Whether or not Hegel or Heidegger personally believed a particular interpretation is completely irrelevant to whether the interpretations put forth are true or false. The only reason we would need to know for sure exactly what they were arguing is to appeal to them as an authority (a fallacious approach). If the theories of Hegel provide novel insights based upon interpretations of his work then it has value even if the interpretation *of his work* is inaccurate. Also the guy at the beginning is a literal ancap and a transcendendental idealist for the "laws" of economics. Hardly the best example of analytic philosophy
I do philosophical logic (in the analytic tradition, of course) and believe me - doing formal logic (which analytic philosophy is so proud of as its core methodology) to tackle serious philosophical problems makes things way worse than continental philosophy supposedly does. You end up with a paper almost nobody can understand. And those that do have to suspend belief quite a few times, since logical rules dictate that some quite unintuitive things become true/valid. It’s like that joke about spherical chickens in a vacuum.
As a soon to be mathematics graduate with a strong interest in philosophy, I disagree with this larger attitude about continental philosophy very strongly. The reason why areas of STEM teach/engage with their areas of Enquiry in the way they do is because of the fact that the actual objects of the discipline, whether that be strings, rings, groups, sets, points, functions, matrices, events, etc…. are far more logically unproblematic and grounded in their *symbolic* representation than concepts or sentences are in philosophy/philosophical logic. In philosophy you run into conceptual issues all the time which make zero sense the moment you apply logical syntax to philosophical claims. For instance, one might consider the application of the law of excluded middle to the sentence “It is raining or it is not raining”. While not logically indicated, there’s an immediately clear conceptual ambiguity here; we have not identified a “where”. How many water droplets would have to drop from the sky before it would be classified as rain? How would we validate this? Etc…. While this is a textbook example, there are more complicated and skeptically troubling variations of these concerns which run *far* deeper than just basic logical truths and get at the heart of semiotics, linguistics, metaphysics of language, etc… things that, in fact, have been most frequently addressed by continental philosophers (at least in my experience)! These problems, simply due to the nature of the phenomenon being studied, are not of significant concern for a mathematician (and are less significant concerns for a scientist). When a mathematician speaks of a “wave”, they are often literally just referring to an abstract object which “obeys like a wave” and “satisfies the properties of waves” (if you ever have worked in advanced proof based mathematics, you learn rather quickly how misleading certain ‘intuitive’ mathematical concepts can be and learn to hold the rigorous logical definitions close to your chest). Mathematical objects (like pi, e, ‘the circle’, etc…) often gain their notoriety as a consequence of convergent application, emergence, or derivation in various areas. A simple example of this is how limit points in analysis and accumulation points in topology have essentially identical characteristics despite being constructed set-theoretically in completely different ways (so much so that many topologists literally call accumulation points limit points!). If you can show that an accumulation point exists on a Hausdorff space, it logically behaves *identically* to the analysis definition of limits and thus you in some sense have multiple ways of deriving mathematical concepts which are not initially related. This is in my opinion the most philosophically interesting part of math as it, in my opinion, speaks to some sort of metaphysically binding component to mathematics as a whole. In philosophy, generally speaking, philosophers are interested in things which relate to human subjectivity, ideas, language, etc… If I wanted to start a niche philosophical area which studied specifically “magic slime” and the magic slime was defined entirely in terms of diagrams and/or as a purely logical construction, you’d call what I’m doing a waste of time; possibly bad philosophy! But this is in some sense what mathematicians do (albeit, in cases where it’s not a waste of time). When a physicist decides that they want to use trigonometric functions, spherical geometry, probability theory, etc…. It’s because the phenomenon they are studying literally obeys the diagrammatical structure of the mathematical construction in an empirical sense. A physicist studying the motion of a pendulum uses trigonometry to model harmonic motion because if you mark the position of the pendulum at different points in space over time, in real time, it LITERALLY resembles a trigonometric function. This does not work in philosophy because the sentences do not “resemble” ideas (albeit there’s an interesting niche phenomenological side of this which I don’t have time to address). The formalized approach to argumentation is a representation devoid of empirical sense and it’s for this reason that trying to make philosophy resemble a discipline like mathematics counterproductive in my personal opinion. (Notice how even in economics where the object of enquiry is definitionally quantitative, there’s still major issues with replication simply because people are involved and don’t behave in a lawlike manner)
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This illustrates the central tenet of analytic Philosophy quote well: Philosophy should be treated like formal sciences because it ought to be a formal science, and any line of inquiry that does not conform to either formal or empirical science, is a waste of time. Note that I'm not saying I agree with such a radical statement , but I am persuaded by the pragmatism it offers
I won’t speak for mathematics but Physics is certainly full of semantic vagueness and possible points of contention that might stem from that. It only manages to hide it for few reasons: 1. Because the mathematical/formal aspects are clear and rigorous, and these are used for making technology and predictions. 2. Because the pondering of the metaphysical meaning of physical concepts is at best not encouraged, and the passing down of them is carried by prior generations of physicists who have superficial understandings for similar reasons. An anecdote of mine perfectly gets across this point: on my second semester we were covering the concepts of work and kinetic energy in a classical mechanics course. The assistant teaching us covered all the usual points: work is defined as a path integral of a force field, it equals the difference of kinetic energy, and probably the way that relates to potential energy for conservative fields. I was puzzled by energy being implicitly given the status of some real, substantive quality (in physics generally) because how could it if it just stems from work, something that’s just a path integral? The assistant was just totally confused, and didn’t really get what was bothering me. Even though all I asked was a very basic question of what the significance of all this was as far as reality goes. What makes semantic ambiguity stand out in philosophy is just that philosophy is a search for the truth of things. What are you even doing if not making a claim for something or against a different position on something? As far as the wealth of interpretations go, I think limiting this as a “continental philosophy phenomenon” isn’t fair. You can find this sort of thing for a lot of philosophers throughout history. The best example that comes to mind is Kant, because he was precisely trying to be very precise and rigorous about everything. Admittedly, not everyone is as bad as Hegel, but I think semantic ambiguity is unavoidable when doing philosophy. It’s always concerned about things that are more basic than people normally need to define. Of course it will lead to points of unclarity when the author is not available for questioning.
The question is, is semantic ambiguity a problem? Could it not be, that words have multiple referents until specified? Is it not the way we measure it in practice that defines which aspects of reality we mean? Maybe successful reference has less to do with resemblance between thought and reality and more to do with our interactions with reality.
@@AdamWEST-yu2os she. And no, I’m pretty sure she was sober. Again, her explanation of ‘work’ as a formal concept was fine; just the standard explanation you could get anywhere. I’m not even necessarily making some kind of case for Derrida. I’m just saying that rigorousness in physics doesn’t necessarily mean much because the meaning of the claims in it can be vague even if the whole formalism is rigorous. And that’s the issue. I don’t know what the “correct answer” is supposed to be, or even if this is some matter of discussion in the philosophy of physics. If it was, then it’d just be on the assistant for being ignorant and not really exemplify an issue in the whole field.
@@weltschmerzistofthaufig2440 because all of those properties could be true even if it were just a number and nothing more. I think this concern is very easy to sense in Lagrangian mechanics because there you get the expression for conserved quantities simply by manipulating the Lagrangian and the functions it depends upon. So energy density, for example, is just Σ(φ-dot dL/dφ-dot)-L. Why should this quantity correspond to something real? After all, its conservation is just tied to mathematical properties of the Lagrangian (time translation symmetry), not to an Eleatic appeal to indestructibility of that-which-is. Why do you think those properties confer energy being anything metaphysically substantive?
Always found it insane that anyone accepts this category of 'continental philosophy' anything other than a strawman that analytic philosophers use to define themselves in opposition to. All the worst cliches about popular French and German philosophers are rhetorically spliced together to produce a coherent 'continental' school of philosophy, presented as an impenetrable web of nonsense that the sensible privately educated Anglophones have swept aside with their eminently practical empirical approaches. Come on, 'yeah well philosophers that don't speak English are umm unclear and I don't know what they were on about' is not actually an argument.
I totally agree. These philosophers are literally only alike insofar as they have a reputation for being hard. Some would say willfully obtuse, some would say creatively ingenious; the difference seems largely one of personal preference, and thus why any arguments against “continental philosophy” as generally unclear is just a gross overgeneralization.
@@AdamWEST-yu2os Funny how you claim to know so much about this “insular group” yet can’t seem to spell a single one of their names right. Sounds like you haven’t ever read them. Am I hearing some irony?
@@AdamWEST-yu2os I think the idea that a philosopher's work stops being useful after a certain period of time or because they have a strange worldview is kind of nonsense (not that I am interested in Heidegger). No economist would argue this of Adam Smith or David Ricardo. If you're going to engage with psychiatry and psychoanalysis, for instance, it just makes sense to engage with Freud. Of course, post structuralists are particularly interested in the figures you mention, but why would they lead you to retroactively categorise philosophers like Kant and Hegel? It would be like trying to argue that John Stuart Mill is actually analytic.
@@AdamWEST-yu2os I'm not going to get into the weeds arguing about who does or does not have value. With that being said, again, the idea that someone's ideas have been 'discredited' isn't really relevant to whether they should be engaged with or not. Addressing someone's ideas is not the same as agreeing with them, and sometimes it is necessary even when you disagree with them precisely because those ideas are so prevalent. I'm still not convinced as to why Hegel, for instance, counts as 'continental'. What are the precepts of this continental philosophy? It seems like there is really nothing linking German idealism to Bataille's materialism other than that both of them influenced Derrida.
So you are resurrecting the thought of early (Tractatus-era) Wittgenstein? Good luck with that. There’s a reason he himself abandoned those ideas. Language doesn’t work that way. It’s not math.
@@gavinyoung-philosophythe fact that language is not clear is precisely the reason why we should be as clear as possible when using it, especially so when we are trying to assert something important, even more so if your idea is going to change the world. The mindset of "embrace the ambiguity of language" will not propell humanity forward, it is the formalization of everything that allow society to be this advanced, it is the effort of million of mathematicians and physicists who tried to put "rules" into what once seems "magical" and "unexplanable" that get us to where we are today.
@@ngnxtan I’m not giving a statement of personal incredulity and saying let’s just give up. This is not a “language-mystery of the gaps”. I’m just saying that even physicists and mathematicians take for granted the specificity of language. For example, in mathematics, we use the number 0 as a placeholder for a concept we can’t actually conceptualize or use in operations, in the strictest sense that 0 is a contradiction: a something which is supposedly nothing. Instances such as these show how we can use concepts all the time that are helpful and can even be integrated into a rigorous system, yet which are nevertheless riddled with problems that those who claim they’re just being “precise”, are actually just failing to do!
@@ngnxtan And so what will propel philosophy forward is artificially ignoring one of the most prominent features of language? If philosophy intends to think these problems at all it would have to try to approach precisely such problems. You can't just adopt some model a priori - Descartes' clear and distinct ideas - which by the way is more or less a metaphor derived from Euclidean geometry and imported into the space of reflection, to try to artificially amputate a whole field of problems because it isn't with conducive to the particular set of metaphors you adopt to try to determine what thinking is. Scientific advancement and social advancement are not one and the same thing
Sadly, people who know nothing about more advanced philosophy will always be louder and more widely heard than those advanced philosophers themselves. Even 4 minutes into this video there is so much wrong with it (which, ironically, could even be demonstrated "analytically") but I feel that all that needs to be said, or asked rather, is the following - which objective truths did analytical philosophy uncover which allowed it to somehow maintain the position that it is somehow more clear, has better arguments, or better address counter-arguments, than continental philosophy? Only the most obstuse philosophers would pretend that somehow analytical philosophy has proven itself to such a degree that it is able to lay claim to being better than continental philosophy in terms of metrics like clarity, argumentation, or addressing counter-arguments. First of all, continental philosophy (whatever you want to say about its actual content) has largely arisen from the FAILURES of analytical philosophy - hence, why Hegel-among the German Idealists-is the one frequently designated as among being one of the most notable figures of continental philosophy whereas, somehow, Kant or Fichte isn't. What in the fuck Kant or Fichte successfully argue to make them more analytical than Hegel? Such a premise or argument would be ridiculous to try to argue and, yet, some of the most "clear-headed" (more like basic or primitive) philosophers always attempt to try to distinguish Hegel apart from Kant as being somehow especially continental (which for them really just means "unclear") - just say you don't understand continental philosophy and leave it there. Second of all, continental philosophies ABSOLUTELY have clear premises that flow into deductively valid and sound arguments - anyone who claims that this isnt the case never actually took the time to read the continental philosophers they are bashing or made 1 or 2 half-assed attempts at doing so and decided that it wasnt their lack of an understanding that was the cause of not being able to understand the text but, rather, it was the text itself. Which, on its face, is fine - however, as evidenced by some of the more post-modern thinkers that also hold clarity in high regard in philosophy (most notably for me are American pragmatists thinkers like Dewey or Rorty), the problem isnt that continental philosophers dont have arguments, the problem-if anything-is that DEDUCTIVELY GIVEN ARGUMENTS HAVE (THUS FAR THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF WESTERN PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT) FAILED AT PROVIDING ANTECEDENTLY GIVEN REALITIES IN ANY OBJECTIVE SENSE. Here, the issue is most prevalent with Hegel - not in the fact that Hegel isn't sufficiently clear (although many Hegelian scholars themselves have argued this - for example, most notably, Robert Pippin) BUT THAT HEGEL'S ARGUMENTS ARE THEMSELVES CHARACTERIZED BY A (DIALETICALLY) LOGICAL REVERSAL OF THE VERY SHAPE IN WHICH ANALYTICALLY GIVEN DEDUCTIVE ARGUMENTS PRESENT THEMSELVES IN THEIR FAILURES TO PROVIDE NECESSARY CONNECTIONS BETWEEN RATIONALITY AND THEIR GIVEN PHILOSOPHICAL SUBJECT-MATTER (i.e. ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, etc.). In other words, you begin to understand what continental philosophers are trying to do-in the form of deductive reasoning-when you understand that what they are trying to address is the failure of a history and tradition of analytically given deductive arguments to answer the questions in philosophy they tried to solve to begin with. Third of all, how tf do philosophers-analytical or otherwise-get away with attacking an entire branch of philosophy without providing any positive definition of it DESPITE THE FACT THAT THEY EXPLICITLY CLAIM (like in this video) THAT THEIR BRANCH OF THOUGHT IS (albeit negatively via the very act of implication I guess) DEFINED BY THE VERY CLARITY AND SIMPLICITY THAT THEIR SUPPOSED ANTITHESIS LACKS? Its unreal to me how some of the worst philosophers have the balls to make the claims they make with literally no support and then turn around and define their entire branch of thought with that same rational support, clarity, validity, soundness, etc. If the only worthwhile theoretical thinking has to be conducted in the same way we do mathematical equations then how is it that we still have no clue how to comprehensively account for any of the main philosophical areas of discipline on logically or rationally given terms? You may have your own view or standpoint on a given area of philosophy like ethics, metaphyics, epistemology, asthetics, or whatever, and you might be totally convinced of its validity, soundess, comprehensiveness, objectivity, etc. but no serious philosopher ever claims that THEIR arguments by any means account for THE ONLY objective view for what counts for ALL of philosophical thought - because to do so would not only be insane, but OBVIOUSLY BIASED AND/OR DEEPLY FLAWED. So, if you want an idea as to why continental philosophy exists or what it even is, just take a moment to consider how little currency any analytical theory of philosophy has on providing answers to the most fundamental questions concerning the nature of things in reality, or reality itself.
@@joely_62 naw bro, when you've been studying philosophy as long as I have, you hear this same stupid argument over and over and only from people who have no fucking clue what they're talking about. And don't even get me started on morons like Jordan Peterson and how they've amplified this retarded take by 1000x.
Your comment has a similar issue to the continental philosophy perhaps. Whatever point is being made is lost in a welter of unnecessary words. Concision and precision are the best way to convey an idea or concept.
@@InsertPhilosophyHere Do you have any specific analytic philosophers in mind?... The other thing is that the word "scholasticism" has two meanings. One is entirely a judgmental term of abuse: "narrow-minded insistence on traditional doctrine." The other meaning seems to refer to a kind of methodological approach.... In any case, so which 20th century and 21st century analytic philosophers were "narrow-minded" and obedient to "traditional doctrine"? ... Is being a "scholastic" necessarily a criticism? Perhaps *extreme* scholasticism is indeed a bad thing. But isn't its opposite (whatever we take that to be) just as bad?
I couldn't DISagree more ... often, if thoughts immediately appear "clear", this means you're just repeating familiar language structures, and philosophy can(!) be about going beyond. Like e.g. Heidegger did, he basically refracted the german language into itself to illuminate structure and heritage - impossible to translate into english. Is it difficult? Yes, but so is learning anything that goes against your deepest habits. Some people (including "professional" philosophers) are not interested in that or too lazy to dig deeper, fine... but stop the grandios statements and be more humble, you're embarrassing yourself.
It's interesting that you claim that those philosophers are lazy. I'm sorry I don't see the point of what you said. Philosophers, mathematicians and linguists are trying to make their assertions as unambiguous as possible. If they don't take clarity seriously, their propositions could be interpreted in a way which they don't intend or be absolutely incomprehensible. What's the point in making things vague or ambiguous or incoherent?
@@benjiewhorf7473 It’s not that continental philosophers are intentionally bringing in ambiguities and vagueness (at least not always), but rather that they accept their presence and reality as an omnipresent fact of language. The analytic philosophers take for granted the fixity and precision of language, at least in certain domains and at certain thresholds of communication, and scold continental guys who purposefully investigate language at its edges where ambiguities and vagueness are most pronounced.
@@gavinyoung-philosophy Hello! I'm not sure whether analytic philosophers take the precision for granted and in my opinion they don't. They accept the limitations of natural language. They simply use the linguistic tools available to make their assertions as unambiguous as possible which is you'd often find them preface their propositions by stating something down the lines of "It is the case that...... ", "There exists.... such that.... " etc. Analytic philosophers(philosophers of language), logicians, semanticists and syntacticians are working on ambiguities. Moreover, they make ample use of symbolic logic and other metalinguistic tools for stating for their premises for extra clarity which natural languages cannot provide. The problem with being ambiguous while asserting something is that semantic value of the assertion will remain unknown unless otherwise stated by the one uttering it. I'm genuinely curious about how continental philosophers investigate language at its edges without using any formal tools. I'd appreciate you can recommend some papers or books. Just keep in mind, I'm a semanticist by trainings, so anything too continental will be hard for me to grasp.
@@benjiewhorf7473 Derrida’s “Of Grammatology” is a staple in this regard, and it’s all about the limitations and inherent ambiguities of language. You may enjoy it too considering your occupation!
As you'll know, no analytic philosopher is against continental philosophy simply because it's... well, *continental*. After all, there's much admiration for Frege, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Tarski, etc. etc. - and even Brentano and Husserl - in analytic circles. Plus, there are many contemporary analytic philosophers in Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, etc. But not so much so in France! The point was made that (often) arguments aren't "made explicit" in continental philosophy. That assumes that there are arguments in the first place - it's just that the reader isn't spoon-fed. But what about the types of continental philosophy which simply don't have arguments at all - explicit or implicit? This is a type of philosophy (which is often indistinguishable from political or religious oratory) that relies heavily on (very confident) categorical statements, poeticisms, rhetoric, hyperbole, etc. I've been accused of being "anal" and "pedantic" for stressing the definitions of concepts. Yet, if this isn't done, people often talk passed each other. That said, not all analytic philosopher do formalised their arguments. That is, they don't state a set of premises, and then offer a conclusion. So there are many midway positions between highly-formalised philosophy, and philosophical free improvisations.
I don't think that Frege, Wittgenstein, Carnap and Tarski are continental philosophers, but then it should be of no surprise that there is critical reception of them by contemporary analytic philosophers
@@Rudi361 They were born and brought up on the Continent (Germany, Austria, and Poland). Though the latter three moved to the UK and US. There isn't a "critical reception" of these philosophers by "contemporary analytic philosophers". If anything, the exact opposite is the case.
Which analytic philosopher does this for ethics? I've yet to know what they mean by basic terms like "good", "duty", "imperative", "ethics" or more importantly, "reasons"? I am also quite confused as to what analytic philosophy even means? It seems that it meant something pre -1950, and it seems something opposite post 1950?
@@natanaellizama6559analytic typically refers to Anglo-American philosophy, and you might here distant definitions from different people - I usually think of it as more empiricism-based and with discrete topics, and Continental philosophy follows Hegel and the German idealist era, phenomenology, existentialism and structural linguistics. With this in mind, ordinary language philosophy might actually be more Continental than analytical. Analytical might be more left-brained and Continental more right-brained. Anyways it’s not a helpful division in my opinion, and I think Continental philosophy was originally a pejorative used by Anglo-American philosophers.
What I understand to be continental philosophy is best understood in the light of Kant’s insight that what we call reality is a subjective construct arising from “categories of cognition”. Consequently, what is being investigated in continental philosophy is not reality per se, but the categories of cognition which inform said reality. There is, of course, plenty of badly written continental philosophy. Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness”, for example, often has a distinctively “stream of consciousness” style about it. Nevertheless, what this video calls “noise” is mostly the result of the reader’s lack of any real understanding of the philosophical perspective being presented.
From a rationalist standpoint, it is simply inadequate to assert something you don't understand as fraudulent or nonsense. This type of "argument" is anti-intellectual at its core. We are free to complain about the obscurity of the language of certain authors, but only after you have intellectually engaged with the material can you give informed and constructive criticism. For the uninitiated, algebraic geometry may appear more opaque and incomprehensible than Hegel's science of logic (not claiming that Hegel is as rigorous as 20th-century mathematics, of course). When it comes to difficult thinking, opacity-clarity is more of a reflection of the thinker's mastery of the (semantic) "content" of the thought than a property of the linguistic representation of the "content." Representation matters, to be sure, but they are stretched to the limit, by default, when exploring a fundamentally new way of thinking. Unless you are a genius, you can't expect to master ideas of 20th-century mathematics or engage with a thinker like Husserl (Göttingen's official philosopher in its prime) without years of hard work. There is nothing rational and praiseworthy about reducing thinkers to a bad camp and then dismissing it as fraudulent and nonsensical. The multiplicity of interpretations (for the syntax/language as in model theory) is well-established. From an "analytical" standpoint, the "number" of interpretations (or models) for a given syntax (up to isomorphism) is so "large" that no cardinality can express it. Interpretations are also known to be a lot more subtle than syntax. Apparently contradictory interpretations can be equivalently valid (i.e., verifies all true sentences) for the exact syntax if the syntax is insufficient to express the "contradiction."
Thanks for posting this thoughtful examination. Perhaps it could be balanced by critiques of analytic philosophy (maybe you have already done that; this is the first time I've looked at your channel.) Over time I have become more and more discouraged by analytic philosophy and its claims of clarity and analytical rigor. I don't think either of those are true. They aren't rigorous and their writing is not clear. I think partly that is due to the analytic tradition's unwillingness to use things like metaphor, simile, allegory, and so forth, on the grounds that they do not lead to clarity. But a case can be made that such structures of comparisons are themselves modes of reason. // This is a complex issue and, once again, thanks for taking the time to present the outlines of the dispute.
- Continental philosophers are unclear on what they are saying - So what do you think about them? - I hate them - Can you be more precise? - They are like the worst bad guys. Although I’m sure there are some good bad guys. Ah yeah analytic philosophers are pure logic my dude. On an other note: Hegel was not a continental philosopher. He just wrote in am obscure manner. Also you can’t easily apply analytic views on him since a main part of his project is that he created what he considered a new form of logic, which is not classical logic. And finally, the focus of continental philosophy is just different. It cares more about the therapeutic effects of philosophy (psychoanalysis) and the experience of the individual, than strictly truth of some propositions. It’s not as focused on universal truths, which it considers too abstract for a person. Ironically this was the critique of Romantic era philosophers against the systematic philosophy of Hegel. However in order to get to truly universal truth they have to include personal experience. Basically the analytic continental split is a mistake.
The analytic/continental disctinction is weird in a particular way: While there is a group of self-styled analytics, there should be much more doubt about the reverse group - the continentals - existing in this way. I think maybe in a narrow sense, 20th century philosophy (especially 2nd half 20th century philosophy) from mainland Europe might share methodological commitments and topics, but if you also group Hegel and German idealism into it, why not also Nietzsche and Schopenhauer? What about Adorno? Habermas? To be precise, I hardly know anything about most of these philosophies, but pretending they all form the group of continental philosophers and can all be written down with a few remarks seems utterly silly. It is true that analytic philosophy is a style of philosophy defined by providing clear definitions and arguments and by dealing with counter-examples. This way of doing philosophy does make it distinct from basically all other philosophy, but the perception that all the rest is basically the same or can be defined negatively (by the absence of the analytic style) is wrong, I think. The 2nd group is the "all the rest"-group, hence one should find a plethora of questios posed, styles chosen and topics discussed if one looked carefully. The perception of sameness seems truly misguided, hence most uses of the label "continental philosophy" but the most narrow ones should be rejected. Not least, "extracting information" seems to be only one use of philosophy, and maybe a wildly misplaced one at that. Maybe this all started with Kant. Finding that philosophy should be more like science and not like "walking in the dark" was motivating him, but also the positivists ans later analytics. Has it worked? Does this kind of philosophy provide us with a consensually agreed upon body of knowledge and facts, with unquesioned methods and assumptions, with paradigms? These would be some of the metrics that one should be interested in if one objected that one's approach was more scientific in nature than other approaches. I hardly think that such an evaluation would be favorable for contemporary (or past) analytic philosophy. The only thing that can be said is that analytic philosophers are c l e a r l y in disagreement with each other. Weirdly, the success of analytic philosophy is hardly debatable. It can be measured in its global spread and the way in which it pushes aside other approaches. But this institutional victory doesn't equate to having won this status like a hard science does. It has won its status maybe like scholasticism has, or Aristotelian natural philosophy - it is hegemonic, yet clearly not "right" if being right would mean conforming to the metrics layed out above. (To make my point clear, the analytic style has its worth imo, even if it missed its objective entirely and I think one can use it to make clear what one thinks in a very rigorous fashion. I just don't think it's the only reasonable way of doing philosophy and I don't think it should baselessly define everything else just by its own internal standards, because it will trigger misjudgments and arrogance. Also a last remark: Being rigorous in defining a concept or a thought doesn't make the concept clear per se. Even if one succeeds at making something clear, it isn't necessarily right. Adding rigor is only a complete solution to the problems of a field of enquiry if the object of analysis is already of a certain nature to begin with. One can gain a little bit from rigor if doing philosophy, but most philosophical ideas clearly become clear as being actually unclear by doing it.)
I disagree about the analytic philosophy. I find them awfully obscure and in that obscurity hide a lot of things. The greatest example being ethics. I've found no clear or compelling definition of the basic terms that they all seem to be talking about. Heck, I don't even know a basic definition of "reason". From this, there's also a much operative obscurity as to what the relation between this is to the will or to the subject. A far clearer and more compelling work lies in, say, Martin Buber. I also am not sure about the counter-examples. Again, in ethics, there's no relation at all as to the obvious counter-example of a subjective line of ethics and how it would go. They all just ASSUME the ethical categories and then ASSUME them(even by definition) as "imperative" for some reason and yet not clarify what does that entail. Any meaningful clarification destroys the edifice of "reasons-based" ethics. Half of my time arguing with this philosophy is just getting them to clarify concepts and then trying to tie concepts to intuitions, which is "supposedly" what this philosophy is known for.
@@natanaellizama6559 Ethics might be a special case. Afaik, a lot of analytic findings in this area are assumed to be "common sense" by the analytic philosophers producing them. For instance moral realism, by many, is assumed to be the "intuitive position", and many say what seems to be the case should only be ever doubted if there is a stronger seeming going against it etc. The problem is that the general public is mixed on that question. Overall, the intuitions of trained philosophers and non-philosophers tend to be different, so it is highly questionable if intutitions are these objective immalleable yardsticks they are assumed to be. And maybe the turn to intuitions was disadvantageous to dealing with counter-examples.
@@KommentarSpaltenKrieger Well, my issue is not with intuitions. They are basic and fundamental, as far as I'm concerned. We ought to analyze our intutions and absent intuitions there is no content to analyze. We even use intuitions to analyze other intuitions. For example, all rational principles are intuitive. This doesn't entail all assumed intuitions are intuitions or that intuitions are infallible. It is like empirical senses. Without them, what is the content of experience? All experience would assume them, but that doesn't mean they are infallible. Yet it is our way to engage with external reality. The jump forward arises from the obvious fact that sensitive intuitions are not the only KIND of intuitions we use to engage with reality. I also don't have an issue with moral realism per se, but I do have an issue with it alongside hidden but foundational implications of the practice(like naturalism, secularism, and so on). So, the issue is neither moral intuitions nor moral realism, but how to make sense of those within the previous structures of naturalism and secularism. I don't think one can and conceptual clarification of the regular base intuitions that form the foundational ground for engaging with morality are in conflict with naturalism and secularism. Hence analytical philosophers(who are mostly naturalist and secular) benefit from not clarifying these concepts and going by "common sense", even though then they negate such common sense in a posterior move. When they are pushed for clarification, then fundamental and irresolvable problems arise.
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@@natanaellizama6559I see the opposite, most secularists and naturalists are anti-realists. I precisely like analytic philosophy for its near incompatibility with moral reasoning.
I'm not sure the polls agree with you. Most contemporary philosophers are analytic and not anti-realist. And even anti-realism is not per se sufficient to imply a negation of morality(many anti-realist hold to morality just as non-Platonic)
I don't think this is convincing or informative. The main issue I have with "continental" philosophy is that I have no idea what they are saying usually. That's probably a me issue. I focus on Aristotle and philosophy relating to mathematics and logic. A lot of what I see in the "analytic" tradition (e.g. WV Quine's views on language and psychology) comes across as wrong or misguided to me, but at least I more or less understand what they are saying. When I read what is called continental philosophy I don't even find arguments I can disagree with, so I can't really criticize it. It's a brick wall to me.
@@brawndo1255 If it means anything, I can promise you that with time it gets much better. I found that linguistics really helped me sharpen my grammar and syntactical skills which ultimately made it much easier to read a lot of continental figures. Especially if you are reading Aristotle, he’s very particular with his grammar and can be tough at times (he’s also being translated to English from attic Greek so don’t forget this element of difficulty as well).
@@epicninjali3640 Aristotle is an odd case. He makes a lot more sense in Greek. Most translations follow a tradition of making his important vocabulary as opaque as possible (e.g. dynamis - potentiality). As far as the continental up to post-whatever tradition is concerned, I think one of the reasons I don't engage with it is that it doesn't intersect with anything I'm working on. For instance, there is some debate about whether all of mathematics can be interpreted in terms of structural relations or there is some part of it, e.g. quantity that is irreducible to anything else. I don't see anything out of these traditions dealing with problems like that. Incidentally, I looked at Heidegger's interpretations of Aristotle and they are flat wrong and misconstrue fundamental terms. I don't know about the rest of his work, but I wasn't impressed by this at all.
Hold on a minute, Kit Fine? Wasn't he the one who wrote about fuzzy logic? Degrees of truth? I remember the name because about 35 years ago when I studied philosophy at Leeds University at a lecture for philosophical logic it has stuck in my mind our tutor saying, 'well, I suppose I have to say something about fuzzy logic, although I find it a distasteful subject'. So is what Fine says about non-analytical philosophy (all philosophy is analytical by the way!) 20% true? Or 56% true. Maybe 73% true. You should ask him.
This whole characterization of Continental philosophy (itself a very loaded and frankly unhelpful term) as generally unclear is just rubbish. The fact of the matter is that the two styles of philosophical discourse are doing something very different with language as they present their arguments. Both are “doing philosophy”, but concerning very different domains, phenomena, and objects of analysis. What the analytic guys fail to understand about Continental philosophers is that their subjects of concern operate on the cutting edge of language itself and often, what the Alaric guys see as “clarity”, the contents philosophers recognize as an obstinate unwillingness to accept the vagueness inherent in language and learn to more creatively approach philosophical discourse. Continental philosophers like Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze, etc tend to have a more narrative or literary tinge to their writing as compared to the dry but formulaic and clear style of analytic philosophers, precisely because they are often criticizing our notions of clarity, linguistic accuracy, metaphysical surety, and more. It’s easy to latch onto the proclivity towards neologisms in continental thoughts as a justification for stating that they lack clarity, but the fact of the matter is, these thinkers are just developing language in a novel and creative way that genuinely propels scholarship into new domains instead of agonizing over “problems” created by analytic philosophers who have often imposed such constraints upon their thought in an effort to pretend that language is as stable as they’d like it to be.
Yea analytic philosophy is like you should know that.. its boring and who takes the time to spell that out.
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I don't think Analytic philosophers fail to understand this, they just think those lines of inquiry and objects of study are pointless or useless. To clarify, when you say that developing language this way " *genuinely* propels scholarship into new domains" what is being gained here? What is doing scholarly work or reaching new domains good for?
We learn how to confront social problems such as the implications of language with regards to gender, colonization, science, medical discourses, and more. To use language in this way allows us to recognize the deeply value-laden way we use language and concepts and how they allow us to interact and form societies.
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@@gavinyoung-philosophy But isn't that a presuopposition? How can you *know* what the impact of language is on these matters without the analytic method? and even if you did, don't you see this is precisely the criticism of the analytics? The Analytics don't claim language is *de facto* stable, they think it must be made so by consistently using clear definitions, in fact, I'd argue the use of neologisms is the most analytic aspect of continental philosophy.
I feel like certain arguments make more sense once they'rte laid out extensively, with examples and rewordings and fully using their semantic load. This is what makes Plato's philosophy timeless. The dialectic, for one, since it relies on using the entire semantic load of a sentence, cannot be translated into analytic language, and it seeks precision precisely in the unfolding of the text, rather than by definitions. They are different approaches. Analytic philosophy tries to cross the gap between signifier and signified, whereas continental philosophy presupposes that you're always talking about the signified and that you're aware of this whole procession; in this model, whether your personal conception aligns with the signified is a problem in itself, and there's a ton of literature trying to solve precisely that problem.
The number of video essays on this platform alone is proof most people would badly philosophise on anything for free. It's absurd to think it's a kind of organized con
Not the crap I saw he seems like an analytic crossover who ended up writing continental nonsense. Dualistic offset analytic emergence. The exact opposite of Heidegger who went from continental ontology to analytical technology.
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The problem is, there is no way to tell this if you can't understand Hegel at all. And that's not a criticism of analytic philosophers, it's just a fact of the matter of how are we supposed to judge a philosophy as "true" or "beautiful".
What an absolute mediocrity of an "argument". A series of generalities without no concrete reference to a single passage by any philosopher mentioned. You parade sophistry.
Derrida deconstructs the inability of hospitality within philosophy of the mind of autists, heidegger deconstructs the ontology of continental philosophy itself... I don't care about hegel that book looked disgusting. What are you retarded these men are in league of legends. Heidegger also just makes fun of hegelian morphology within Dasein that creates conceptual continental psychology within philosophy of the mind.
Great video! I couldn't agree more. I'm tired of 200 page books that can be condensed into two paragraphs. It doesn't mean that some ideas can't be interesting but some times are quite commonplace or ill founded.
Just found this channel. Subscribed. It seems from the comments that a lot of people who follow the channel have an emotional attachment to the continental side of the divide. From their tendency to go ad hominem they do sound quite leftist. I was trained in America, and so gravitate toward the analytic style. However I think the designation “continental” does not go back as far as Hegel and the immediate post-Kantians. It seems more a twentieth century distinction. By that time obscurity had become a stylistic desideratum, rather than, as with Kant, Hegel, Fichte, and the rest, an unfortunate flaw. Nevertheless, I do admit that the continental side is dealing with issues related to consciousness, identity, subjectivity, etc., that do not lend themselves to the eliminative, and in its way distorting, clarity of mathematics and formal logic.
huemer lmao. he's just as much of a bs artist as some continentals. moral realism 🤣 irreducible normativity 🤣🤣 phenomenal conservatism 🤣🤣🤣 his """argument""" for free will 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 anarcho-capitalism 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
@@Saimlordy almost no one who actually understands what opposition to moral realism means would use phrases such as 'its logical conclusion' ominously, as if it implies something sinister. you're engaging in normative entanglement. look it up; lance bush wrote excellent articles on it on his substack 'lance independent'.
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@@Saimlordy And what is the logical conclusion of moral anti-realism?
Well, an example would be that you couldn't say the Holocaust was bad, only that it makes you feel negative emotions, which have no more weight than a Nazi's positive feelings about it.
@@Saimlordy i am a moral anti-realist and i say that the holocaust was bad. if you say that non-moral-realists can *only* mean by saying something like 'the holocaust was bad' that the holocaust makes them feel negative emotions, you don't understand the conceptual space. an anti-realist is only committed to the view that the holocaust is not stance-independently bad. btw, as a moral realist, do you think that the moral truth 'the holocaust is bad' always existed, or did it come into existence at some specific point around the holocaust? what kind of moral truth is it, where and how does it exist, how is it 'accessed'?
Good video. Can I surmise that you didn't include the clips of continental philosophers obfuscating things (that you've shown in earlier videos), because you want to add those to a later video examining the argument that they're fraudulent?
Hum, maybe I should have put more screenshots of writings considered obscure now that I think about it. Perhaps even only for the sake of giving some quick examples to the viewer.
What is your measure of understanding? I only spent the equivalent of two semesters studying Hegel for example and I feel like I generally understood it for the most part. And even if I didn’t “truly understand Hegel”, I nonetheless benefitted substantially from what I did understand as it pertains to my own philosophical approach/development.
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@@epicninjali3640 that's the point, if you counter criticism of continentals by arguing that "you didn't understand them" how can you ever be sure you understand them? how can you ever be qualified to speak on them whatsoever?
Your reply seems to be relying on a false dichotomy of “you understand” or “you don’t understand” which does not represent how learning anything actually works in practice. For instance, if I asked you whether or not you “understood calculus” it would be silly to say “yes or no” because the subject is vast, there’s various levels of depth/complexity of engagement, and many are simply worse at certain topics than others. You could be a beast at differential equations and know nothing about manifolds. Should that person say yes? Similarly, one might have taken the undergraduate calculus series but never touched analysis. Should they say no? This reasoning transfers over to the point being made with criticisms of understanding/engagement. If you ask “did you understand Hegel” it’s the same kind of question. Even a cursory introduction to German Idealism for instance would disprove basically everything Bertrand Russell had said about him because his interpretation is so bad, most people who’ve studied Hegel would realistically find it inconceivable given his intelligence that he actually even tried to understand him. Nobody is ever in possession of “exactly” what an author said or meant (furthermore who truly cares?). And with harder texts of course there’s more variation. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t reasonable and unreasonable interpretations. I could even agree with you only a few people deeply, deeply understand Hegel but you don’t need to deeply, deeply understand Hegel to utilize Hegelian ideas productively. For instance around page 60 of the Science of Logic (Cambridge edition) he has an excellent argument against transcendental arguments (synthetic a priori) which I often take inspiration from. Did I understand it or misunderstand it? Who knows and who cares I’m concerned with actually doing philosophy. Under a more realistic understanding of the log behind claims of “understanding X”, the circularity you are concerned with disappears.
Your reply seems to be relying on a false dichotomy of “you understand” or “you don’t understand” which does not represent how learning anything actually works in practice. For instance, if I asked you whether or not you “understood calculus” it would be silly to say “yes or no” because the subject is vast, there’s various levels of depth/complexity of engagement, and many are simply worse at certain topics than others. You could be a beast at differential equations and know nothing about manifolds. Should that person say yes? Similarly, one might have taken the undergraduate calculus series but never touched analysis. Should they say no? This reasoning transfers over to the point being made with criticisms of understanding/engagement. If you ask “did you understand Hegel” it’s the same kind of question. Even a cursory introduction to German Idealism for instance would disprove basically everything Bertrand Russell had said about him because his interpretation is so bad, most people who’ve studied Hegel would realistically find it inconceivable given his intelligence that he actually even tried to understand him. Nobody is ever in possession of “exactly” what an author said or meant (furthermore who truly cares?). And with harder texts of course there’s more variation. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t reasonable and unreasonable interpretations. I could even agree with you only a few people deeply, deeply understand Hegel but you don’t need to deeply, deeply understand Hegel to utilize Hegelian ideas productively. For instance around page 60 of the Science of Logic (Cambridge edition) he has an excellent argument against transcendental arguments (synthetic a priori) which I often take inspiration from. Did I understand it or misunderstand it? Who knows and who cares I’m concerned with actually doing philosophy. Under a more realistic understanding of the logic behind claims of “understanding X”, the circularity you are concerned with disappears.
To me this divide is very simple. The so called continental philosophy provides deep and new insights into human condition, our lives essentially. The so called analytical philosophy on the other hand is drowned in useless busywork and is practically almost useless.
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I mean, isn't the problem completely opposite? The human subjective experience is "useless" (not instrumental), while logic, maths and physics are all by definition useful (they don't deal with the nature of things in themselves but rather their relations),
I think the original commenter was half joking (and if not I would push back in saying that there’s plenty of great analytical work where the generalization is inappropriate; Feyerabend for one is a great example) however do you really think the human subjective experience is useless? Are you sure science is useful? By what metric?
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@@epicninjali3640 Yes, I think usefulness is measured in respect to a certain goal, something is more useful the more effectively (or efficiently) helps you achieve your goals. Human subjective experience is useless because it is itself, the metric by which goals are measured, it is our subjective experience that gives us the faculty of wishing in the first place. There's also the matter that qualia is inherently incomunicable, so there's a very real posibility that the questions regarding such intimate phenomena cannot be discussed in any meaningful way.
What is the alternative to being embedded in subjectivity? Should we simply stop studying such things because they aren't about the object of our enquiry? Personally, I think it's a bit unrealistic and counter to both empirical and historical research to think that we can simply ignore our own subjectivity and expect our reasoning to be "more objective". It's a lot harder to notice the ways in which you are prone to bias in your work if you fail to thoroughly examine and identify the role of your on subjectivity. While you claim that human subjective experience is useless because it is it's own measure, do you also acknowledge that it is the source of the goal itself? Can we not have goals which are counter-purposive for what we might otherwise want if we were more aware of the ways in which our more affective or ideological biases were bleeding into our thought? As it pertains to qualia, if your standard of truth is a sort of exact, absolutely identical correspondence of experience then I'm skeptical as to whether that's every present in any mode of communication at all. While I understand the concern, I think this position will devolve into a kind of skepticism or idealism which fails to be epistemologically grounded in demonstrative experiences, be it empirical or phenomenological.
Just notice the sheer number of long meandering text walls from the conti fanboys. This definitely says something about how continental philosophy failed them on developing effective succinct communication skills lmao
Can you suggest any major achievement of the so called "Analytic" philosophy in the last 50 years? Or is the Trolley Problem all you can boast about? Or maybe it already "showed the fly a way out of the bottle"? The whole analytic-continental divide is already obsolete. Any practical use of analytical philosophy died by the end of the Vietnam war when US Army abandoned analytical approach to war and McNamara resigned. How does analytical philosophy grapple with the unconscious, the main discovery of the 20th century? Or maybe you think that the unconscious is also "fraudulent"? There was the Cassirer-Heidegger debate which Heidegger "won", but any righteous Deleuzean avoids Heidegger like a plague, and Deleuze admired Frege much more than Heidegger, so what should one call this, "a continental split"? In short, my dear Mon0, you are a straw-manning machine.
„Achievement“? Do you mean progress? In that case philosophy is generally the wrong place to look for it. Do you mean contributing to the diversification of viewpoints? In that case it contributes, but it is not clear to me what the intrinsic value of diversification is. The value of philosophy lies in training and sharpening one’s mind. And both continental and analytic philosophy is valuable for this purpose.
While I don’t agree that he is strawmanning, you’re right: “analytic philosophy” is virtually dead as a meaningful contributor to the continual philosophical projects facing us today. I truly cannot see meaningful challenges that such philosophers even face, although this may be for lack of personal acquaintance with the niche.
@@Everywhere4 I mean creation and improvement of concepts. If you think that philosopher is a sage (a wise man) than your mind surely needs some sharpening.
@@gavinyoung-philosophy I can understand that you, as a fresh and quixotic young academic, try to take the reconciliatory path, but this kind of unproductive "Sokalism" must be exposed for what it really is - a blatant straw-manning, a reactionary ressentiment that is trying to separate an active force from what it can do...
@@exlauslegale8534 But analytic philosophers create and improve concepts. Usually this are metaphysical concepts, so maybe it appears as if they don’t create and improve concepts because the followers of the continental tradition are not interested in the type of concepts the analytics create and improve. I don’t claim that philosophers are sages. philosophers are delusional, but they are better in examining commonly held presuppositions that are often taken for granted.
No that's what analytic philosophers do to subjects after creating a continental divide - they don't want them involved in. I had one of those who even pretended to be me and create a idealism on my alterity after he offset the optic nerve in my brain.
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@@Impaled_Onion-thatsmineWhat are you talking about.
The big problems on continental philosophers are they are mostly system builders. Metaphysics is a very very hard concept. You cannot do metaphysics without even doing physics which is highly technical and already complicated when trying to interpret it without violating any laws. Kant for example based his metaphysics from Newtonian physics. Experience is indeed important for doing philosophy but without proper methods (logical reasoning) it can be controversial-- it also could be motivated by cognitive biases. They ruined the natural sciences. They incorporate non-sensical concepts of politics, subjective experience for mind-independent inquiry of objective knowledge. They can conflate God rather than to separate it. Nevertheless, they are experts in experience and human condition... and pure reasoning can be hard to suffice the complexity of human experiences. Hermeneutics for example can address the historical and cultural conditions of the human events. In conclusion, they need to always challenge their assumptions and revise their beliefs if possible and avoid too much metaphysics iff they can't actually find a proper way of doing it with very painstaking consideration of the natural sciences.
@@SeanAnthony-j7f I agree that more classical philosophers are system builders but philosophers like Deleuze and Heidegger are unequivocally the exact opposite. They affirm metaphysics as primarily an open system. You absolutely can do metaphysics without physics. Kant in particular was actually completely wrong about his metaphysics of natural science because he was taking Newton’s ideas about space and time and embellishing them with metaphysical significance and claiming necessity which is in my opinion, a bit silly. The theism thing is more of a historical problem rather than a “continental” problem imo. Most continental philosophers, continental specifically in the post-Husserlian sense are not theists. In fact they are overwhelmingly agnostic. How did they ruin the natural science? I work in mathematics and I practically never hear anything about philosophy at all. They lack the institutional power for such a thing to even be possible.
@@epicninjali3640 I'm talking about the philosophy of sciences which constitutes (Phil. of mathematics, Phil. Physics, Phil. Biology in general etc.) Badiou a continental philosopher is an example of which did philosophy of mathematics (his works in the ontology and the foundations of mathematics i.e. with set theory of course) the post modern french philosophers initiated the science hoax with their obscure writings and abuses the scientific concepts which take two physicists to even wrote about it and systematically criticized it (which is embarrassing for philosophers of science like us who actually studied our expertise as like any other scientists). Alain Badiou is of course a practicing mathematician and unlike Delueze knows his own mathematical expertise but as a philosopher of mathematics he was pretty non-mainstream and never in discussions with the analytic philosophers. If you read his book "Being and Event" rather than devote all of his pages to Godel, Russell or Frege, Kant and the traditional schools of thought in the foundations of mathematics. He would always digress and talk about Marx, Hegel and politics which is just confusing. When it comes to metaphysics, unfortunately I got a more empiricist leaning. For metaphysical speculation to be meaningful and actually contribute to our understanding of the world is to deal with the interpretations of scientific experiments. Obviously this kind of approach also posited problems and complications and can also be refuted. To give an example of a more empirical approach to metaphysics would be: *David Hume* is a notable empiricist who emphasized the importance of experience and observation in forming knowledge. In *A Treatise of Human Nature ,* he explores concepts like causation and personal identity, grounding his philosophical inquiries in empirical observations of human behavior and experience. While more speculative and concerns himself/herself more in abstract thinking that appeal to logical reasoning alone would be: *René Descartes* who, in his work *Meditations on First Philosophy,* engages in deep abstract reasoning about the nature of existence and the mind-body problem, largely independent of empirical evidence. His famous dictum, "I think, therefore I am," is derived from introspective thought rather than scientific observation. Obviously he got too excited when he generalized his philosophical reflections with the pineal gland. Nevertheless metaphysics is just a jarring subject. That, hardly to be any meaningful but is unfortunately unavoidable because it is deeply ingrained with epistemology which we inadvertently generalize when trying or make sense with our beliefs and justifications of such phenomena like for example God.
@@SeanAnthony-j7f I mean, even here though I feel this has more to do with specific philosophers than it does "continental philosophy" as such. I personally am quite sympathetic to Lakatos', Simondon, and Feyeraband's work more broadly and I think they could appropriately be considered 'continental philosophers of science'. Also, you mention Deleuze however I find his "Logic of Sense" to be a quite appropriate defense of a more empirical approach to mathematical epistemology (He is more applied-math pilled). I mean, even in STEM, esp physics and math, I'm sure you are aware of the sort of pure vs applied divide. I can actually understand, and am sympathetic to a certain extent with the frustration as it pertains to the lack of critical engagement with scientific work from the humanities more broadly, especially when they feel justified in making critical commentary. But I also think it is unfair to identify it as a uniquely continental issue. Plus, much of what you seem to be identifying as bad; the incorporation of social/political factors, is in my opinion far more contentious even in the philosophy of science. Consider for instance the Kuhn vs. Popper debate. Regardless of what your opinions on Kuhn are, there's a reason he is taken very seriously in science studies more broadly.
@@epicninjali3640 the divide was more of, like being sympathetic toward the natural sciences and mathematics vs. focus more in the human sciences. The continental could incorporate psychological theories more easily to their philosophical inquiry while the analytic would concern themselves more in analysing the foundations or the basic assumptions of the logical and scientific status and the demarcations of the scientific practices, likewise that is also the reason why psychoanalysis is not as popular to the analytic as in the continental. It is really more the differences in the goal and methodologies. However, Husserl is more appreciated in the analytic since he is serious about science and logic. There's one common principle that still what any philosophers of any traditions do is to generalize with basic object of thoughts. Thinking about God and philosophizing about what justifications should we hold just for the fact that we should believe in a personal God. It is a basic first principle to be part of your method. Unless if you consider the meaningfulness or the latest scientific findings in evolutionary biology that might convince you that human is determined to be x which could intervene with your way of thinking and knowing independently.
@@SeanAnthony-j7f To be honest, I agree with genuinely everything you said in this reply. I would just say that theism is far from a “staple” of continental philosophy. My experience with both continental and analytic philosophy has been that in the overwhelming majority of cases (20th century+), agnosticism as it pertains to god is generally what’s affirmed, if it’s even discussed at all. While true that it is more popular in continental circles than analytic ones, I think this has more to do with the history than anything else. There is plenty of anti-theist continental stuff and I think likely you’re identifying continental philosophy with theism because the culture is far less hostile to religion in general (this isn’t to say they should or shouldn’t be I’m just making a descriptive claim).
We see this problem in activism in equity and inclusion diversity and all this stuff. 10 minutes into the video and it really is about not the concepts themselves but how much one can misinterpret them and use them for personal financial gain and then people to morally masturbate about it on Twitter?
Analytic philosophy is the most boring, useless and banale shit ever. Continental philosophy may be labyrinthous, strange, sometimes full of itself, but if you tried going for it and overcoming your ego, which always wants to see that 2+2 equals 4, then maybe you would notice it's not exactly a waste of time, but basically the spine of modern society.
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The spine of modern society is to assume that 2+2=4 without further question
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It's also very strange to call it useless since, if anything, it's too practical, assuming 2+2=4 is the most pragmatic way to view the issue there exists. It is precisely that Analytic philosophy is concerned more with these matters than metaphysics and ontology that distinguishes it from Continental Philosophy.
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It's also very strange to call it useless since, if anything, it's too practical, assuming 2+2=4 is the most pragmatic way to view the issue there exists. It is precisely that Analytic philosophy is concerned more with these matters than metaphysics and ontology that distinguishes it from Continental Philosophy.
Whether or not Hegel or Heidegger personally believed a particular interpretation is completely irrelevant to whether the interpretations put forth are true or false. The only reason we would need to know for sure exactly what they were arguing is to appeal to them as an authority (a fallacious approach). If the theories of Hegel provide novel insights based upon interpretations of his work then it has value even if the interpretation *of his work* is inaccurate.
Also the guy at the beginning is a literal ancap and a transcendendental idealist for the "laws" of economics. Hardly the best example of analytic philosophy
I do philosophical logic (in the analytic tradition, of course) and believe me - doing formal logic (which analytic philosophy is so proud of as its core methodology) to tackle serious philosophical problems makes things way worse than continental philosophy supposedly does. You end up with a paper almost nobody can understand. And those that do have to suspend belief quite a few times, since logical rules dictate that some quite unintuitive things become true/valid. It’s like that joke about spherical chickens in a vacuum.
There are also some analytic interpretations of Hegel, for example by Robert Brandom, so this whole distinction is really not so clear
Also: Ernst Tugendhat did it for Heidegger, and Arthur Danto for Nietzsche.
@@pillmuncher67 I think Graham Priest uses Heidegger as well,
As a soon to be mathematics graduate with a strong interest in philosophy, I disagree with this larger attitude about continental philosophy very strongly.
The reason why areas of STEM teach/engage with their areas of Enquiry in the way they do is because of the fact that the actual objects of the discipline, whether that be strings, rings, groups, sets, points, functions, matrices, events, etc…. are far more logically unproblematic and grounded in their *symbolic* representation than concepts or sentences are in philosophy/philosophical logic.
In philosophy you run into conceptual issues all the time which make zero sense the moment you apply logical syntax to philosophical claims. For instance, one might consider the application of the law of excluded middle to the sentence “It is raining or it is not raining”. While not logically indicated, there’s an immediately clear conceptual ambiguity here; we have not identified a “where”. How many water droplets would have to drop from the sky before it would be classified as rain? How would we validate this? Etc…. While this is a textbook example, there are more complicated and skeptically troubling variations of these concerns which run *far* deeper than just basic logical truths and get at the heart of semiotics, linguistics, metaphysics of language, etc… things that, in fact, have been most frequently addressed by continental philosophers (at least in my experience)!
These problems, simply due to the nature of the phenomenon being studied, are not of significant concern for a mathematician (and are less significant concerns for a scientist). When a mathematician speaks of a “wave”, they are often literally just referring to an abstract object which “obeys like a wave” and “satisfies the properties of waves” (if you ever have worked in advanced proof based mathematics, you learn rather quickly how misleading certain ‘intuitive’ mathematical concepts can be and learn to hold the rigorous logical definitions close to your chest). Mathematical objects (like pi, e, ‘the circle’, etc…) often gain their notoriety as a consequence of convergent application, emergence, or derivation in various areas. A simple example of this is how limit points in analysis and accumulation points in topology have essentially identical characteristics despite being constructed set-theoretically in completely different ways (so much so that many topologists literally call accumulation points limit points!). If you can show that an accumulation point exists on a Hausdorff space, it logically behaves *identically* to the analysis definition of limits and thus you in some sense have multiple ways of deriving mathematical concepts which are not initially related. This is in my opinion the most philosophically interesting part of math as it, in my opinion, speaks to some sort of metaphysically binding component to mathematics as a whole.
In philosophy, generally speaking, philosophers are interested in things which relate to human subjectivity, ideas, language, etc… If I wanted to start a niche philosophical area which studied specifically “magic slime” and the magic slime was defined entirely in terms of diagrams and/or as a purely logical construction, you’d call what I’m doing a waste of time; possibly bad philosophy! But this is in some sense what mathematicians do (albeit, in cases where it’s not a waste of time). When a physicist decides that they want to use trigonometric functions, spherical geometry, probability theory, etc…. It’s because the phenomenon they are studying literally obeys the diagrammatical structure of the mathematical construction in an empirical sense. A physicist studying the motion of a pendulum uses trigonometry to model harmonic motion because if you mark the position of the pendulum at different points in space over time, in real time, it LITERALLY resembles a trigonometric function. This does not work in philosophy because the sentences do not “resemble” ideas (albeit there’s an interesting niche phenomenological side of this which I don’t have time to address). The formalized approach to argumentation is a representation devoid of empirical sense and it’s for this reason that trying to make philosophy resemble a discipline like mathematics counterproductive in my personal opinion. (Notice how even in economics where the object of enquiry is definitionally quantitative, there’s still major issues with replication simply because people are involved and don’t behave in a lawlike manner)
This illustrates the central tenet of analytic Philosophy quote well:
Philosophy should be treated like formal sciences because it ought to be a formal science, and any line of inquiry that does not conform to either formal or empirical science, is a waste of time.
Note that I'm not saying I agree with such a radical statement
, but I am persuaded by the pragmatism it offers
I won’t speak for mathematics but Physics is certainly full of semantic vagueness and possible points of contention that might stem from that. It only manages to hide it for few reasons:
1. Because the mathematical/formal aspects are clear and rigorous, and these are used for making technology and predictions.
2. Because the pondering of the metaphysical meaning of physical concepts is at best not encouraged, and the passing down of them is carried by prior generations of physicists who have superficial understandings for similar reasons.
An anecdote of mine perfectly gets across this point: on my second semester we were covering the concepts of work and kinetic energy in a classical mechanics course. The assistant teaching us covered all the usual points: work is defined as a path integral of a force field, it equals the difference of kinetic energy, and probably the way that relates to potential energy for conservative fields.
I was puzzled by energy being implicitly given the status of some real, substantive quality (in physics generally) because how could it if it just stems from work, something that’s just a path integral? The assistant was just totally confused, and didn’t really get what was bothering me. Even though all I asked was a very basic question of what the significance of all this was as far as reality goes.
What makes semantic ambiguity stand out in philosophy is just that philosophy is a search for the truth of things. What are you even doing if not making a claim for something or against a different position on something?
As far as the wealth of interpretations go, I think limiting this as a “continental philosophy phenomenon” isn’t fair. You can find this sort of thing for a lot of philosophers throughout history.
The best example that comes to mind is Kant, because he was precisely trying to be very precise and rigorous about everything.
Admittedly, not everyone is as bad as Hegel, but I think semantic ambiguity is unavoidable when doing philosophy. It’s always concerned about things that are more basic than people normally need to define. Of course it will lead to points of unclarity when the author is not available for questioning.
The question is, is semantic ambiguity a problem?
Could it not be, that words have multiple referents until specified?
Is it not the way we measure it in practice that defines which aspects of reality we mean?
Maybe successful reference has less to do with resemblance between thought and reality and more to do with our interactions with reality.
Hegel is significantly clearer than Kant. The critique of pure reason is important but a shitshow for semantic consistency
@@AdamWEST-yu2os she. And no, I’m pretty sure she was sober. Again, her explanation of ‘work’ as a formal concept was fine; just the standard explanation you could get anywhere.
I’m not even necessarily making some kind of case for Derrida. I’m just saying that rigorousness in physics doesn’t necessarily mean much because the meaning of the claims in it can be vague even if the whole formalism is rigorous.
And that’s the issue. I don’t know what the “correct answer” is supposed to be, or even if this is some matter of discussion in the philosophy of physics. If it was, then it’d just be on the assistant for being ignorant and not really exemplify an issue in the whole field.
@@2tehnik Why wouldn't energy be real and substantive? It's a conservative quantity that is governed by force acting on a unit distance.
@@weltschmerzistofthaufig2440 because all of those properties could be true even if it were just a number and nothing more. I think this concern is very easy to sense in Lagrangian mechanics because there you get the expression for conserved quantities simply by manipulating the Lagrangian and the functions it depends upon. So energy density, for example, is just Σ(φ-dot dL/dφ-dot)-L. Why should this quantity correspond to something real? After all, its conservation is just tied to mathematical properties of the Lagrangian (time translation symmetry), not to an Eleatic appeal to indestructibility of that-which-is.
Why do you think those properties confer energy being anything metaphysically substantive?
Always found it insane that anyone accepts this category of 'continental philosophy' anything other than a strawman that analytic philosophers use to define themselves in opposition to. All the worst cliches about popular French and German philosophers are rhetorically spliced together to produce a coherent 'continental' school of philosophy, presented as an impenetrable web of nonsense that the sensible privately educated Anglophones have swept aside with their eminently practical empirical approaches. Come on, 'yeah well philosophers that don't speak English are umm unclear and I don't know what they were on about' is not actually an argument.
I totally agree. These philosophers are literally only alike insofar as they have a reputation for being hard. Some would say willfully obtuse, some would say creatively ingenious; the difference seems largely one of personal preference, and thus why any arguments against “continental philosophy” as generally unclear is just a gross overgeneralization.
exactly
@@AdamWEST-yu2os Funny how you claim to know so much about this “insular group” yet can’t seem to spell a single one of their names right. Sounds like you haven’t ever read them. Am I hearing some irony?
@@AdamWEST-yu2os I think the idea that a philosopher's work stops being useful after a certain period of time or because they have a strange worldview is kind of nonsense (not that I am interested in Heidegger). No economist would argue this of Adam Smith or David Ricardo. If you're going to engage with psychiatry and psychoanalysis, for instance, it just makes sense to engage with Freud. Of course, post structuralists are particularly interested in the figures you mention, but why would they lead you to retroactively categorise philosophers like Kant and Hegel? It would be like trying to argue that John Stuart Mill is actually analytic.
@@AdamWEST-yu2os I'm not going to get into the weeds arguing about who does or does not have value. With that being said, again, the idea that someone's ideas have been 'discredited' isn't really relevant to whether they should be engaged with or not. Addressing someone's ideas is not the same as agreeing with them, and sometimes it is necessary even when you disagree with them precisely because those ideas are so prevalent.
I'm still not convinced as to why Hegel, for instance, counts as 'continental'. What are the precepts of this continental philosophy? It seems like there is really nothing linking German idealism to Bataille's materialism other than that both of them influenced Derrida.
So you are resurrecting the thought of early (Tractatus-era) Wittgenstein? Good luck with that. There’s a reason he himself abandoned those ideas. Language doesn’t work that way. It’s not math.
Exactly! Language is not nearly as stable or airtight as the analytic guys would like to feel it is.
@@gavinyoung-philosophythe fact that language is not clear is precisely the reason why we should be as clear as possible when using it, especially so when we are trying to assert something important, even more so if your idea is going to change the world.
The mindset of "embrace the ambiguity of language" will not propell humanity forward, it is the formalization of everything that allow society to be this advanced, it is the effort of million of mathematicians and physicists who tried to put "rules" into what once seems "magical" and "unexplanable" that get us to where we are today.
@@ngnxtan I’m not giving a statement of personal incredulity and saying let’s just give up. This is not a “language-mystery of the gaps”. I’m just saying that even physicists and mathematicians take for granted the specificity of language. For example, in mathematics, we use the number 0 as a placeholder for a concept we can’t actually conceptualize or use in operations, in the strictest sense that 0 is a contradiction: a something which is supposedly nothing. Instances such as these show how we can use concepts all the time that are helpful and can even be integrated into a rigorous system, yet which are nevertheless riddled with problems that those who claim they’re just being “precise”, are actually just failing to do!
i could not understand your words, too much semantic noise
@@ngnxtan And so what will propel philosophy forward is artificially ignoring one of the most prominent features of language? If philosophy intends to think these problems at all it would have to try to approach precisely such problems. You can't just adopt some model a priori - Descartes' clear and distinct ideas - which by the way is more or less a metaphor derived from Euclidean geometry and imported into the space of reflection, to try to artificially amputate a whole field of problems because it isn't with conducive to the particular set of metaphors you adopt to try to determine what thinking is. Scientific advancement and social advancement are not one and the same thing
"En filosofía es importante...". Como si hubiese una filosofía, que majaderos que son
Verdad.
"Kit Fine, professional philosopher"
Sadly, people who know nothing about more advanced philosophy will always be louder and more widely heard than those advanced philosophers themselves.
Even 4 minutes into this video there is so much wrong with it (which, ironically, could even be demonstrated "analytically") but I feel that all that needs to be said, or asked rather, is the following - which objective truths did analytical philosophy uncover which allowed it to somehow maintain the position that it is somehow more clear, has better arguments, or better address counter-arguments, than continental philosophy? Only the most obstuse philosophers would pretend that somehow analytical philosophy has proven itself to such a degree that it is able to lay claim to being better than continental philosophy in terms of metrics like clarity, argumentation, or addressing counter-arguments.
First of all, continental philosophy (whatever you want to say about its actual content) has largely arisen from the FAILURES of analytical philosophy - hence, why Hegel-among the German Idealists-is the one frequently designated as among being one of the most notable figures of continental philosophy whereas, somehow, Kant or Fichte isn't. What in the fuck Kant or Fichte successfully argue to make them more analytical than Hegel? Such a premise or argument would be ridiculous to try to argue and, yet, some of the most "clear-headed" (more like basic or primitive) philosophers always attempt to try to distinguish Hegel apart from Kant as being somehow especially continental (which for them really just means "unclear") - just say you don't understand continental philosophy and leave it there.
Second of all, continental philosophies ABSOLUTELY have clear premises that flow into deductively valid and sound arguments - anyone who claims that this isnt the case never actually took the time to read the continental philosophers they are bashing or made 1 or 2 half-assed attempts at doing so and decided that it wasnt their lack of an understanding that was the cause of not being able to understand the text but, rather, it was the text itself. Which, on its face, is fine - however, as evidenced by some of the more post-modern thinkers that also hold clarity in high regard in philosophy (most notably for me are American pragmatists thinkers like Dewey or Rorty), the problem isnt that continental philosophers dont have arguments, the problem-if anything-is that DEDUCTIVELY GIVEN ARGUMENTS HAVE (THUS FAR THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF WESTERN PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT) FAILED AT PROVIDING ANTECEDENTLY GIVEN REALITIES IN ANY OBJECTIVE SENSE. Here, the issue is most prevalent with Hegel - not in the fact that Hegel isn't sufficiently clear (although many Hegelian scholars themselves have argued this - for example, most notably, Robert Pippin) BUT THAT HEGEL'S ARGUMENTS ARE THEMSELVES CHARACTERIZED BY A (DIALETICALLY) LOGICAL REVERSAL OF THE VERY SHAPE IN WHICH ANALYTICALLY GIVEN DEDUCTIVE ARGUMENTS PRESENT THEMSELVES IN THEIR FAILURES TO PROVIDE NECESSARY CONNECTIONS BETWEEN RATIONALITY AND THEIR GIVEN PHILOSOPHICAL SUBJECT-MATTER (i.e. ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, etc.). In other words, you begin to understand what continental philosophers are trying to do-in the form of deductive reasoning-when you understand that what they are trying to address is the failure of a history and tradition of analytically given deductive arguments to answer the questions in philosophy they tried to solve to begin with.
Third of all, how tf do philosophers-analytical or otherwise-get away with attacking an entire branch of philosophy without providing any positive definition of it DESPITE THE FACT THAT THEY EXPLICITLY CLAIM (like in this video) THAT THEIR BRANCH OF THOUGHT IS (albeit negatively via the very act of implication I guess) DEFINED BY THE VERY CLARITY AND SIMPLICITY THAT THEIR SUPPOSED ANTITHESIS LACKS? Its unreal to me how some of the worst philosophers have the balls to make the claims they make with literally no support and then turn around and define their entire branch of thought with that same rational support, clarity, validity, soundness, etc. If the only worthwhile theoretical thinking has to be conducted in the same way we do mathematical equations then how is it that we still have no clue how to comprehensively account for any of the main philosophical areas of discipline on logically or rationally given terms? You may have your own view or standpoint on a given area of philosophy like ethics, metaphyics, epistemology, asthetics, or whatever, and you might be totally convinced of its validity, soundess, comprehensiveness, objectivity, etc. but no serious philosopher ever claims that THEIR arguments by any means account for THE ONLY objective view for what counts for ALL of philosophical thought - because to do so would not only be insane, but OBVIOUSLY BIASED AND/OR DEEPLY FLAWED. So, if you want an idea as to why continental philosophy exists or what it even is, just take a moment to consider how little currency any analytical theory of philosophy has on providing answers to the most fundamental questions concerning the nature of things in reality, or reality itself.
gee calm down
@@joely_62 naw bro, when you've been studying philosophy as long as I have, you hear this same stupid argument over and over and only from people who have no fucking clue what they're talking about.
And don't even get me started on morons like Jordan Peterson and how they've amplified this retarded take by 1000x.
your comment has more content than the video itself lol
@@humbertobourguignonc.berna6396 ❤️
Your comment has a similar issue to the continental philosophy perhaps.
Whatever point is being made is lost in a welter of unnecessary words.
Concision and precision are the best way to convey an idea or concept.
Analytic philosophers continuously display, with childish lack of self-awareness, their total inability to understand and comprehend complex ideas.
I didn't know scholastics from the 12th century had access to RUclips. 🤨ruclips.net/video/Mp9NY-Nu4Yk/видео.html
Do you mean that all analytic philosophers are, basically, 12th-century scholastics? Perhaps I've misread your statement.
@@paulaustinmurphy Not all, but many are essentially New Scholastics in their approach.
@@InsertPhilosophyHere Do you have any specific analytic philosophers in mind?... The other thing is that the word "scholasticism" has two meanings. One is entirely a judgmental term of abuse: "narrow-minded insistence on traditional doctrine." The other meaning seems to refer to a kind of methodological approach.... In any case, so which 20th century and 21st century analytic philosophers were "narrow-minded" and obedient to "traditional doctrine"? ... Is being a "scholastic" necessarily a criticism? Perhaps *extreme* scholasticism is indeed a bad thing. But isn't its opposite (whatever we take that to be) just as bad?
I couldn't DISagree more ... often, if thoughts immediately appear "clear", this means you're just repeating familiar language structures, and philosophy can(!) be about going beyond. Like e.g. Heidegger did, he basically refracted the german language into itself to illuminate structure and heritage - impossible to translate into english. Is it difficult? Yes, but so is learning anything that goes against your deepest habits. Some people (including "professional" philosophers) are not interested in that or too lazy to dig deeper, fine... but stop the grandios statements and be more humble, you're embarrassing yourself.
I totally agree
It's interesting that you claim that those philosophers are lazy. I'm sorry I don't see the point of what you said. Philosophers, mathematicians and linguists are trying to make their assertions as unambiguous as possible. If they don't take clarity seriously, their propositions could be interpreted in a way which they don't intend or be absolutely incomprehensible. What's the point in making things vague or ambiguous or incoherent?
@@benjiewhorf7473 It’s not that continental philosophers are intentionally bringing in ambiguities and vagueness (at least not always), but rather that they accept their presence and reality as an omnipresent fact of language. The analytic philosophers take for granted the fixity and precision of language, at least in certain domains and at certain thresholds of communication, and scold continental guys who purposefully investigate language at its edges where ambiguities and vagueness are most pronounced.
@@gavinyoung-philosophy Hello! I'm not sure whether analytic philosophers take the precision for granted and in my opinion they don't. They accept the limitations of natural language. They simply use the linguistic tools available to make their assertions as unambiguous as possible which is you'd often find them preface their propositions by stating something down the lines of "It is the case that...... ", "There exists.... such that.... " etc. Analytic philosophers(philosophers of language), logicians, semanticists and syntacticians are working on ambiguities. Moreover, they make ample use of symbolic logic and other metalinguistic tools for stating for their premises for extra clarity which natural languages cannot provide.
The problem with being ambiguous while asserting something is that semantic value of the assertion will remain unknown unless otherwise stated by the one uttering it.
I'm genuinely curious about how continental philosophers investigate language at its edges without using any formal tools. I'd appreciate you can recommend some papers or books. Just keep in mind, I'm a semanticist by trainings, so anything too continental will be hard for me to grasp.
@@benjiewhorf7473 Derrida’s “Of Grammatology” is a staple in this regard, and it’s all about the limitations and inherent ambiguities of language. You may enjoy it too considering your occupation!
As you'll know, no analytic philosopher is against continental philosophy simply because it's... well, *continental*. After all, there's much admiration for Frege, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Tarski, etc. etc. - and even Brentano and Husserl - in analytic circles. Plus, there are many contemporary analytic philosophers in Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, etc. But not so much so in France!
The point was made that (often) arguments aren't "made explicit" in continental philosophy. That assumes that there are arguments in the first place - it's just that the reader isn't spoon-fed. But what about the types of continental philosophy which simply don't have arguments at all - explicit or implicit? This is a type of philosophy (which is often indistinguishable from political or religious oratory) that relies heavily on (very confident) categorical statements, poeticisms, rhetoric, hyperbole, etc.
I've been accused of being "anal" and "pedantic" for stressing the definitions of concepts. Yet, if this isn't done, people often talk passed each other. That said, not all analytic philosopher do formalised their arguments. That is, they don't state a set of premises, and then offer a conclusion. So there are many midway positions between highly-formalised philosophy, and philosophical free improvisations.
*past
I don't think that Frege, Wittgenstein, Carnap and Tarski are continental philosophers, but then it should be of no surprise that there is critical reception of them by contemporary analytic philosophers
@@Rudi361 They were born and brought up on the Continent (Germany, Austria, and Poland). Though the latter three moved to the UK and US. There isn't a "critical reception" of these philosophers by "contemporary analytic philosophers". If anything, the exact opposite is the case.
Which analytic philosopher does this for ethics? I've yet to know what they mean by basic terms like "good", "duty", "imperative", "ethics" or more importantly, "reasons"?
I am also quite confused as to what analytic philosophy even means? It seems that it meant something pre -1950, and it seems something opposite post 1950?
@@natanaellizama6559analytic typically refers to Anglo-American philosophy, and you might here distant definitions from different people - I usually think of it as more empiricism-based and with discrete topics, and Continental philosophy follows Hegel and the German idealist era, phenomenology, existentialism and structural linguistics. With this in mind, ordinary language philosophy might actually be more Continental than analytical. Analytical might be more left-brained and Continental more right-brained. Anyways it’s not a helpful division in my opinion, and I think Continental philosophy was originally a pejorative used by Anglo-American philosophers.
This video is more of a argument against analytical philosophers lmao
What I understand to be continental philosophy is best understood in the light of Kant’s insight that what we call reality is a subjective construct arising from “categories of cognition”. Consequently, what is being investigated in continental philosophy is not reality per se, but the categories of cognition which inform said reality. There is, of course, plenty of badly written continental philosophy. Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness”, for example, often has a distinctively “stream of consciousness” style about it. Nevertheless, what this video calls “noise” is mostly the result of the reader’s lack of any real understanding of the philosophical perspective being presented.
From a rationalist standpoint, it is simply inadequate to assert something you don't understand as fraudulent or nonsense. This type of "argument" is anti-intellectual at its core. We are free to complain about the obscurity of the language of certain authors, but only after you have intellectually engaged with the material can you give informed and constructive criticism.
For the uninitiated, algebraic geometry may appear more opaque and incomprehensible than Hegel's science of logic (not claiming that Hegel is as rigorous as 20th-century mathematics, of course). When it comes to difficult thinking, opacity-clarity is more of a reflection of the thinker's mastery of the (semantic) "content" of the thought than a property of the linguistic representation of the "content." Representation matters, to be sure, but they are stretched to the limit, by default, when exploring a fundamentally new way of thinking.
Unless you are a genius, you can't expect to master ideas of 20th-century mathematics or engage with a thinker like Husserl (Göttingen's official philosopher in its prime) without years of hard work. There is nothing rational and praiseworthy about reducing thinkers to a bad camp and then dismissing it as fraudulent and nonsensical.
The multiplicity of interpretations (for the syntax/language as in model theory) is well-established. From an "analytical" standpoint, the "number" of interpretations (or models) for a given syntax (up to isomorphism) is so "large" that no cardinality can express it. Interpretations are also known to be a lot more subtle than syntax. Apparently contradictory interpretations can be equivalently valid (i.e., verifies all true sentences) for the exact syntax if the syntax is insufficient to express the "contradiction."
Thanks for posting this thoughtful examination. Perhaps it could be balanced by critiques of analytic philosophy (maybe you have already done that; this is the first time I've looked at your channel.) Over time I have become more and more discouraged by analytic philosophy and its claims of clarity and analytical rigor. I don't think either of those are true. They aren't rigorous and their writing is not clear. I think partly that is due to the analytic tradition's unwillingness to use things like metaphor, simile, allegory, and so forth, on the grounds that they do not lead to clarity. But a case can be made that such structures of comparisons are themselves modes of reason. // This is a complex issue and, once again, thanks for taking the time to present the outlines of the dispute.
- Continental philosophers are unclear on what they are saying
- So what do you think about them?
- I hate them
- Can you be more precise?
- They are like the worst bad guys. Although I’m sure there are some good bad guys.
Ah yeah analytic philosophers are pure logic my dude.
On an other note: Hegel was not a continental philosopher. He just wrote in am obscure manner. Also you can’t easily apply analytic views on him since a main part of his project is that he created what he considered a new form of logic, which is not classical logic.
And finally, the focus of continental philosophy is just different. It cares more about the therapeutic effects of philosophy (psychoanalysis) and the experience of the individual, than strictly truth of some propositions. It’s not as focused on universal truths, which it considers too abstract for a person. Ironically this was the critique of Romantic era philosophers against the systematic philosophy of Hegel. However in order to get to truly universal truth they have to include personal experience. Basically the analytic continental split is a mistake.
The analytic/continental disctinction is weird in a particular way: While there is a group of self-styled analytics, there should be much more doubt about the reverse group - the continentals - existing in this way. I think maybe in a narrow sense, 20th century philosophy (especially 2nd half 20th century philosophy) from mainland Europe might share methodological commitments and topics, but if you also group Hegel and German idealism into it, why not also Nietzsche and Schopenhauer? What about Adorno? Habermas? To be precise, I hardly know anything about most of these philosophies, but pretending they all form the group of continental philosophers and can all be written down with a few remarks seems utterly silly.
It is true that analytic philosophy is a style of philosophy defined by providing clear definitions and arguments and by dealing with counter-examples. This way of doing philosophy does make it distinct from basically all other philosophy, but the perception that all the rest is basically the same or can be defined negatively (by the absence of the analytic style) is wrong, I think. The 2nd group is the "all the rest"-group, hence one should find a plethora of questios posed, styles chosen and topics discussed if one looked carefully. The perception of sameness seems truly misguided, hence most uses of the label "continental philosophy" but the most narrow ones should be rejected.
Not least, "extracting information" seems to be only one use of philosophy, and maybe a wildly misplaced one at that.
Maybe this all started with Kant. Finding that philosophy should be more like science and not like "walking in the dark" was motivating him, but also the positivists ans later analytics. Has it worked? Does this kind of philosophy provide us with a consensually agreed upon body of knowledge and facts, with unquesioned methods and assumptions, with paradigms? These would be some of the metrics that one should be interested in if one objected that one's approach was more scientific in nature than other approaches. I hardly think that such an evaluation would be favorable for contemporary (or past) analytic philosophy. The only thing that can be said is that analytic philosophers are c l e a r l y in disagreement with each other. Weirdly, the success of analytic philosophy is hardly debatable. It can be measured in its global spread and the way in which it pushes aside other approaches. But this institutional victory doesn't equate to having won this status like a hard science does. It has won its status maybe like scholasticism has, or Aristotelian natural philosophy - it is hegemonic, yet clearly not "right" if being right would mean conforming to the metrics layed out above.
(To make my point clear, the analytic style has its worth imo, even if it missed its objective entirely and I think one can use it to make clear what one thinks in a very rigorous fashion. I just don't think it's the only reasonable way of doing philosophy and I don't think it should baselessly define everything else just by its own internal standards, because it will trigger misjudgments and arrogance. Also a last remark: Being rigorous in defining a concept or a thought doesn't make the concept clear per se. Even if one succeeds at making something clear, it isn't necessarily right. Adding rigor is only a complete solution to the problems of a field of enquiry if the object of analysis is already of a certain nature to begin with. One can gain a little bit from rigor if doing philosophy, but most philosophical ideas clearly become clear as being actually unclear by doing it.)
I disagree about the analytic philosophy. I find them awfully obscure and in that obscurity hide a lot of things. The greatest example being ethics. I've found no clear or compelling definition of the basic terms that they all seem to be talking about. Heck, I don't even know a basic definition of "reason". From this, there's also a much operative obscurity as to what the relation between this is to the will or to the subject. A far clearer and more compelling work lies in, say, Martin Buber.
I also am not sure about the counter-examples. Again, in ethics, there's no relation at all as to the obvious counter-example of a subjective line of ethics and how it would go. They all just ASSUME the ethical categories and then ASSUME them(even by definition) as "imperative" for some reason and yet not clarify what does that entail. Any meaningful clarification destroys the edifice of "reasons-based" ethics. Half of my time arguing with this philosophy is just getting them to clarify concepts and then trying to tie concepts to intuitions, which is "supposedly" what this philosophy is known for.
@@natanaellizama6559 Ethics might be a special case. Afaik, a lot of analytic findings in this area are assumed to be "common sense" by the analytic philosophers producing them. For instance moral realism, by many, is assumed to be the "intuitive position", and many say what seems to be the case should only be ever doubted if there is a stronger seeming going against it etc. The problem is that the general public is mixed on that question. Overall, the intuitions of trained philosophers and non-philosophers tend to be different, so it is highly questionable if intutitions are these objective immalleable yardsticks they are assumed to be. And maybe the turn to intuitions was disadvantageous to dealing with counter-examples.
@@KommentarSpaltenKrieger
Well, my issue is not with intuitions. They are basic and fundamental, as far as I'm concerned. We ought to analyze our intutions and absent intuitions there is no content to analyze. We even use intuitions to analyze other intuitions. For example, all rational principles are intuitive.
This doesn't entail all assumed intuitions are intuitions or that intuitions are infallible. It is like empirical senses. Without them, what is the content of experience? All experience would assume them, but that doesn't mean they are infallible. Yet it is our way to engage with external reality. The jump forward arises from the obvious fact that sensitive intuitions are not the only KIND of intuitions we use to engage with reality.
I also don't have an issue with moral realism per se, but I do have an issue with it alongside hidden but foundational implications of the practice(like naturalism, secularism, and so on). So, the issue is neither moral intuitions nor moral realism, but how to make sense of those within the previous structures of naturalism and secularism. I don't think one can and conceptual clarification of the regular base intuitions that form the foundational ground for engaging with morality are in conflict with naturalism and secularism.
Hence analytical philosophers(who are mostly naturalist and secular) benefit from not clarifying these concepts and going by "common sense", even though then they negate such common sense in a posterior move. When they are pushed for clarification, then fundamental and irresolvable problems arise.
@@natanaellizama6559I see the opposite, most secularists and naturalists are anti-realists. I precisely like analytic philosophy for its near incompatibility with moral reasoning.
I'm not sure the polls agree with you. Most contemporary philosophers are analytic and not anti-realist.
And even anti-realism is not per se sufficient to imply a negation of morality(many anti-realist hold to morality just as non-Platonic)
I don't think this is convincing or informative. The main issue I have with "continental" philosophy is that I have no idea what they are saying usually. That's probably a me issue. I focus on Aristotle and philosophy relating to mathematics and logic. A lot of what I see in the "analytic" tradition (e.g. WV Quine's views on language and psychology) comes across as wrong or misguided to me, but at least I more or less understand what they are saying. When I read what is called continental philosophy I don't even find arguments I can disagree with, so I can't really criticize it. It's a brick wall to me.
@@brawndo1255 If it means anything, I can promise you that with time it gets much better. I found that linguistics really helped me sharpen my grammar and syntactical skills which ultimately made it much easier to read a lot of continental figures. Especially if you are reading Aristotle, he’s very particular with his grammar and can be tough at times (he’s also being translated to English from attic Greek so don’t forget this element of difficulty as well).
@@epicninjali3640 Aristotle is an odd case. He makes a lot more sense in Greek. Most translations follow a tradition of making his important vocabulary as opaque as possible (e.g. dynamis - potentiality). As far as the continental up to post-whatever tradition is concerned, I think one of the reasons I don't engage with it is that it doesn't intersect with anything I'm working on. For instance, there is some debate about whether all of mathematics can be interpreted in terms of structural relations or there is some part of it, e.g. quantity that is irreducible to anything else. I don't see anything out of these traditions dealing with problems like that. Incidentally, I looked at Heidegger's interpretations of Aristotle and they are flat wrong and misconstrue fundamental terms. I don't know about the rest of his work, but I wasn't impressed by this at all.
Hold on a minute, Kit Fine? Wasn't he the one who wrote about fuzzy logic? Degrees of truth? I remember the name because about 35 years ago when I studied philosophy at Leeds University at a lecture for philosophical logic it has stuck in my mind our tutor saying, 'well, I suppose I have to say something about fuzzy logic, although I find it a distasteful subject'.
So is what Fine says about non-analytical philosophy (all philosophy is analytical by the way!) 20% true? Or 56% true. Maybe 73% true. You should ask him.
Basically, the more wordy and inscrutable something is, the more likely it's bullshit.
This whole characterization of Continental philosophy (itself a very loaded and frankly unhelpful term) as generally unclear is just rubbish. The fact of the matter is that the two styles of philosophical discourse are doing something very different with language as they present their arguments. Both are “doing philosophy”, but concerning very different domains, phenomena, and objects of analysis. What the analytic guys fail to understand about Continental philosophers is that their subjects of concern operate on the cutting edge of language itself and often, what the Alaric guys see as “clarity”, the contents philosophers recognize as an obstinate unwillingness to accept the vagueness inherent in language and learn to more creatively approach philosophical discourse. Continental philosophers like Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze, etc tend to have a more narrative or literary tinge to their writing as compared to the dry but formulaic and clear style of analytic philosophers, precisely because they are often criticizing our notions of clarity, linguistic accuracy, metaphysical surety, and more. It’s easy to latch onto the proclivity towards neologisms in continental thoughts as a justification for stating that they lack clarity, but the fact of the matter is, these thinkers are just developing language in a novel and creative way that genuinely propels scholarship into new domains instead of agonizing over “problems” created by analytic philosophers who have often imposed such constraints upon their thought in an effort to pretend that language is as stable as they’d like it to be.
Yea analytic philosophy is like you should know that.. its boring and who takes the time to spell that out.
I don't think Analytic philosophers fail to understand this, they just think those lines of inquiry and objects of study are pointless or useless.
To clarify, when you say that developing language this way " *genuinely* propels scholarship into new domains" what is being gained here? What is doing scholarly work or reaching new domains good for?
We learn how to confront social problems such as the implications of language with regards to gender, colonization, science, medical discourses, and more. To use language in this way allows us to recognize the deeply value-laden way we use language and concepts and how they allow us to interact and form societies.
@@gavinyoung-philosophy But isn't that a presuopposition? How can you *know* what the impact of language is on these matters without the analytic method? and even if you did, don't you see this is precisely the criticism of the analytics? The Analytics don't claim language is *de facto* stable, they think it must be made so by consistently using clear definitions, in fact, I'd argue the use of neologisms is the most analytic aspect of continental philosophy.
That's functionally equivalent to saying all religions are frauds. It's a radical stance.
That's functionally equivalent to saying that continental philosophy is a religion.
Aren't they?
I feel like certain arguments make more sense once they'rte laid out extensively, with examples and rewordings and fully using their semantic load. This is what makes Plato's philosophy timeless. The dialectic, for one, since it relies on using the entire semantic load of a sentence, cannot be translated into analytic language, and it seeks precision precisely in the unfolding of the text, rather than by definitions. They are different approaches. Analytic philosophy tries to cross the gap between signifier and signified, whereas continental philosophy presupposes that you're always talking about the signified and that you're aware of this whole procession; in this model, whether your personal conception aligns with the signified is a problem in itself, and there's a ton of literature trying to solve precisely that problem.
The number of video essays on this platform alone is proof most people would badly philosophise on anything for free. It's absurd to think it's a kind of organized con
Hegel alone is the biggest counter argument to that. Hegel's philosophy is beautiful and much truer than many other philosophies
Not in the slightest
Not the crap I saw he seems like an analytic crossover who ended up writing continental nonsense. Dualistic offset analytic emergence. The exact opposite of Heidegger who went from continental ontology to analytical technology.
The problem is, there is no way to tell this if you can't understand Hegel at all. And that's not a criticism of analytic philosophers, it's just a fact of the matter of how are we supposed to judge a philosophy as "true" or "beautiful".
What an absolute mediocrity of an "argument". A series of generalities without no concrete reference to a single passage by any philosopher mentioned. You parade sophistry.
@@AdamWEST-yu2os Maybe read?
@@AdamWEST-yu2os Just stop. You're embarrassing yourself.
@@AdamWEST-yu2os grow up.
@@AdamWEST-yu2os Yes, and I actually have published on the field and know formal logic. Stop embarrassing yourself.
@@AdamWEST-yu2os Where are the passages cited in the video?
Very good video. Continentals want to defend their sophistry in the comments though LMAO. I was about to engage but I'd rather not.
"semantic noise" = "semiosis" (Umberto Eco)?
Thats not what its for, its a division being dragged behind a modern truck on a rope and they just don't care, or help.... this guy can take a hike.
Derrida deconstructs the inability of hospitality within philosophy of the mind of autists, heidegger deconstructs the ontology of continental philosophy itself... I don't care about hegel that book looked disgusting. What are you retarded these men are in league of legends. Heidegger also just makes fun of hegelian morphology within Dasein that creates conceptual continental psychology within philosophy of the mind.
Great video! I couldn't agree more. I'm tired of 200 page books that can be condensed into two paragraphs. It doesn't mean that some ideas can't be interesting but some times are quite commonplace or ill founded.
@@paulosousa3146 do you think there’s value in struggling through difficult texts?
Just found this channel. Subscribed. It seems from the comments that a lot of people who follow the channel have an emotional attachment to the continental side of the divide. From their tendency to go ad hominem they do sound quite leftist.
I was trained in America, and so gravitate toward the analytic style. However I think the designation “continental” does not go back as far as Hegel and the immediate post-Kantians. It seems more a twentieth century distinction. By that time obscurity had become a stylistic desideratum, rather than, as with Kant, Hegel, Fichte, and the rest, an unfortunate flaw. Nevertheless, I do admit that the continental side is dealing with issues related to consciousness, identity, subjectivity, etc., that do not lend themselves to the eliminative, and in its way distorting, clarity of mathematics and formal logic.
huemer lmao. he's just as much of a bs artist as some continentals. moral realism 🤣
irreducible normativity 🤣🤣
phenomenal conservatism 🤣🤣🤣
his """argument""" for free will 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
anarcho-capitalism 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Almost no one who is opposed to moral realism would take their opposition to it to its logical conclusion.
@@Saimlordy almost no one who actually understands what opposition to moral realism means would use phrases such as 'its logical conclusion' ominously, as if it implies something sinister. you're engaging in normative entanglement. look it up; lance bush wrote excellent articles on it on his substack 'lance independent'.
@@Saimlordy And what is the logical conclusion of moral anti-realism?
Well, an example would be that you couldn't say the Holocaust was bad, only that it makes you feel negative emotions, which have no more weight than a Nazi's positive feelings about it.
@@Saimlordy i am a moral anti-realist and i say that the holocaust was bad.
if you say that non-moral-realists can *only* mean by saying something like 'the holocaust was bad' that the holocaust makes them feel negative emotions, you don't understand the conceptual space. an anti-realist is only committed to the view that the holocaust is not stance-independently bad. btw, as a moral realist, do you think that the moral truth 'the holocaust is bad' always existed, or did it come into existence at some specific point around the holocaust? what kind of moral truth is it, where and how does it exist, how is it 'accessed'?
Good video. Can I surmise that you didn't include the clips of continental philosophers obfuscating things (that you've shown in earlier videos), because you want to add those to a later video examining the argument that they're fraudulent?
Hum, maybe I should have put more screenshots of writings considered obscure now that I think about it. Perhaps even only for the sake of giving some quick examples to the viewer.
Just because you don't understand Continental philosophy doesn't mean it's bad.
No, but it is actually valid criticism of it if few people can understand it.
What is your measure of understanding? I only spent the equivalent of two semesters studying Hegel for example and I feel like I generally understood it for the most part. And even if I didn’t “truly understand Hegel”, I nonetheless benefitted substantially from what I did understand as it pertains to my own philosophical approach/development.
@@epicninjali3640 that's the point, if you counter criticism of continentals by arguing that "you didn't understand them" how can you ever be sure you understand them? how can you ever be qualified to speak on them whatsoever?
Your reply seems to be relying on a false dichotomy of “you understand” or “you don’t understand” which does not represent how learning anything actually works in practice. For instance, if I asked you whether or not you “understood calculus” it would be silly to say “yes or no” because the subject is vast, there’s various levels of depth/complexity of engagement, and many are simply worse at certain topics than others. You could be a beast at differential equations and know nothing about manifolds. Should that person say yes? Similarly, one might have taken the undergraduate calculus series but never touched analysis. Should they say no?
This reasoning transfers over to the point being made with criticisms of understanding/engagement. If you ask “did you understand Hegel” it’s the same kind of question. Even a cursory introduction to German Idealism for instance would disprove basically everything Bertrand Russell had said about him because his interpretation is so bad, most people who’ve studied Hegel would realistically find it inconceivable given his intelligence that he actually even tried to understand him.
Nobody is ever in possession of “exactly” what an author said or meant (furthermore who truly cares?). And with harder texts of course there’s more variation. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t reasonable and unreasonable interpretations. I could even agree with you only a few people deeply, deeply understand Hegel but you don’t need to deeply, deeply understand Hegel to utilize Hegelian ideas productively. For instance around page 60 of the Science of Logic (Cambridge edition) he has an excellent argument against transcendental arguments (synthetic a priori) which I often take inspiration from. Did I understand it or misunderstand it? Who knows and who cares I’m concerned with actually doing philosophy.
Under a more realistic understanding of the log behind claims of “understanding X”, the circularity you are concerned with disappears.
Your reply seems to be relying on a false dichotomy of “you understand” or “you don’t understand” which does not represent how learning anything actually works in practice. For instance, if I asked you whether or not you “understood calculus” it would be silly to say “yes or no” because the subject is vast, there’s various levels of depth/complexity of engagement, and many are simply worse at certain topics than others. You could be a beast at differential equations and know nothing about manifolds. Should that person say yes? Similarly, one might have taken the undergraduate calculus series but never touched analysis. Should they say no?
This reasoning transfers over to the point being made with criticisms of understanding/engagement. If you ask “did you understand Hegel” it’s the same kind of question. Even a cursory introduction to German Idealism for instance would disprove basically everything Bertrand Russell had said about him because his interpretation is so bad, most people who’ve studied Hegel would realistically find it inconceivable given his intelligence that he actually even tried to understand him.
Nobody is ever in possession of “exactly” what an author said or meant (furthermore who truly cares?). And with harder texts of course there’s more variation. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t reasonable and unreasonable interpretations. I could even agree with you only a few people deeply, deeply understand Hegel but you don’t need to deeply, deeply understand Hegel to utilize Hegelian ideas productively. For instance around page 60 of the Science of Logic (Cambridge edition) he has an excellent argument against transcendental arguments (synthetic a priori) which I often take inspiration from. Did I understand it or misunderstand it? Who knows and who cares I’m concerned with actually doing philosophy.
Under a more realistic understanding of the logic behind claims of “understanding X”, the circularity you are concerned with disappears.
To me this divide is very simple. The so called continental philosophy provides deep and new insights into human condition, our lives essentially. The so called analytical philosophy on the other hand is drowned in useless busywork and is practically almost useless.
I mean, isn't the problem completely opposite? The human subjective experience is "useless" (not instrumental), while logic, maths and physics are all by definition useful (they don't deal with the nature of things in themselves but rather their relations),
I think the original commenter was half joking (and if not I would push back in saying that there’s plenty of great analytical work where the generalization is inappropriate; Feyerabend for one is a great example) however do you really think the human subjective experience is useless? Are you sure science is useful? By what metric?
@@epicninjali3640 Yes, I think usefulness is measured in respect to a certain goal, something is more useful the more effectively (or efficiently) helps you achieve your goals. Human subjective experience is useless because it is itself, the metric by which goals are measured, it is our subjective experience that gives us the faculty of wishing in the first place.
There's also the matter that qualia is inherently incomunicable, so there's a very real posibility that the questions regarding such intimate phenomena cannot be discussed in any meaningful way.
What is the alternative to being embedded in subjectivity? Should we simply stop studying such things because they aren't about the object of our enquiry? Personally, I think it's a bit unrealistic and counter to both empirical and historical research to think that we can simply ignore our own subjectivity and expect our reasoning to be "more objective". It's a lot harder to notice the ways in which you are prone to bias in your work if you fail to thoroughly examine and identify the role of your on subjectivity.
While you claim that human subjective experience is useless because it is it's own measure, do you also acknowledge that it is the source of the goal itself? Can we not have goals which are counter-purposive for what we might otherwise want if we were more aware of the ways in which our more affective or ideological biases were bleeding into our thought?
As it pertains to qualia, if your standard of truth is a sort of exact, absolutely identical correspondence of experience then I'm skeptical as to whether that's every present in any mode of communication at all. While I understand the concern, I think this position will devolve into a kind of skepticism or idealism which fails to be epistemologically grounded in demonstrative experiences, be it empirical or phenomenological.
Just notice the sheer number of long meandering text walls from the conti fanboys. This definitely says something about how continental philosophy failed them on developing effective succinct communication skills lmao
Can you suggest any major achievement of the so called "Analytic" philosophy in the last 50 years? Or is the Trolley Problem all you can boast about? Or maybe it already "showed the fly a way out of the bottle"? The whole analytic-continental divide is already obsolete. Any practical use of analytical philosophy died by the end of the Vietnam war when US Army abandoned analytical approach to war and McNamara resigned.
How does analytical philosophy grapple with the unconscious, the main discovery of the 20th century? Or maybe you think that the unconscious is also "fraudulent"? There was the Cassirer-Heidegger debate which Heidegger "won", but any righteous Deleuzean avoids Heidegger like a plague, and Deleuze admired Frege much more than Heidegger, so what should one call this, "a continental split"?
In short, my dear Mon0, you are a straw-manning machine.
„Achievement“?
Do you mean progress? In that case philosophy is generally the wrong place to look for it.
Do you mean contributing to the diversification of viewpoints? In that case it contributes, but it is not clear to me what the intrinsic value of diversification is.
The value of philosophy lies in training and sharpening one’s mind. And both continental and analytic philosophy is valuable for this purpose.
While I don’t agree that he is strawmanning, you’re right: “analytic philosophy” is virtually dead as a meaningful contributor to the continual philosophical projects facing us today. I truly cannot see meaningful challenges that such philosophers even face, although this may be for lack of personal acquaintance with the niche.
@@Everywhere4 I mean creation and improvement of concepts. If you think that philosopher is a sage (a wise man) than your mind surely needs some sharpening.
@@gavinyoung-philosophy I can understand that you, as a fresh and quixotic young academic, try to take the reconciliatory path, but this kind of unproductive "Sokalism" must be exposed for what it really is - a blatant straw-manning, a reactionary ressentiment that is trying to separate an active force from what it can do...
@@exlauslegale8534
But analytic philosophers create and improve concepts. Usually this are metaphysical concepts, so maybe it appears as if they don’t create and improve concepts because the followers of the continental tradition are not interested in the type of concepts the analytics create and improve.
I don’t claim that philosophers are sages. philosophers are delusional, but they are better in examining commonly held presuppositions that are often taken for granted.
I think the field is just outside the dominion of linguistic conceit, and can't really be held to the criteria of analysis within language.
So Marx was right. Philosophers are stuck arguing about their imaginary worlds and not the actual world.
No that's what analytic philosophers do to subjects after creating a continental divide - they don't want them involved in. I had one of those who even pretended to be me and create a idealism on my alterity after he offset the optic nerve in my brain.
@@Impaled_Onion-thatsmineWhat are you talking about.
The big problems on continental philosophers are they are mostly system builders. Metaphysics is a very very hard concept. You cannot do metaphysics without even doing physics which is highly technical and already complicated when trying to interpret it without violating any laws. Kant for example based his metaphysics from Newtonian physics.
Experience is indeed important for doing philosophy but without proper methods (logical reasoning) it can be controversial-- it also could be motivated by cognitive biases.
They ruined the natural sciences. They incorporate non-sensical concepts of politics, subjective experience for mind-independent inquiry of objective knowledge.
They can conflate God rather than to separate it.
Nevertheless, they are experts in experience and human condition... and pure reasoning can be hard to suffice the complexity of human experiences. Hermeneutics for example can address the historical and cultural conditions of the human events.
In conclusion, they need to always challenge their assumptions and revise their beliefs if possible and avoid too much metaphysics iff they can't actually find a proper way of doing it with very painstaking consideration of the natural sciences.
@@SeanAnthony-j7f I agree that more classical philosophers are system builders but philosophers like Deleuze and Heidegger are unequivocally the exact opposite. They affirm metaphysics as primarily an open system.
You absolutely can do metaphysics without physics. Kant in particular was actually completely wrong about his metaphysics of natural science because he was taking Newton’s ideas about space and time and embellishing them with metaphysical significance and claiming necessity which is in my opinion, a bit silly.
The theism thing is more of a historical problem rather than a “continental” problem imo. Most continental philosophers, continental specifically in the post-Husserlian sense are not theists. In fact they are overwhelmingly agnostic.
How did they ruin the natural science? I work in mathematics and I practically never hear anything about philosophy at all. They lack the institutional power for such a thing to even be possible.
@@epicninjali3640 I'm talking about the philosophy of sciences which constitutes (Phil. of mathematics, Phil. Physics, Phil. Biology in general etc.) Badiou a continental philosopher is an example of which did philosophy of mathematics (his works in the ontology and the foundations of mathematics i.e. with set theory of course) the post modern french philosophers initiated the science hoax with their obscure writings and abuses the scientific concepts which take two physicists to even wrote about it and systematically criticized it (which is embarrassing for philosophers of science like us who actually studied our expertise as like any other scientists). Alain Badiou is of course a practicing mathematician and unlike Delueze knows his own mathematical expertise but as a philosopher of mathematics he was pretty non-mainstream and never in discussions with the analytic philosophers. If you read his book "Being and Event" rather than devote all of his pages to Godel, Russell or Frege, Kant and the traditional schools of thought in the foundations of mathematics. He would always digress and talk about Marx, Hegel and politics which is just confusing.
When it comes to metaphysics, unfortunately I got a more empiricist leaning. For metaphysical speculation to be meaningful and actually contribute to our understanding of the world is to deal with the interpretations of scientific experiments. Obviously this kind of approach also posited problems and complications and can also be refuted. To give an example of a more empirical approach to metaphysics would be:
*David Hume* is a notable empiricist who emphasized the importance of experience and observation in forming knowledge. In *A Treatise of Human Nature ,* he explores concepts like causation and personal identity, grounding his philosophical inquiries in empirical observations of human behavior and experience.
While more speculative and concerns himself/herself more in abstract thinking that appeal to logical reasoning alone would be:
*René Descartes* who, in his work *Meditations on First Philosophy,* engages in deep abstract reasoning about the nature of existence and the mind-body problem, largely independent of empirical evidence. His famous dictum, "I think, therefore I am," is derived from introspective thought rather than scientific observation.
Obviously he got too excited when he generalized his philosophical reflections with the pineal gland. Nevertheless metaphysics is just a jarring subject. That, hardly to be any meaningful but is unfortunately unavoidable because it is deeply ingrained with epistemology which we inadvertently generalize when trying or make sense with our beliefs and justifications of such phenomena like for example God.
@@SeanAnthony-j7f I mean, even here though I feel this has more to do with specific philosophers than it does "continental philosophy" as such. I personally am quite sympathetic to Lakatos', Simondon, and Feyeraband's work more broadly and I think they could appropriately be considered 'continental philosophers of science'. Also, you mention Deleuze however I find his "Logic of Sense" to be a quite appropriate defense of a more empirical approach to mathematical epistemology (He is more applied-math pilled). I mean, even in STEM, esp physics and math, I'm sure you are aware of the sort of pure vs applied divide. I can actually understand, and am sympathetic to a certain extent with the frustration as it pertains to the lack of critical engagement with scientific work from the humanities more broadly, especially when they feel justified in making critical commentary. But I also think it is unfair to identify it as a uniquely continental issue. Plus, much of what you seem to be identifying as bad; the incorporation of social/political factors, is in my opinion far more contentious even in the philosophy of science. Consider for instance the Kuhn vs. Popper debate. Regardless of what your opinions on Kuhn are, there's a reason he is taken very seriously in science studies more broadly.
@@epicninjali3640 the divide was more of, like being sympathetic toward the natural sciences and mathematics vs. focus more in the human sciences. The continental could incorporate psychological theories more easily to their philosophical inquiry while the analytic would concern themselves more in analysing the foundations or the basic assumptions of the logical and scientific status and the demarcations of the scientific practices, likewise that is also the reason why psychoanalysis is not as popular to the analytic as in the continental. It is really more the differences in the goal and methodologies. However, Husserl is more appreciated in the analytic since he is serious about science and logic.
There's one common principle that still what any philosophers of any traditions do is to generalize with basic object of thoughts. Thinking about God and philosophizing about what justifications should we hold just for the fact that we should believe in a personal God. It is a basic first principle to be part of your method. Unless if you consider the meaningfulness or the latest scientific findings in evolutionary biology that might convince you that human is determined to be x which could intervene with your way of thinking and knowing independently.
@@SeanAnthony-j7f To be honest, I agree with genuinely everything you said in this reply. I would just say that theism is far from a “staple” of continental philosophy. My experience with both continental and analytic philosophy has been that in the overwhelming majority of cases (20th century+), agnosticism as it pertains to god is generally what’s affirmed, if it’s even discussed at all. While true that it is more popular in continental circles than analytic ones, I think this has more to do with the history than anything else. There is plenty of anti-theist continental stuff and I think likely you’re identifying continental philosophy with theism because the culture is far less hostile to religion in general (this isn’t to say they should or shouldn’t be I’m just making a descriptive claim).
We see this problem in activism in equity and inclusion diversity and all this stuff. 10 minutes into the video and it really is about not the concepts themselves but how much one can misinterpret them and use them for personal financial gain and then people to morally masturbate about it on Twitter?
Analytic philosophy is the most boring, useless and banale shit ever. Continental philosophy may be labyrinthous, strange, sometimes full of itself, but if you tried going for it and overcoming your ego, which always wants to see that 2+2 equals 4, then maybe you would notice it's not exactly a waste of time, but basically the spine of modern society.
The spine of modern society is to assume that 2+2=4 without further question
It's also very strange to call it useless since, if anything, it's too practical, assuming 2+2=4 is the most pragmatic way to view the issue there exists. It is precisely that Analytic philosophy is concerned more with these matters than metaphysics and ontology that distinguishes it from Continental Philosophy.
It's also very strange to call it useless since, if anything, it's too practical, assuming 2+2=4 is the most pragmatic way to view the issue there exists. It is precisely that Analytic philosophy is concerned more with these matters than metaphysics and ontology that distinguishes it from Continental Philosophy.
And its culmination seems to be in accepting the randomness of its most basic fabric.
Tyler Niknam called it years ago.