Have there been any interesting developments in 21st century philosophy?

Thanks for this, it sounds right up my alley.

>In this major new work, Richard J. Bernstein argues that many of the most important themes in philosophy during the past one hundred and fifty years are variations and developments of ideas that were prominent in the classical American pragmatists: Charles S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey and George H Mead. Pragmatism begins with a thoroughgoing critique of the Cartesianism that dominated so much of modern philosophy. The pragmatic thinkers reject a sharp dichotomy between subject and object, mind-body dualism, the quest for certainty and the spectator theory of knowledge. They seek to bring about a sea change in philosophy that highlights the social character of human experience and normative social practices, the self-correcting nature of all inquiry, and the continuity of theory and practice. And they-especially James, Dewey, and Mead-emphasize the democratic ethical-political consequences of a pragmatic orientation.
Many of the themes developed by the pragmatic thinkers were also central to the work of major twentieth century philosophers like Wittgenstein and Heidegger, but the so-called analytic-continental split obscures this underlying continuity. Bernstein develops an alternative reading of contemporary philosophy that brings out the persistence and continuity of pragmatic themes. He critically examines the work of leading contemporary philosophers who have been deeply influenced by pragmatism, including Hilary Putnam, Jürgen Habermas, Richard Rorty, and Robert Brandom, and he explains why the discussion of pragmatism is so alive, varied and widespread. This lucid, wide-ranging book by one of America's leading philosophers will be compulsory reading for anyone who wants to understand the state of philosophy today.

A twenty first century philosopher would probably only be recognised in retrospect

just read H. S. Harris dude

>Its all downhill from Plato.

Philosophy hasn't answered anything in 2000 years. There's a reason it's dead. Also, the feminists took over.

Philosophy has always been people just twiddling their thumbs. You literally cannot discover anything real on your own purely by thinking about it. If Einstein were trapped in a box his whole life he wouldn't just pull his field equations out of his ass. Obviously that is a contrived thought, but it makes a decent analogy. Yes, you need to do both theory and observation, but the fact of the matter is theory is useless by itself. Sure, you can try to forge a new path, but it's likely to be total nonsense and very arbitrary.

>Philosophy hasn't answered anything in 2000 years.
Philosophy has never answered anything....

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>Purpose of life? Reproduction.

No, Zizek has his own project inextricably wrapped up in this. I'd recommend Hegel by Charles Taylor if you want an approachable introduction.

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Whoever actually came up with the phrase "as above so below" pretty much maxed out the possibilities of philosophy. Can't go much beyond that level of insight. It's all fractals

most people just don't understand philosophy.

>I hear Sloterdjik is good

He's not, he's just a run of the mill Kantian who splashes on some nu-school terms

no, skepticism destroyed philosphy. now we know there's no such thing as certainty so theres no point in thinking about stuff anymore

>now we know there's no such thing as certainty

You certain about that?

That's seriously nigger-rigging Heidegger to fit a narrative that doesn't describe his project at all. Absolute state of analytics when they have to rope in continental figures to prop up their horseshit

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My diary desu

inb4 sean goonan

semiotext(e)

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no

>metaphysics solved by darwin
>epistemology, problem of whence cometh knowledge solved by darwin
>problem of aesthetics solved by darwin
you need to lose a tongue or thumbs for something so stupid

nassim taleb.

Bernstein hardly mentions Heidegger at all, he's like: "Look, he prioritizes Zuhandedsein over Vorhandedsein" and: "Behold, a 20th century philosopher writes like a 20th century philosopher." It's obvious to anybody that the overall philosophical projects of Peirce and Heidegger are conspicuously different, doesn't mean Peirce isn't read by continentals in the current year (Apel, Habermas, Carlo Sini, Eco, etc.) and fashionable as fuck. Classical pragmatism, already a third party, is becoming kind of a koinè bridging the two sides of the divide to bully the shit out of Descartes.

>epistemology, problem of whence cometh knowledge solved by darwin

Of the problems you listed, this is the least wrong. We can say that, at the least, the structural aspects of knowledge have a biological basis that ultimately was conditioned by natural selection. This doens't tell us the nature of its specific form, but we at least have a good idea where to look and how to understand its development into its current human form.

This is different from the question of how a given definition of knowledge might be possible or meaningful as a relation, but it still matters and informs us.

That's seriously nigger-rigging Heidegger to fit a narrative that doesn't describe his project at all. Absolute state of continentals when they have to rope in nazis figures to prop up their horseshit

you’re such a fucking pseud

>implying Heidegger doesn't place big importance on the social character of human experience and extra-rational being
It's a totally valid point

From a biological standpoint it would be true but it isn't a very fulfilling meaning so you can deny if you want

lol

>Shitlist.

We really are fucked if any of these brainlets have a say in anything.

shut the FUCK up kiddo

Can you explain further?

Correct. The only worthwhile philosophy is philosophy of science.

Initially, every academic discipline was simply called "philosophy", then once enough discoveries in a particular area were made, they branched into their own field.

Instead of talking about "forms" of trees and dogs, we now have biology.
Instead of trying to figure out whether things are made from water or earth, we now have chemistry and physics.
Instead of positing what Will drives humans, we now have psychology and neurology.
Instead of trying to contrive tax systems from thought experiments, we have economics and sociology.

We will get better and better concrete answer to problems we assume are impossible, as long as we keep asking questions. That's what philosophy is there for, to structure and criticise thought and investigation.

It's just fucking pathetic that people are still writing papers on dated ideas like "the thing in itself" and trying to expand on concepts which are useless in every sense of the word, like "can you PROVE that you exist?"

Just fucking move on already.

The last century confirmed humanities need for Religion as a mitigator.

>Instead of talking about "forms" of trees and dogs, we now have biology.
Holy.... I want more

Do you realise that Plato's bullshit forms have held back science for centuries? Please refer to the post regarding Darwin again.

>Biology has nothing to to with the form of knowledge or how it is acquired

Do you realize that you have never read Plato?

>Instead of talking about "forms" of trees and dogs, we now have biology.
>Instead of trying to figure out whether things are made from water or earth, we now have chemistry and physics.
>Instead of positing what Will drives humans, we now have psychology and neurology.
>Instead of trying to contrive tax systems from thought experiments, we have economics and sociology.

Imagine being THIS fucking naive and ignorant

No. Spengler was half-right that Western Philosophy would end with a philosophy of history, namely his own. In his book, Decline of the West, however, the soul of a Culture discovers its number sense and then its historical sense, therefore the philosophy should end with a philosophy of math which destroys the number sense that gave birth to it.

Spengler's philosophy of history destroys the Faustian sense of history. To put it briefly, our sense is that history is infinite, and bound up in the future. It's why Western nations in particular are so obsessed with progress. Spengler's philosophy subverts this sense by revealing the morphology of history; Culture's are born, live to become Civilizations, then die, and progress is an illusion.

There were still some philosophers after Spengler that influenced others, but that don't satisfy his conditions for great philosophy, and they often held ideas that echoed Spengler's own. Heidegger is the classic example. He was an undoubtedly brilliant mind who contributed nothing to Germany and held bleak views about the West's future (he was a member of the Nazi Party, but other than that his main non-philosophical contributions were his brief rectorship). Wittgenstein is another classic genius, but contributed little to any nation he lived in. He was the inheritor of great wealth but did little with it, and his philosophy is that of growing disgust with philosophy. The philosophers after those two are much the same; further deconstruction of Western ideas.

Now the Faustian number sense is that numbers are really relationships and limits. Greeks cared about Geometry, Westerners care about Analysis, to put it succinctly. The end of this number sense occurs in much the same way as for history. Godel proved his famous incompleteness theorems in 1931, while Spengler was still alive, and later proved that incompatible axioms could both be relatively consistent. The foundations of Analysis were arbitrary, to some extent.

Again there is mathematics after Godel. But it mainly involves the destruction of the Western number sense. Descriptive Set Theory is the main example of this. The theory essentially explores the consequences of choosing one set of axioms over another. This arbitrariness is the death of a fixed number sense, for better or worse.

What will be interesting to see is the rise of the next major Culture, and what their philosophy entails.

Žižek's transcendental materialism as a consequence of the Hegelian reversal of Marxism, is the next stage of history tho

I studied philosophy at university (I have a BA in English lit and phil) many years ago. I am not saying philosophy has been useless, if that's what you understood from my post, your reading comprehension is disgusting. I am saying that academic philosophy that is still fetishizing guys from hundreds of years ago is inane.

Philosophy has laid the foundations of every discipline that exists today, and is still the underlying force that pushes us towards truth, knowledge and discovery. All I'm saying is that now it has allowed us to develop better tools, let's use them.

But no keep posting anime faces and one sentence posts, I'm sure you're gonna convince anyone you know dick about philosophy.

Only the herd would think philosophy is dead

Also, there's nothing wrong with studying the history of philosophy, for it is a history of human development. It is not, however, applicable to much of an extent today.

You can argue about what Spinoza and Descartes all day in the same way you can discuss Napoleon and Caesar. They are historical figures, their ideas are outdated.

>All I'm saying is that now it has allowed us to develop better tools, let's use them.
Is there any scientific tool that can tell me what the meaning of life is? Whether or not God exist? What the Good is? What makes a work of art beautiful?

Science can only describe. Sure they can say: "Music is beautiful because it this and this chemical is released in the brain" but from an existential perspective these answers are shit. I honestly feel bad for you if you studied this in university while comprehending next to nothing.
>English phil
Oh... this makes sense

I love these fucking aphorisms you witty guys come up with. Please consider collating them and publishing them, it is the work of genius.

> Only the herd would think philosophy is dead

what brings someone to solve the Captcha to post something as reductive and vague as this?

Honestly the next big philosopher has a high chance of being a Russian who is heavily influenced by Zizek. Spengler talks about how Russia has its own Culture than kind of got screwed by the West suffocating it.

A lot of fields have seen new debates, positions, theories, etc. in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics.
There is a whole generation of young philosophers doing hard work for progress and clarifiaction of difficult issues.

You mean Dugin?

Well, philosophy has been declared dead as soon as it started. Socrates got executed for fuck's sake. It is always the masses, the herd, who claim philosophy is dead. They lack the intellectual attitude to understand that philosophy is a unique phenomenon of great thinkers interacting with each other, giving birth to unique perspectives and ideas on reality. We are not moving towards some 'end goal' truth with 'tools' like science. Maybe this is true if you're interested in the amount of atoms on a stone, but the fundamental questions will remain unanswered outside philosophy. Imagine scientists one day cheering because they found 'the meaning of existence' somewhere in space! It is absurd. Science is nothing more than a tool to create technology. Philosophy engages with the fundamental questions of the human condition. Engaging with these questions gives a much greater perspective on human existence.

This is why I always say philosophy is not for the masses. Most people lack a curious attitude towards the world and the universe. They refuse to leave questions open: they want truth and certainty, developed by science and reason. Your frustrated response to something you did not initially understand is a great example for this. Philosophy is not for the masses, but for the intellectual elite.

>I am saying that academic philosophy that is still fetishizing guys from hundreds of years ago is inane.
This is pure herd mentality. The idea that science somehow made philosophy obsolote because we are on this one-way train ride to truth that advances as technology advances. Philosophy is not for people who want to desperately cling to certainties in order to escape the meaninglessness of a life with certain death.

Also scientists do not even take the valid ideas of philosophers of science in account. Although empericism and falsificationism have been criticized to death, it is still more or less the standard in science. That is until a new paradigm starts, philosophers will say: "I told you so" without anyone hearing them. The miscommunication between philosophers and the masses is central to philosophy. Philosophers are pioneers, they are the avant garde of thought. Scientists are just reflections of their time.

Mate I am not disagreeing with you. Your brain is basically stuck, you can't transcend past the science-philosophy dichotomy.

Scientific and philosophical descriptions of something like music are different ways of approaching the same problems. I never once implied everyone should stop writing fiction, speculating deeper meanings of life, or talking about art in terms other than "chemicals in the brain".

My thesis is that if (please try to read this carefully), IF there are tools available that give better answers than philosophical speculation, the dichotomy doesn't exist. It is not Plato's forms vs Darwin's theory of evolution - it is time to move on from ideas that only existed because there was nothing better. If Plato had known about a fossil record his theories would be vastly different, yet people still fetishize not his legacy, but his actual biological views.

This is one almost silly example because nobody with a brain doubts evolution but academic philosophy is full of people that outright reject psychology and sociology for ancient ideas about how humans act alone and in groups.

>Popper
>Pooper
pick both

And let us not forget how pre-war scientists like Einstein, Schrödinger et al. were intellectual giants who were extremely well versed in philosophy. Einstein was a follower of Spinoza and believed intuition should be held in higher regard than reason. After the World War II mass culture started and not surprisingly scientists got dumbed down to being preachers of their own new religion, like Richard "my son was studying Spinoza last night and it was bullshit because if you look at the world you cannot verify it" Feynman. The spiritual vacuum left by the death of christianity just gives rise to this new absurd notion that philosophy is dead because science took it over. This is nothing more than philosophy being reduced to the 'ancilla' of religion during the Middle Ages.

>Science is nothing more than a tool to create technology
This is where I believe a lot of contention and arguments come from. Is psychology a science? Nietzsche considered himself a psychologist, and in my eyes, he was more of a psychologist who could write well than a philosopher. Psychologists often posit about the meaning of life but do so with an understanding of the human brain, behaviour, biases etc. Take the book Man's Search for Meaning. It is written by a psychiatrist, but its ideas are similar to those of Kierkegaard, except his are based on clinical trials, therapy sessions and actual neurology.

Yet in heated debates people reduce philosophy to "how many angels can dance..." and "pleasure is just serotonin in the brain". I don't get the anger - poetic and technical works do exist and they are some of the best things we've ever produced.

For Spengler, intellectuals aren't supposed to be dissidents. They're supposed to be part of a Culture, and are really expressions of what most people in that Culture already believe (to some extent). Take Goethe and Newton for example. Both were well-received where they lived, both were recognized in their lifetime, both worked productively both within academia and without. Goethe and Newton disagreed with each other, and people would take sides with one or the other, but Westerners have more in common with either of them than with any Chinese Philosophers. And, if we're honest with ourselves, we have more in common with them than we do with an Aristotle or a Plato.

Dugin seems to be somewhat of a dissident in Russia. He was removed from his teaching position due to comments about Ukraine, but I suppose in the future he may be better received. I don't know enough about his work to say how well he embodies Russian Culture. And frankly I don't understand Russian culture that well, I just know that it's very different from my own.

>Dugin seems to be somewhat of a dissident in Russia. He was removed from his teaching position due to comments about Ukraine, but I suppose in the future he may be better received. I don't know enough about his work to say how well he embodies Russian Culture. And frankly I don't understand Russian culture that well, I just know that it's very different from my own.

So was Marx, yet he is undoubtedly a seminal philosopher in western philosophy. Spengler himself stated that his philosophy forms the ultimate conclusion of the West.

You'll note that Marx was largely rejected in the West, but his ideology found its place in Russia. The Western Marx was Hegel.

>Spengler himself
You're acting like Marx needs the approval of that irrelevant pseud.

>Imagine scientists one day cheering because they found 'the meaning of existence' somewhere in space
And neither will philosophers. If both answers are unprovable then why is one better than the other?

>Marxist
>calling anyone else a pseud

>This doens't tell us the nature of its specific form
>>Biology has nothing to to with the form of knowledge or how it is acquired

???

you're right in the most pedantic way, yes you need a biological lifeform for conscious knowledge and learning to be possible but that doesn't mean knowledge is entirely determined by biology- which is a bafflingly uninformed opinion

feel free to explain how biology settles disputes between different theories of truth and justification

shut up

>???
You get how meme arrows work, right?

>that doesn't mean knowledge is entirely determined by biology- which is a bafflingly uninformed opinion

Of course it doesn't and I'm not claiming that. I'm just pointing out how much we could potentially gain with more knowledge of biology. All possible thoughts seem to only be able to occur along with a physical medium.

>feel free to explain how biology settles disputes between different theories of truth and justification

It doesn't settle such disputes, at the very least not with the understanding we currently have, but there is a very real sense in which it enables them. If I say "knowledge is true justified belief", then someone might come up with a counterexample:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem

But in which case, we might say that this demonstrates the inadequacy of the explanation because we have some *intuition*, some sense that this isn't an adequate abstraction of what we "really mean" when we speak of knowledge. But how might that itself arise? This might be considered some variation of Plato's Problem (how to we intuit the idea of perfect equality, or a perfectly straight line if no example of it seeming exists physically). Why do we feel that our intuitions have betrayed us, despite our inability to explicitly define them in this case? We even have another thread going on where Chomsky discusses this very issue.

In the case of Plato's initial issue (to which he posited the forms), we might look at how the physical construction of our brains might allow certain intuitions to be built up. We can see, for instance, that our vision provides immediate constructs that aid our sense of edge detection, we have to some extent an inbuilt sense of line, and possibly straightness arising from the construction of our brain. This doesn't mean we understand how this actually works on a deeper level, but we can say that out intuitions are fundamentally connected with the physical, which there is no reason to believe shouldn't offer some insight into what makes the content of knowledge possible.

Meillassoux

>In the case of Plato's initial issue (to which he posited the forms), we might look at how the physical construction of our brains might allow certain intuitions to be built up. We can see, for instance, that our vision provides immediate constructs that aid our sense of edge detection, we have to some extent an inbuilt sense of line, and possibly straightness arising from the construction of our brain. This doesn't mean we understand how this actually works on a deeper level, but we can say that out intuitions are fundamentally connected with the physical, which there is no reason to believe shouldn't offer some insight into what makes the content of knowledge possible.

this is a pretty long winded way of saying you think empiricism is correct. but you are also making inroads toward idealism

how does an empirical model contribute to something like conceptual analysis? i.e. if you are a coherentist about justification, how does sense experience or the construction of our brains tell us anything about the idea of justification? the example you gave is a geometrical object, and yes i agree that geometric concepts exist in the external world, but i think it's a reach to say that a more advanced biology would locate concepts like justification or truth in the external natural world.

No. In fact there hasn’t been a single interesting development in all of philosophy.

so that is a no then?

>this is a pretty long winded way of saying you think empiricism is correct

How does that follow at all? I'm trying to say that much of our knowledge is only possible because of the 'innate' faculties we have due to our biological development, and that to specific nature of this cannot be ignored if you wish to understand how various kinds of knowledge is possible. If you tried to teach a cockroach that "white light is composed of many different wavelengths" as we may understand it, would there be any way to say that it is capable of 'knowing' this, either in terms of perception or purely in terms of physics? So surely the capacity of forms of knowledge depends on the construction of the mind. What does this mean for us in the first place? Would a person blind from birth be said to know this in the same total way as the seeing person, even if they could conceive of the physics behind it? Maybe he really could, were he able to be implanted with memories or hallucination of color.

>i think it's a reach to say that a more advanced biology would locate concepts like justification or truth in the external natural world

I think we're getting somewhere. I'm not saying we can't abstract beyond our senses, but this still relies on the specific faculties of abstraction that he happen to have, which we need in order to conceive of what might be supported through inference, and which wouldn't be possible were they not supported by our biology. Reality might cause our minds to develop understanding that better or more weakly corresponds with what might be called truth (i.e. physical laws, if the universe really does rely on a finite number of mathematical constructs that can potentially be conceived), our ability to approximate truth again is contingent on our mental capacity.

A singular definition of knowledge, something that totally characterizes the difference between knowledge and non-knowledge, I believe is impossible. If you see someone in a mirror, have you seen them and do you know you have seen them? What of a moving image on a screen connected to a camera in the next room? What if that is recorded and delayed by a given amount of time?

v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education

Do the students here know that "Two bodies are considered equivalent if equal torques will produce equal acceleration." in any case?

certainty is useless. Power is what we search.
Descartes and Bacon helped us have more POWER and it has been growing ever since.

>t. icycalm

People ask "what has philosophy accomplished" as if their whole society isn't predicated on innoculating unwitting idiots with primitive philosophical axioms. We were feral before philosophy. All science is just applied epistemology.

The purpose of life is to return to God. This has been a known fact for centuries. People make their own reasons up because they don't understand the Truth.

Aesthetics and large chunks of phenomenolgy were definately solved by darwin.

my man agamben