytic philosophy students.
If the benchmark for philosophical success is “produced highly technical puzzles that only six other people on Earth care about,” then analytic philosophy is thriving. If it’s “changed how human beings understand themselves,” continental philosophy seems to be doing a lot of the heavy lifting.
A lot of impact on Phil of science too. I also want to double the point re psychoanalysis, bc many tie tightly to Freud and poetic/literature-centric extensions of Jung, Roger’s, etc. And for me, much of this argument slides right over into calling feminist philosophers trivial (which ime is empirically speaking a half-step from woke and a step from dangerous) bc they employ many techniques swept up as continental. No doubt there are other fields we’re skipping. That’s the primary danger of this exercise of assertions of both ad hominem and little or no worth anyway: where does that obviously true and obviously false assertion find its various bounds? Part of the implicit answer is that the general trowel work of castigation is far more important than delimiting applicability usefully. An attitude I experience regularly, and it’s toxic.
> Has anyone outside a philosophy department benefited from debates about whether tables exist or are merely simples arranged tablewise?
For what it's worth, that's also a traditional subject of debate for Tibetan Buddhist monks, which technically are not part of philo departments. Whether they benefit from it or not, I can't really say :)
A part of me thinks the ire that analytic philosophers direct to continental philosophers is basically a classic example of "I can tolerate anything except the outgroup." https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
I don't mean to just psychologize and dismiss your arguments. I want to be clear that this is not an _argument_ against anything that you're saying here, since I already wrote up my rebuttal, which basically agrees with a lot of what you're saying. Might just be worth considering.
Might be
"So now, let’s compare the theories: mine, according to which the field is mostly nonsense, and the pro-continental theory. The pro-continental theory must posit that many of the greatest geniuses of the last century—Chomsky, Williamson, Fine—developed a bizarre psychosis that left them unable to read perfectly intelligible texts…" [etc.]
It seems like you're doing lunatic/liar/lord here (Chomsky isn't stupid and he isn't crazy, so his critique must be right and the continentals must be mostly nonsense), but don't you run into the same problem from the other side? Lots of well-regarded philosophers and indeed much of the entire edifice of Western philosophy have found Hegel to be highly influential and important. Couldn't I borrow your "bizarre psychosis" mode of argumentation and say that, to claim the field is mostly nonsense, you have to suppose either that huge numbers of philosophy professors and other thinkers have psychotically imagined meaning where none can rationally be found, or that they're involved in a tremendous and not especially lucrative con? Neither of those seem plausible. Maybe this is a situation where different people prioritize different things, hold ideas to different standards, etc.?
When people dismiss theological arguments and miracle claims, one of the responses you make is that many of the smartest people in the world have believed in God and that theology has long been a well-respected field of study, so one shouldn't dismiss its arguments from ignorance. But what you're doing in these posts really seems like the dismissal of the Courtier's Reply, which in theological arguments you say is illegitimate.
Certainly that smart people think I'm wrong is some evidence that I am. But it is very puzzling--far more so, I think--if continental philosophy is serious and legitimate that so many very smart people just can't understand these basic texts.
What makes you call them basic texts? I have read "Introduction to X philosophy" texts that are quite readable.
I also just reject the linear/binary thinking that "Chomsky is smart, ergo comprehension is his whole deal, so if he can't understand it it isn't understandable." People fail to understand things for a lot of reasons, including annoyance with the writing style! A lot of very smart people misunderstand very famous books and plays and movies!
To Occam this, writing a book that means nothing and somehow building a career out of doing so at the time, and then having that nonsensical book sustain a massive field of study for centuries, seems like a much greater mystery than writing a book that means something that many specialists claim to understand but some smart non-specialists fail to understand.
My experience with this stuff in academia, both with fellow students who like it and profs who like it is if you ask them to put it simply, they cannot, and they act like it is not worth their time or effort, but they are very good at going back and forth with one another about the "essential absolute" or "nothing nothings" or "universality of spirit" whatever is under discussion.
Certainly there are some disciplines that requires complex jargon and specialized languages (e.g. physics) to do the work, but with philosophy the question becomes "what work is being done? Producing more philosophers who teach more philosophy courses to undergraduates, and anoint more doctoral candidates, who produce more philosophy who teach more courses?" Stark utility is not the only measure of function, but there is certainly a question to be answered.
You'll agree that it wouldn't make any sense for me to update my priors about whether continental philosophy makes sense based on the experiences that an anonymous person I don't know had with anonymous professors and students whom I also don't know. Have you tried reading introductory texts? For instance, Peter Singer (an analytic philosopher who I believe was influential on BB!) wrote "Hegel: A Very Short Introduction." https://www.amazon.com/Hegel-Short-Introduction-Peter-Singer/dp/019280197X
The question of whether useful work is being done is a separate question, and one that applies just as much to analytic philosophy as to continental philosophy, as far as I can tell.
I did an undergrad honours degree in philosophy at a reasonable respected North American University, and did some graduate work in ethics. I did this after a first career as a computer programmer in the engineering world.
I think that the most that can be done to save philosophy is what the lit-crits do, that is, recast it (and most everything) as a genre of literature, so asking "is this true?" is like asking "Is Hamlet true?" It's not true, it's literature, so the question is how it relates to other literature.
I agree that the question of "useful work" applies to all philosophy, but more generally to the University and to the disciplines without a scientific method (in the sense of Bacon, Linnaeus, etc. not in the sense of Hegel and the Germans calling everything under the sun "science" as in the sample quote above, as in Kant, etc.). IMO most of the departments should have been privatized along with theology, and disestablished---the reason they are not is primarily due to how public education picks up where public religion leaves off. Instead of publicly accredits priests, we now have publicly accredited English teachers, etc.
It's not that none of these thinkers have anything of value to say---as I said elsewhere, I think Derrida does a lot of good stuff about the University in his "Right to Philosophy" 1/2. It is simply buried in mountains of obscurantism, but that is true of all philosophy, because the genre requires the publication of books, and also articles, where the basic point is not very difficult to grasp, but then you have to pad the article with a couple of counter-points, etc. as a function of the genre's rules.
Basically, if Philosophy is "love of wisdom," then we have to decide if wisdom exists---maybe it doesn't, but that's not how you play the game, is it? I have known enough scientists in physics, chemistry, etc. who simply think philosophy is nonsense, because they do not need it to do their jobs. The historical pedagogical function of philosophy was as a way out of religious dogmatism, but that has not really been a thing for a long time, or, if it is (the University as dogma, etc.) then philosophy no longer really shows a way out of received wisdom, like "the University exists."
This has not been my experience, but perhaps that's because I got most of my continental education from political theorists instead of philosophers.
Hegel, Nietzsche were unclear enough that there are left-Nietzscheans, left-hegelians and left in such a way that they they seem to consider some major things said by Hegel or Nietzsche to support generally left-wing ideals but then there are also right-wing Hegelians, centrists, etc. Hegel was unclear enough that Schopenhauer wrote that there is more wisdom in every single page of Hume than entire collection of Hegel's writing. Kaufman understood Nietzsche differently than Marxist-Leninist political philosopher Domenico Losurdo. Nietzsche is considered proto-fascist by Losurdo and Nietzsche defenders claim that that is a misreading and Losurdo doesn't understand Nietzsche when he wrote a thousand page book on Nietzsche and he is an italian from Europe, so... not an American or British analytic guy.
Before contintental or analytic philosophy distinction, i can name some older philosophers like Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, Al-Ghazali, Mozi, Confucius, etc. who are much easier to understand than Hegel or Nietzsche or Kant. And there is not much dispute to what they ultimately meant.
Now, these days i am hearing terms like 'left-utilitarian' but when 'left-utilitarian' is said - it just means that the author means that - given empirical evidence, Utilitarian ethical theory would support socialism and/or communism instead of capitalism. Left utilitarians don't change utilitarian ethical theory fundamentally. When i compare this with Kantianism, there are Kantians who foundationally disagree with each other on what Kantian deontology entails regarding animal welfare, regarding criminal punishment, regarding lying to the Nazi.
Literally all welfarist consequentialists i encountered so far care about animal welfare and directly (saying that animal happiness matters and we care not because cruelty to animals would be bad for human virtue development but because animal happiness matters intrinsically).
I'm not arguing that Hegel et al. are clear to read; I certainly don't find them so. My claim is just that the methods BB is using to establish whether Hegel or any other philosopher has meaning are bad, and don't work. And I don't think your methods work either. To start with the silliest one, Schopenhauer slagging Hegel is just gossip, not argument.
Moving on to those with substance:
"Hegel, Nietzsche were unclear enough that there are left-Nietzscheans, left-hegelians and left in such a way that they they seem to consider some major things said by Hegel or Nietzsche to support generally left-wing ideals but then there are also right-wing Hegelians, centrists, etc."
How is this different from, say, Christianity? I don't think the New Testament is generally thought to be very unclear—it better not be, if our souls depend on it!—yet there are left-wing and right-wing Christians (also the Thirty Years War happened). Schools of thought mingle with ideologies in all sorts of ways; that doesn't necessarily mean the schools of thought are are poorly conceived.
"Left utilitarians don't change utilitarian ethical theory fundamentally. When i compare this with Kantianism, there are Kantians who foundationally disagree with each other on what Kantian deontology entails regarding animal welfare, regarding criminal punishment, regarding lying to the Nazi."
Now you're not talking about understanding the philosophers themselves; you're talking about applying them in novel situations. That's a separate problem, and not one that utilitarians are exempt from! Does utilitarianism entail longtermism? Concern for wild animal welfare? Different thinkers have different opinions! Indeed, BB is frequently in disagreement with fellow philosophers, as he would have to be just by expressing opinions!
I agree with your general point about analytic being a clearer style but I’m sorry: any German speaking philosopher who had been following the post-Kantian debates of the time would have had no trouble with that paragraph from Hegel. It's not a difficult passage at all.
Perhaps by quoting only one paragraph of Hegel written in German, Matthew did not get to the verbs, which are included only in the last chapter of the book. : )
The degree to which we are comparing texts in translation with texts not in translation strikes me as an obvious confounder here.
I think everyone needs to go back to making fun of Americans and the English for being monolingual. Not because it's an actual flaw, but just as a reminder that other languages exist, and most are more complex than English.
To quote the classic: translations are either true, or beautiful. Never both.
Could you say what it means? I mean, Kant is another windbag, and if you read his Essay on Perpetual Peace, all of what he says happens within the establishment of peace, which opposes hunter-gatherer lifestyles, which is set up against the "status naturalis" of war. To justify this, he goes on and on about reason and how even if it is not natural, it is reasonably artificial, or some sort of artifice that is necessary for something he feels very strongly about---probably his place within the University bureaucracy.
Hegel is basically saying that a preface makes sense for something like anatomy because, in Kantian terms, anatomy is an empirical science: its general idea doesn’t yet give you the real knowledge, which lies in all the particular facts about nerves, muscles, and organs that follow, so an introductory overview doesn’t distort anything. The principle is provided from elsewhere. But philosophy, as Kant insists, is a rational science whose truth lies in a universal concept that already contains its particulars within it; the principle is the whole. So if you try to present philosophy’s “general idea” in a preface—before the movement of thought has unfolded—you end up offering the result without the rational process that alone makes it true. That’s why a philosophical preface feels odd or even inappropriate: philosophy can’t be summarized in advance the way an empirical science can, because doing so pretends to give the science while actually stripping away the very development through which rational cognition becomes genuine knowledge.
That seems remarkably sensible.
“Status naturalis” just means “state of nature”, a basic term in political philosophy, and all Kant is saying is that the artifice of human reason is necessary to suppress the natural human inclination toward war. I could parse that even from your garbled retelling of it. Do you just not like reading or what?
Parfit's text was not particularly good writing and requires additional context to parse just like all the continental passages you cite. Phrases like "each-we" are totally nonsense without such context.
As far as actual insights from continental thinkers I can list a number relating to Althusser and Saussurian semiotics as that's what I'm most familiar with.
1. We're socialized and ideologically trained by institutions (including school, family, church, unions, political parties) to reproduce our society.
2. You cannot exist outside of ideology, every human has one (a specific and imperfect worldview and your place in it).
3. You get specific ideological positions by being "called" into them (interpellated in his words) via specific utterances and actions (not pure internal contemplation).
4. The logic of the state is the relative maximization of its capacity for violence compared to all other actors in society.
5. There are certain sciences which will never be accepted by ruling ideologies if the object of that science is related to the justifications of that ideology.
6. Words and symbols get their meaning via their correlations and anti-correlations to other words and experiences.
7. The meaning of such words and symbols can be found in studying human material culture and mapped to approximate our semantic or semiotic field.
Committing to hyper simplistic and formulaic reasoning because that’s how you think you do The Enlightenment is pretty on the money for someone who likes Jeremy Bentham Tbf
Let’s not forget that Bentham was the guy whose Archimedean foundation of ethics was so janky that it required JS Mill to overhaul to resemble a viable theory of ethics
I think sidgwick did better than both mill and Bentham with respect to welfarist consequentialism (Utilitarianism). But Bentham was pretty ahead of his time in terms of his political views and he arrived at them due to his ethics. He also cared about animal welfare directly compared to Kant, Hegel, and deontologists around that time.
I like some of the thing Bentham had to say on slavery, women, etc but not his method. He also had a bad take on usury. The problem is his ethical thinking strives for universality by stripping itself of complexity
True, but Bentham was older than Karl Marx and socialism at that time was at infancy. Bentham was also in support of lgbtq+ rights much before it was okay to do so such that his friend kept it hidden until his death.
Additionally, Utilitarianism or welfarist consequentialism always seemed like best justification for socialism and violent revolution compared to deontology because only consequentialism justifies killing a few to save the many.
I am a Marxist-Leninist and i believe that consequentialism is the best justification for my political ideology instead of deontolology. Deontology would always get in the way maximizing the wellbeing of overwhelming majority (the working class, the poor) because it violates the deontological rights of the few (the rich and their private property). Robert Nozick is famous for showing how deontolology doesn't actually support even Rawlsian social liberalism or social democracy and that deontolology can be coherently built to support libertarian capitalism. Robert Nozick 's book "anarchy, state, and utopia" is acclaimed to be a powerful response to Rawls (whether you take socialist or social liberal interpretation).
I am a Marxist-Leninist because i see the success China and socialist market economy of China and Vietnam so far. China has shown that the state or the government based socialism of Marxism-Leninism is very good and powerful for increasing the quality of life for the working class and the poor.
I'm more of a left hegelian virtue ethicist myself, I don't find either deontology or utilitarianism convincing although i think parts of them are appealing. Interestingly there was a lot of neo-kantians on the socialist left too. But I think while all three enlightenment schools of ethics (utilitarianism, deontology, contractarianism) have real advantages in advancing equality (especially Bentham as you say), I think their ethics ultimately seek rigor by oversimplifying moral questions and making it formulaic. I think virtue theory can take up whats true from deontology and utilitarianism as parts of ethics, like egalitarianism, but not reducing all of ethical theory to utility or rational duty.
As an aside, I wrote a book on what I take to be Marx's ethics from my dissertation
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/karl-marxs-ethics-of-human-flourishing-9798216251026/
First of all: Bentham’s Bulldog is an arrogant undergrad and it shows. (Imagine using linear algebra as your prototype of something “hard” and “confusing”; you might as well use fractions). Developmentally appropriate enough, I suppose - I was one too once - but not really worth engaging with in this mode. That said, I do think a more modest version of his position here is justified: continental and analytic philosophy really are substantially different activities which happen to share a name, and it’s as reasonable to prefer the norms of one over the other as it is to prefer either over the norms of, say, history or philology or economics. And it is not particularly fair to treat the virtues of each to you as exclusively being theirs: the consilience of the humanities is not as strong as that of the sciences, but it does exist, and most insights worth preserving can be found in many fields.
Phrases like "each-we" are totally nonsense without such context.
Of course. But “each-we dilemma” (not just bare ‘each-we’, which in isolation actually fails to refer) is plainly nonsense in a way that, say, “phenomenon” is not. One is an ordinary english word put to extraordinary usage; the other is a novel compound, and an awkward one, and all the better fit to purpose for it. It is far easier to proceed with a false understanding of one than of the other. Is this to some extent a failure of the reader’s education, or perhaps their choice of translation? Sure. But ours is a broken world and a braindead academy, and refusing to face up to that is not a virtue. There is value in forcing readers to, dare I say it, notice their confusion.
We're socialized and ideologically trained by institutions (including school, family, church, unions, political parties) to reproduce our society.
Well, sure, maybe. It of course has to be the case that most people who went on to have intellectual descendants were, but this is basically tautological. Whether that fact still holds this late in the day - whether cultural evolution is still in the driver’s seat, so to speak - is very much an empirical question, and so not really the sort of thing philosophy can hope to answer. It’s a fruitfully provocative position, to be sure - but if you’re creative enough, almost anything can be.
You cannot exist outside of ideology, every human has one (a specific and imperfect worldview and your place in it).
Duh. But this is old news for analytics: what do you think Two Dogmas of Empiricism was really all about?
You get specific ideological positions by being "called" into them (interpellated in his words) via specific utterances and actions (not pure internal contemplation).
I’m not confident I know what this means but insofar as it’s claiming “knowledge” “production” is a social process - again, no shit. Shadowboxing against the young and foolish A.J. Ayers does no one any good.
The logic of the state is the relative maximization of its capacity for violence compared to all other actors in society.
Once again, a provocative thesis, but is it a true one? That’s for future historians to say. For my part, I am open to the possibility that there are only two or three real states on Earth, but I find it hard to see how, failing that, Costa Rica or Cuba can be said to be a capacity-for-violence-maximizer.
There are certain sciences which will never be accepted by ruling ideologies if the object of that science is related to the justifications of that ideology.
Given a sufficiently strong account of what it takes for an ideology to be “ruling”, this is trivial; given a weak one, it is false. Which are we dealing with? The answer is necessarily extremely fuzzy, of course, which is acceptable - but only insofar as we regard our social-”scientific” concepts as tools for action and not as real facts. This is not the viewpoint of the stereotypically analytic-brained, and fair enough: the genuinely scientific is not the whole of worthwhile human activity, but neither is it nothing.
Words and symbols get their meaning via their correlations and anti-correlations to other words and experiences
It seems odd to credit this continental philosophy when it - or at least the groundwork for it - long predates the split. You could do much worse as a summary of Hume’s epistemology, for instance. And if on the other hand you want real formal rigor and not just vibes before you assign any credit, then fair enough - but then Saussure is still very much not your guy.
The meaning of such words and symbols can be found in studying human material culture and mapped to approximate our semantic or semiotic field.
In principle, yes, sure, use is meaning. In practice? Have you seen experimental subjects recently? Lol. Lmao, even.
Linear algebra *is* hard. And I say that as someone who has published in the Journal of Convex Analysis.
Even fractions are hard before you learn how they work. Remember back to 4th grade.
>But “each-we dilemma” (not just bare ‘each-we’, which in isolation actually fails to refer) is plainly nonsense in a way that, say, “phenomenon” is not. One is an ordinary english word put to extraordinary usage; the other is a novel compound, and an awkward one, and all the better fit to purpose for it. It is far easier to proceed with a false understanding of one than of the other.
I don't think analytic philosophy is in a position to argue that it is using novel words for uniquely suited purposes, I'd say that many of it's high profile claims, such as the hard problem of consciousness, are based on using natural language with a specialized context to conflate several things together. As I've argued in these posts:
https://nicolasdvillarreal.substack.com/p/materialist-semiotics-and-the-nature
https://nicolasdvillarreal.substack.com/p/the-problem-of-consciousness-and
>It of course has to be the case that most people who went on to have intellectual descendants were, but this is basically tautological.
Not really, Althusser was using this explicitly to argue you need alternative institutions to socialize and ideologically train people into creating a new society, in this case being the communist party. Also, in a practical sense, it means you can map out where ideology is being produced in a physical sense if you pay attention to where people are putting in the labor to actually articulate something.
>Duh. But this is old news for analytics: what do you think Two Dogmas of Empiricism was really all about?
The fact that we're speaking of ideology here means we can plug this concept into a study of culture and society in a way that the typical discourse about "biases" as a neutral thing cannot.
>I’m not confident I know what this means but insofar as it’s claiming “knowledge” “production” is a social process - again, no shit.
Not just social, but particular, citing Pascal Althusser notes how it's the act of kneeling and praying that really makes one a believer, going through the actions of your role, whether a policeman, priest, unionist or news anchor is a part of what creates your ideology and sense of self.
>Once again, a provocative thesis, but is it a true one? That’s for future historians to say. For my part, I am open to the possibility that there are only two or three real states on Earth, but I find it hard to see how, failing that, Costa Rica or Cuba can be said to be a capacity-for-violence-maximizer.
Some states have more or less means, let's not forget that Cuba invited the deployment of nuclear weapons onto its soil lol. And this relative maximization means that it creates forces in two directions, to maximize the amount of violence capacity the state has, but only relative to everyone else. If increasing the state's violence came at the cost of increasing everyone else's they wouldn't do it. For sure, there will be empirical exemptions, but the idea is that this is a historical structure, where we see a tendency for rising maximum relative violence over time.
>but only insofar as we regard our social-”scientific” concepts as tools for action and not as real facts.
I wouldn't agree with that, Althusser is explicitly speaking of real facts which ideology creates blindspots around.
>And if on the other hand you want real formal rigor and not just vibes before you assign any credit, then fair enough - but then Saussure is still very much not your guy.
Saussure was a rigorous linguist, and his point against atomistic notions of meaning seems to be something people like Chomsky reject to this very day.
>In principle, yes, sure, use is meaning. In practice? Have you seen experimental subjects recently? Lol. Lmao, even.
I've written extensively about how LLMs are proofs of this, basically vindicating a prediction Umberto Eco made in the 70s. I published a book on it this year, although you can find many of the essays on the AI tab of my blog as well.
https://nicolasdvillarreal.substack.com/p/a-soul-of-a-new-type
https://nicolasdvillarreal.substack.com/t/ai
I even used these ideas to give a prediction of the human compute required by the human brain. https://nicolasdvillarreal.substack.com/p/structural-estimates-of-human-computation
>But this is old news for analytics: what do you think Two Dogmas of Empiricism was really all about?
And this, too, predates the split, coming from Vienna Circle member Neurath.
Nice try. I apreciate it, and there are a bunch of good ideas here. I really don't mean to be snarky, but are the good ideas new?
I was just thinking of Francis Bacon's 4 Idols from around 1600. Two were:
Idols of the Tribe
Misleading ideas inherent in the mind of man. Not understanding statistics. Not thinking logically.
Idols of the Cave
Misleading ideas in the mind of an individual due to his temperament, education, etc. Thinking like an economist (“maximize surplus”), or an epidemiologist (“save lives”), or an engineer (“make it strong”) or a modern American. Plato’s Republic’s Cave Allegory.
The difference between Althusser and these earlier accounts of ideological biases is that he points out how all of this has to be produced materially, requiring people working, often getting paid to do so, to articulate and spread ideology. The point is exactly that it's not just some neutral thing we all have, it's organized in particular ways by particular institutions and activities.
I'd recommend reading Althusser's seminal essay on this matter to see for yourself what the difference is between these earlier accounts and his. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm
Richard Dawkins had a great take on this:
============================
Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content. The chances are that you would produce something like the following:
"We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously."
This is a quotation from the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, one of many fashionable French ‘intellectuals’ outed by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont in their splendid book Intellectual Impostures, which caused a sensation when published in French last year, and which is now released in a completely rewritten and revised English edition. Guattari goes on indefinitely in this vein and offers, in the opinion of Sokal and Bricmont, "the most brilliant mélange of scientific, pseudo-scientific and philosophical jargon that we have ever encountered."
============================
https://richarddawkins.com/articles/article/postmodernism-disrobed
That's awesome!
It takes real talent to generate a long stream of bullshit like that. I know I wouldn't be able to do it.
See also "Letter from Yale" by Helena Echlin:
I am sitting in a windowless conference room. The walls are lined with sets of leather-bound books with gold-lettered spines. ‘The ode must traverse the problem of solipsism,’ a young man is saying. He pauses for a long time. Underneath the table, one leg is twisted around the other. A stretch of gaunt white ankle shows between trouser and sock. ‘In order to approach participating in.’ He pauses again, his body knotted like a balloon creature made by a children’s entertainer. Finally, in one rush: ‘The unity which is no longer accessible.’ My fellow students utter a long soft gasp, as if at a particularly beautiful firework.
‘Brilliant,’ says the professor. ‘Very finely put. But I didn’t quite understand it. Could you repeat it?’ I write the sentence down in my notebook, like everyone else in the seminar. _The ode must traverse the problem of solipsism before it can approach participating in the unity which is no longer accessible_. When I have pieced it together, I realise he is talking nonsense. I am struck by the thought that literary criticism – at least as it is practised here – is a hoax.
https://web.archive.org/web/20030706234659/http://www.aretemagazine.com/t_article.jsp?id=28
Great example Bill- do you know of his work? I’ve gotten enormous bits from him and Deleuze, despite following 30% of the time.
Part of the issue for me is that you implicitly assume this contradictory, poetic, unclear stuff, much of it near to or buried within social and individual psychology, should be held to the standard you exemplify in your EA thoughts on shrimp, reaching for logic and numbers bc that’s how one gets places philosophically- that’s how one avoids triviality and error. It’s a completely different animal. I’m not saying I like it, but I am saying you are enthusiastically tossing babies out with bathwater.
Dawkins is as much or more of an arrogant pompous pseudo-intellectual, pontificating about fields outside his area of expertise that he has no interest in trying to understand, as any philosopher he purports to criticize.
But Dawkins is a very good writer. That's why it's easy to see how wrong he is when writes about, e.g. the existence of God.
It was aimed at a slightly different target, but I also like Randall Munroe's version:
https://xkcd.com/451/
https://xkcd.com/169/ however is aimed at the exact target (or at least panel 5)
The Hegel inclusion to me seems misguided. Obviously, Hegel is not a "Continental Philosopher," because neither continental nor analytic philosophy existed when Hegel was writing; the divide is a phenomenon of the 20th century. I should also say Hegel is difficult in translation, but also in German--but it is more intelligible in German. Part of this is because, for anyone interested in post-Kantian debates in German philosophy, one would be intimately familiar with the way certain terms are used, and additionally, especially in comparison to Fichte or Schelling, Hegel uses far less jargon and neologisms to express philosophical content. He wrote in something closer to a vernacular usage of German than just about any of his prominent contemporaries. This gets lost in translation as what was once vernacular becomes "Hegelese."
Regarding the confusion around what Hegel really said, this largely has to do with debates not in Hegelianism per se, but Marxism and politics. 19th-century divisions in Hegel interpretation have a tendency to follow sectarian schisms--right Hegelianism versus the Young Hegelians--and 20th-century divisions follow sectarian schisms within Marxism. Karl Korsch's Marxism and Philosophy is an excellent little text on this.
I cannot really say anything about Analytic philosophy per se without making stark over-generalizations, even stylistically; after all, are Carnap, Rorty, and Cavell really a part of the same tradition? I would say the same thing is true about Continental philosophy, as it is broadly used in academia. Certainly, Foucault and Derrida would absolutely revolt at the prospect of being lumped in together with Hegel. Maybe the problem is that the categories we are using are poorly adapted to the phenomenon :)
Hegel is included because Hegel was the great bugaboo of 20th century analytics like Bertrand Russel, who (unfairly) saw him as the point when philosophy went wrong and so made rejection of his ideas a key part of his new movement. Nowadays of course there are plenty of analytics who take Hegel seriously, but Bentham seems both unaware of and uninterested in these.
Yes, and it should be added that Russell learned his Hegel from the highly suspect tradition of British Idealists, who seemed to want to turn Hegel into Parmenides. To paraphrase the greatest philosopher of the 21st century, they weren't sending their best people :p
As a side note, I am always amused by the incredulity with which certain partisans of so-called Analytic philosophy take towards the philosophical canon; in the course of my education, I was always under the impression that being well-read in and capable of understanding a wide range of intellectual discourses was something to aspire to. Philistine's new clothes, I suppose.
Okay now it’s clear you’re just rage baiting. You didn’t even bother to read the Hegel paragraph you chose as your example, you just picked one at random, assumed it must be incomprehensible and declared it so. You could have picked any of number of way worse passages from the Phenomenology, but you chose one where he’s just explaining why philosophy is a more universal discipline than anatomy. I appreciate the troll but you could put in more of an effort.
I feel a natural impulse to weigh in here and leap to a (partial) defence of "continental philosophy". I usually really enjoy reading your posts--I find them clear, interesting, and worth my time. These two, however, I found intellectually lazy and unsatisfying. I will forego being exhaustive and present my two main reasons for thinking this:
1. You show no curiosity in the communicative aims of philosophical work, outside of Making Really Clear Arguments. Now, to be clear, Making Really Clear Arguments is very important! But, I think your conception of the value of (or the work of *doing*) philosophy--which involves overfitting this ideal to philosophy as such--is impoverished.
2. You don't show any serious interest in the granularity that is being elided by a label like "continental philosophy". You make some noises at the beginning about being imprecise and then make no effort whatsoever to think through how this might modify your perspective. Consequently, and ironically, you end up making lazy inferences.
On point 1, I think it's helpful to ask the question: What the fuck is interpretation for?! And, to put a finer point on it, why do so many continental philosophers seem to want to force you to interpret them instead of making it easy? One thing that might be helpful to think about is the perlocutionary aim of a given philosophical work. Take Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, for instance; not only do they not try to Make Really Clear Arguments, but they are refraining from doing this deliberately. In both cases, they are trying to *do something* to the reader, to guide them through a process of both self-recognition and self-estrangement such that the reader can relate to, e.g., socially-embedded norms in a new way. My example here is particular to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, but in order to have a compelling account of why continental philosophy is bullshit you need some account of (a) whether or not the writing is oriented towards some perlocutionary aim other than merely persuading you, and (b) some account of how it fails to meet this perlocutionary aim or (c) some account of why the perlocutionary aim is bullshit. And, despite the particularity of my example, this is a point that would extend to other continental figures, especially those in the phenomenological tradition such as Husserl and Heidegger.
I also have some worries that you really are just misunderstanding some of the things you claim are obscure. Butler is genuinely a terrible writer, but you quote a passage from Butler on what it means to say that a person "is" a woman. I have absolutely no idea how your remarks on this passage--which you take to express a warrant for questioning Butler's competence on this point--gain any kind of critical traction on what Butler is claiming. So far as I can tell, you are straightforwardly agreeing with Butler.
On point 2, you present some really weak evidence for a very strong claim (viz., that *most* of continental philosophy is bullshit). You draw on a handful of writers for first-order evidence that *most* of continental philosophy is bullshit, the Sokal Hoax for some second-order evidence that *most* of continental philosophy is bullshit, and the remarks of Chomsky and Searle for further second-order evidence that *most* of continental philosophy is bullshit. The Sokal Hoax is a particularly egregious piece of evidence, even if I grant that the Hoax really does establish what it purports to establish. The Sokal Hoax purposefully targeted journals in *critical social theory*, and most of your examples come from Butler, a critical social theorist. Is critical social theory a core part of continental philosophy? Sure! I will grant that! Does critical theory constitute *most* of continental philosophy? I see no reason why that should be taken to be true. Are Butler, Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, and the critical social theorists representative of continental philosophy? I don't know, you haven't convinced me, notwithstanding remarks about other ephemeral and unspecified continental philosophers that you talk to who deny the existence of external reality.
Against your second-order evidence of Chomsky disliking Derrida and Searle apparently being incapable of picking up on a joke, I present the following second-order evidence, taking Hegel as an example: the philosophically serious work done on interpreting Hegel by the likes of, for example, Stephen Houlgate and Robert Brandom. On your account, this should either not be possible or be built on sand. This is absurd. Have you made any attempt to engage with this secondary literature before reaching such strong conclusions? Have you read any works at the intersection of phenomenology and philosophy of mind? etc etc. This isn't just a case of "read more lol"; it's a case of "You need some kind of account for how these endeavours are probably a waste of time." Moreover, you need some account for why some of the exemplars of analytic philosophy (e.g., Brandom with Hegel, Wittgenstein with Kierkegaard) didn't just write off these continental thinkers.
To be clear, this is *partial* defence of continental philosophy. I am not going to claim that continental philosophy wouldn't benefit from some of the clarity that comes with analytic philosophy. Equally, I think analytic philosophy could probably benefit by taking some things on board from continental philosophy. But my point here is that your argument is extremely weak and characterized by some pretty shoddy and overconfident reasoning.
Here is a passage taken at random from a canonical text in the analytic tradition. "We improved stimulus synonymy a bit by socializing it. We can do the same for analyticity, calling socially stimulus-analytic just the sentences that are stimulus-analytic for almost everybody. But analyticity in even this improved sense will apply as well to 'There have been black dogs' as to '2 + 2 = 4' and 'No bachelor is married'. Let us face it: our socialized stimulus synonymy and stimulus analyticity are still not behavioristic reconstructions of intuitive semantics, but only a behavioristic ersatz." Not impenetrable if you know the context in which Quine is writing but to those who do not, it is no better off than a chunk of Hegelese.
> Lastly, there is the Sokal Hoax, wherein many different nonsense papers were sent to continental philosophy journals. They were of different kinds—some about race and gender, while Sokal’s original piece was involved jargony science denial. A large portion got published. This sort of fraud is evidence for the unseriousness of the field. While there are bogus journals in other fields, the journals submitted to were well-regarded.
This is innacurate, the Sokal Hoax consistent of exactly one nonsense paper being submitted to one journal, Social Text. Maybe you're confusing this with the Grievance Studies Affair, by Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose. For the latter one, 20 studies were submitted, 4 were published, 3 were accepted but not yet published, 6 rejected and 7 were under review (the authors of the papers had to reveal their identity early because a journalist found out that their pseudonyms were fake).
I would recommend watching this video on the topic: https://youtu.be/ESEFUaEA7kk?si=uQ1Q-pSSuIX36e-N
I think people largely overestimate what the Sokal hoax has to say about postmodernism or continental philosophy. It was an N=1 experiment with no control group, and sokal assumed part of the reason the journal submitted his paper was that it agreed with their ideological biases, but although that may be true, if you don't try submitting a bogus paper that doesn't agree with peoples ideological biases to see what happens, you shouldnt really say that!
You correctly point out that other disciplines being bad doesn't make continental philosophy not bad, but its still good to do a comparitive analysis. The bogdanoff twins got a PhD in physics with a bogus paper, in 2005 3 computer scientists got a bogus paper submitted to a conference, and other people used the algorithms they had created to submit 120 bogus papers in other STEM areas. In 2017, one paper on microbiology using made up star wars nomenclature got accepted by 4 different papers. In 2013, a science journalist got his papers accepted at 157 journals (out of 304 attempts), even when they were filled with intentional reasoning errors, and randomly generated sentences of the type "molecule X from species Y inhibits growth of cancer Z" (as in, X, Y and Z were picked completely at random so them inhibiting a certain growth of cancer was just made up). Yes this doesnt mean it wasnt bad that that one bogus Sokal paper was accepted, but it shows its not something unique to continental philosophy, lots of joutnal in lots of different areas can let bs slip, even with peer review.
(I think in lots of the cases I mentioned the journals were well regarded, but I'm getting basically all this information from the video I linked, around 17 minutes in, I havent done a deep dive on each on so I could be wrong)
The Sokal hoax did have an impact within the community it targeted. It stung and angered.
I didnt say it didnt have an impact. I said that what the sokal hoax actually shows is overstated by a bunch of people.
Did you think I meant to contradict you?
Seems like there are some true things that cannot be communicated using a logically coherent argument. But these philosophers really do seem like total gibberish… how terrible.
Bill, you actually like generating this coarse opinion, which in his mind will bleed into philosophers in a dozen fields you’re not particularly familiar with?
Hegel is not a continental philosopher. He wrote a full century before the term "analytic philosophy" was coined, and his writing led to several schools of thought that directly influenced the early analytics, e.g. the absolute idealists (AKA the British Hegelians), the neo-Kantian movement, and writers like Franz Brentano. Many of the early analytic philosophers were also in direct contact with phenomenologists (there were, after all, plenty of both in Germany and Austria). Michael Dummett's book "Origins of Analytic Philosophy" has lots of good information on this, and Dummett himself is a fascinating figure: his work is deeply rooted in Frege and Wittgenstein, but his approach to philosophical questions is miles away from post-Lewis metaphysics or the Parfit disciples who are now common at Oxford (but more on this later).
The split only really started when the positivists decided they alone had the correct understanding of philosophical method (even then their ethical outlook was heavily influenced by Nietzsche, Dilthey, etc.), and as a practical matter, the divide was intensified when many of the Vienna Circle had to flee Europe and begin writing in English (that Heidegger was an avowed Nazi didn't help matters either).
And, to be clear, "continental philosophy" is a catch-all term invented by the second and third generation of analytics to mean "that weird shit they do over in Europe." No one thinks of themselves primarily as "continental philosophers," they're phenomenologists or critical theorists or psychoanalysts (Freudian, Jungian, Lacanian, etc.) or post-structuralists or deconstructionists or so on. There is no reason to think a criticism of a few writers in a few of these schools (which is what your quotes of Derrida and Butler are) necessarily applies to all of them, and it would be odd if all these different movements were equally incapable of saying meaningful things, given that they are able to distinguish between themselves and have some idea of their points of agreement and disagreement.
As alluded to earlier, analytic philosophy has also grown progressively more diverse (think how much you'd roll your eyes if someone tried to cite their problems with Ayer or Wittgenstein or Quine as the reason analytic philosophy was worthless), and there are plenty of writers with analytic backgrounds who have found "continental" thinkers worthwhile. Apart from the early engagement that was already mentioned, there have been analytic phenomenologists, Marxists, and Hegelians working for decades now.
You have every right to think their main commitments are wrong or their arguments don't work, but there's nothing special about that in philosophy (indeed, this is what's going on in Scott's review of Foucault: he doesn't say he's spouting gibberish, he thinks he's wrong, as he thinks about any number of of philosophers, and you yourself have responded to Scott's critiques when you think he's missed the mark). And in any event, it's a far cry from name-dropping a few analytic heavyweights as proof they can be dismissed out of hand.