Posts by giovanni tiso
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to richard,
The photoelectric effect and the perihelion precession of Mercury were much easier to understand after Einstein got through with them :-)
Fair enough, yes.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to richard,
Foucault on the other hand, is often suspected (perhaps unfairly) of making things harder than they were before.
Einstein certainly made things a great deal harder than they were before. That's hardly an argument against!
(Indeed, he's said to have said once that "things should be as simple as possible - but not simpler." Not a bad maxim to live by.)
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(By the same token, people who ritually complain that Foucault is hard seem to be fine with the fact that Richard Feynman is hard, for reasons that frankly escape me.)
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Andre Alessi,
It’s all well and good to devote one’s time to “investigating the mysteries of the universe”, but if you can’t then phrase the results of your investigations in a way that other people can understand and agree (or disagree!) with without having access to your own private experiences, it’s hard to see the value in the exercise.
I wonder if we're conceding too much of the argument there. Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, the later Foucault are difficult because the problems of knowledge and meaning that they seek to tease out are enormously complex and by their very nature hard to put into words. I don't think every philosopher should be expected to be intelligible to the layperson, much as the discipline as a whole need to be able to communicate with the broader society.
Suggesting that what philosophy teaches is the ability to talk about things (or to tell a good argument from a bad one) would also imply that it doesn't have a content outside of discourse itself and its meta-analysis, whereas I think that some of its insights are just as valuable as those of the hard sciences.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to HORansome,
That is a plausible gloss on Philosophy
Isn't it a little limiting? I'm pretty sure Nietzsche's aim wasn't to get people to agree with one another. I'm rather partial to one of the standard dictionary definitions. "Investigation of the nature, causes, or principles of reality, knowledge, or values, based on logical reasoning rather than empirical methods."
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Russell Brown,
Question: how many of you here are Usenet veterans, and is that where you learned your culture of internet argument?
I am one of those. That's where I learnt that if you suggest that Deckard might have been a replicant in Blade Runner, you die.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Andre Alessi,
Philosophy is an attempt to develop strategies to get people to agree with each other, which is where its central value lies
I beg your pardon?
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Jolisa,
Oh - Vic offers one too? It is the end of the world, humanities-wise.
It did some years ago, briefly. I wasn't impressed with the course as it was presented, which is not to say I don't think it might be worthwhile to study Tolkien per se. (ETA: in fact I covered a lot of so-called genre fiction in my doctorate, so it would be a little hypocritical of me to make that particular claim.)
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I confess that when Victoria offered the LOTR course I died a little inside. Especially after I read the syllabus. It looked like a very conservative course and not at all challenging; a little exploitative, too. But taken in isolation of course it's a straw man.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Sacha,
Always wanted that for Auckland and other local places
I want it for Foxton. Like, now.