The man that will unite Analytical with Continental philosophy

Johnston is one of the most widely followed philosophers writing today. Influenced by Žižek and his readings of German idealism, Johnston’s work has gained many readers among those making the materialist and realist turns in Continental philosophy.[2] Johnston’s books are guided by his “transcendental materialism,” which in sum calls for a materialist ontology that nevertheless does not reduce away the gap or figure that is human subjectivity. Johnston argues for retooling Freud and Lacan after the success of the natural sciences in recent decades, but argues that both Freud and Lacan presaged a lot of these successes. Critical of the thinkers of immanence whom he believes, following Hegel, can only give us subjectless substance, Johnston’s work has brought Lacanianism into the 21st century when many wrongly claimed it dead long before the end of the last.[2]

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Never heard of him. Not interested.

just fuck my shit up

Literally who?

I can assure you that nobody in analytic philosophy knows or has ever heard of this guy.

Badiou is the only one that comes close, but still rather lacking

Cool, you can quote. But analytic and continental will never unite if what you mean by that is a type of meeting in the middle. There's a reason Kripe and Quine never wrote in response to Nietzsche and Heidegger, and why Deleuze and Derrida weren't writing works on Russell and Carnap. Sure you can take terms from both camps and go "look guys they're saying the same thing if you just read them this way," but what lies at the heart of Continental philosophy is the reversal of Platonism. Analytics are still married to universals for the most part, and that's why they can't stop asking "what is the mind" and "what is the moral community."

this. as per this thread
all metaphysics/epistemology/ethics was wrecked by nietzsche and analytics have chosen to ignore him. this is in fact what creates the distinction between analytics and continentals.

Wasn't he really critical of Lacan though? He had the concept of "the myth of the non-given" (inspired by Sellar's myth of the given) used to criticize notions of lack and negativity.

youtube.com/watch?v=KxD_gEDLCPQ

I only know about him because of this Zizek conference, I had no idea people actually cared about his work. It's a good conference though, including the first presentation (not Johnston or Zizek, but the other guy) about time and death in Bergson, Heidegger and Derrida.

*Sellars'

>You will never understand why Hegel Lacan And Zizek are important or what the fuck are they talking about

You could read them and/or about them. With Zizek it's even easier since Youtube is filled with his conferences and courses. And by listening to him you learn something about the other two. Even if it's not an orthodox approach to them, it still helps familiarize you with some of their points or ideas. It's important to be like Zizek and make these ideas work for you rather than just dismissing them.

Hegel and Lacan are almost completely unrelated.

Lol

Not saying you're wrong, but Lacan was explicitly influenced by Kojeve's reading of Hegel so it's no surprise when people think them together. It's not something Le Sniffing Slovenian came up with.

Wikipedia is literally always retarded shite

why does analytical philosophy still exist

So we can talk about things that actually matter in a way that makes sense.

Honestly, the analytic label is too wide for you to say that it talks about things that actually matter. There are plenty of abstractions that get stuck in a cycle jerk no matter how rigorously they are detailed, especially in stuff like ethics and aesthetics. I suppose you can say that it's not really analytic philosophy in that case, but that is sort of my point, even the label is discussed and debated rather than taken for granted. And the making sense part is spot on in the sense of producing sense, that is to say no different than any other language. This is not the same as saying that the results are worthless though since they definitely paid off in things unrelated to philosophy (practical applications) at the very least.

True, but does Johnston even deserve a long article, like Zizek has? Not by merit so much as popularity I mean.

one final bump before bed giggety

I am new to Veeky Forums, and I am a pleb.

That man looks like he takes it up the arse. I do not want what he is selling. That creature cannot teach me how to live.

>teach me how to live.

That's far from being the business of philosophy. A pleb indeed.

What is its business then?

You just thinking for the fun of thinking?

It's fairly comical that you believe Nietzsche did any of that.

Someone hasn't been reading their aristotle.

Can you not think of a thing without immediately reducing its value to only how said thing relates to yourself? As if it's of lower importance if it doesn't shove up your ass whether something you do is right or wrong, like a symbolic father to a child?

It really isn't, Nietzsche is the reason the entire continental tradition doesn't really try to treat with metaphysics in a rigorous way. Metaphysics as it stands today is an absurd diversion for autists who cannot into Nietzsche.

What exactly are contemporary philosophers trying to achieve with their new ontologies?

what makes Neitzsche the final authority on metaphysics?

He's not the final authority, he simply managed to move his philosophy beyond metaphysics, and people influenced by him disregard metaphysics because in their systems of thought, most traditional metaphysics have been discarded / overcome.

Is Nietzsche's critique of metaphysics that big of a deal though? Kant is usually given the same role and he came way before Nietzsche.

Look, it's just a fact that all metaphysics was subsumed by physics, a process that started with Newton and has now totally outstripped any of the idiots that find themselves in "analytic philosophy" departments rather than math or theoretical physics departments. nietzsche just called the end and the entire field has been limping along, underfunded, in anglo philosophy departments since then.

'analytics' like to scoff at 'continentals' but continentals are just people who have closed the platonic loop as per nietzsche and have chosen to write beautiful, socially effective sophistry rather than play autistic language games.

(con't) ultimately my point is we are all morons if we expect to be anything more than morons. we are all bloody degenerates, and the least we can do is accept it and be rhetorically playful. your typical Veeky Forums analytic on the other hand is just absolutely disgusting: repressed, deluded, and a wet blanket. they say nothing interesting, gravely claim to be doing 'serious work', but never show anything of merit. They accuse continentals of intentional obfuscation, but where continentals obfuscate with twists and turns of language, analytics obfuscate with boredom inducing aristotelian prose that manages to say nothing. on top of that they do nothing as a social force. analytic philosophy is for stuffy conservatives who don't have much sex and judge people for having messy countertops.

>Johnston’s books are guided by his “transcendental materialism,” which in sum calls for a materialist ontology that nevertheless does not reduce away the gap or figure that is human subjectivity.
Does anyone care to elaborate?

No. I can't, really.

Can you?

This is the best post I have ever read on Veeky Forums. Holy.. I want more.

Indeed, quality shitposting pasta for contiental/analytic threads.

Well I only know about this from his conversations with Zizek and the other panelists in the conference I posted above. I should look up some more Youtube clips since there are a few of them.

In any case, the obvious problem of how we can reconcile transcendentality, which goes very well with idealism since it ultimately claims that we do not have access to the conditions of possibility of our experience, could be reconciled with materialism and realism.

Subjectivity can be discussed in term of gaps in several senses, one of which is that we notice negativity, absence in a sense, for example when a coworker is missing from work you notice the empty chair. Even though it is an age-old discussion in philosophy if you actually notice the emptiness, the chair as an assemblage of possible relations (including its identity as "missing coworker's chair") or if it's a matter of relations between atomic facts (connections jumping from chair to emptiness to coworker, etc.) or any other combination. So the problem is "how do we account for these aspects in terms of materialism"?

So far it's nothing new compared to the traditional debates in philosophy, including between rationalists and empiricists, but when you add a transcendental framework to it it becomes even more difficult since even experience as such must be left behind in favor of conditions of possibility which operate at a different level.

I'm probably missing several aspects here since gap in a Lacanian sense refers to many things. It also, for instance, refers to literal empty spaces (including at a temporal, "chronological" level such as the spaces between words in a sentence or the empty space between different actions and stimuli, etc.) as well as lack as an empty space in which desire can operate as failure (the space needed for the object cause of desire to operate as a target which is constantly being missed: for example, according to Lacan we repeat creating the sexual desire associated with sexual acts because the acts are a failure every time). Just to clarify, the object cause of desire (object small a) is at a transcendental level, therefore unknown to us truly and directly, and not the objects of experience which we believe to desire and rationalize to ourselves. In this sense, for Lacan this space also allows movements within the mind which perpetuate forever (such as telling yourself that you will change the way to think or act and never do so, making this ideal future a part of your present identity).

Just to add to this: I also previously mentioned the act of the non-given, Johnston's concept, which indicates that he might be against Lacan in some sense so I don't know how much of the Lacan I explained he actually pursues.

tl;dr as always Veeky Forums discussions are fun, but uninformed and I am to blame in this case

>a materialist ontology that nevertheless does not reduce away the gap or figure that is human subjectivity

lmao

All these retard theologians pretending to be philosophers. Sad!

>Sad!
cringe

Yes, clearly the gap is a theological invention and not a genuine problem that numerous psychologists and philosophers are trying to overcome or explain.