I'm a philosophy grad student at a university on the east coast. What do you want to know?

I'm a philosophy grad student at a university on the east coast. What do you want to know?

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>Iyther you dont know nothing or you know too much
>it dont seam like theres any thing in be twean.

are you Analytical or Continental?

Nothing.

Honestly those categories are pretty archaic and don't mean much anymore. There are plenty of people who identify as either analytic or continental, but most of what they have in common is just a term.

fair, desu

Most interesting movement in philosophy at the moment?

Favorite works written in the past 10 years?

There's a book that just came out recently by John MacFarlane called "Assessment Sensitivity." It's pretty internesting in that it attempts to formulate truth-relativism in a way that isn't self-contradictory or obviously incoherent. It's my favorite because of its originality.

Regarding philosophical movements, i have no idea. Honestly, some times I feel like some of the best philosophy happened in the 70s and 80s, and things have since dried up a bit. But then again, we all have our specialties, and likewise our areas of awareness.

For who would you recommend graduate study in philosophy and how did you get onto that path yourself?

Who are your top 1-3 philosophers of all time?

opinions on Being & Time?

Is philosophy meaningful to you or is it purely academic now?
Do you still get that feel when you read a profound sentence and have to set the book down for a minute and feel it and how it relates to your life? Or do you just write a note and move on

Graduate study, if you're at a good universty, is grueling. It's really hard, and you should expect to struggle at first.

I would only recommend that you pursue grad school if philosophy is that comes "pathologically." It needs to be much more than a mere interest, but an obsession.

I knew that I would be a philosopher ever since my senior year in HS. Philosophy is all that I am; it just comes naturally to me, and I excelled far beyond my peers and got into a fantastic school. Sometimes you just know that you'll succeed, if I may be so bold.

it takes dedication, but also patience and perseverance.

is stirner the philosopher for people who don't read philosophy?

How soon is now?

1. Kant
2. McDowell
3. Searle

Philosophy is a thing of beauty that consumes me, both intellectually and emotionally.

I have never read it. I have read Heidegger's lectures on Parmenides, as well as his infamous essay on Nothing. I thought it was a flaming pile of garbage.

whats the difference between analytic and continental philosophy?

Mcdowell as in the man who wrote "Mind and World"

I her alot of his work is hard to read/cryptic

Stirner is barely even a philosopher, let alone for the masses. IDK if there is a philosopher best suited for the public. It's pretty complicated, difficult stuff

He also wrote a huge number of essays, published in two collections. "Mind, Value, and Reality" is one of them. Life changing stuff

His work is very difficult, but cryptic is not right.

Simon Glendinning has a really interesting book on this subject. But cntinental/analytic distinction doesn't really apply anymore. People hold on to it like it's still meaningful, but it's really just a vestige of a bygone era

>Do you still get that feel when you read a profound sentence and have to set the book down for a minute and feel it and how it relates to your life?

>tfw I set down my copy of Leviathan and think about how I probably shouldn't join a revolution and depose the Queen
>tfw I set down my copy of Language, Truth and Logic and think about all of the things in my life that are not analytically or empirically verifiable
>tfw I set down my copy of The Concept of Mind and think about all of the things not necessarily happening in my brain

what do you specialize in?
also
i'm reading through teller's logic primer and i don't accept the a -> b reverser, pic related.
Also what do you plan to do professionally.

are the women in your department "loose"

I do normative philosophy, Kant, perception, action

Also, I would take a look at the prop. logic if I were more sober, sorry my friend

no worries.
I also asked what you'll do professionally in case your substance kept you from noticing haha.
I ask because i've loved philosophy since 8th grade (6 years ago), and i'm majoring in Biochem because i'm too afraid of never making enough money to live comfortably.

Oh, I'll probably get a job teaching a a university somewhere. Publish some papers, maybe write a few books, who knows. Philosophy is a beautiful thing because intelligence can be learned, and philosophy teaches intelligence. teaching people philosophy is an excellent way to improve the world as a whole (assuming their phil edu is good, obviously)

There's a ton of evidence out there, though, that phil majors tend to excel in just about anything they do

OP

Are you a Marxist?

no, but I think marx is important to study and should be taken (fairly) seriously, albeit with some salt

If you love Mcdowell....I assume you also would appreciate Wilfrid Sellars?

are you worried about attending a second rate school?

who are some good current philosophers?

Eh? The Sellars that i've read has been ok, but nothing memorable. I am a bigger fan of McDowell's papers on ethics. However, "Aesthetix Value, Objectivity, and the Fabric of the World" is a goldmine

Peter Molyneux

Second rate?

Idk, but Derek Parfit is overrated

Like i said earlier, i think some of the best stuff i've ever encountered is from 30-40 years ago

1. Kant criticizes the introspective method of Descartes as naive, for assuming that it *just can* have acces to some I-in-itself. But isn't Kant's own method of transcendtental reflection equally naive for assuming that it *just can* reliBly separate the formal elements of knowledge from the material elements?

2. What could justify Kant in assuming that all intelligences, human and non-human, must function in accordance with some same forms (namely, those of reason)?

3. Kant criticized Aristotle's caregories for the "haphazard" method of their discovery - but Kant bases his own categories on the forms of logical judgement. Wasn't the historical discovery/canonization of these forms equally haphazard?

Continental bs

What do you think of Nietzsche? What do legit philosophy students tend to think of Nietzsche?

OP......is it true that critical theorists, feminists, black scholars etc. etc. believe logic and reason are white male racist hegemonic structures?

>There's a ton of evidence out there, though, that phil majors tend to excel in just about anything they do

I believe there were some studies done which showed that philosophy majors tend to earn significantly more money than others in the workforce after they graduate.

1. Kant thinks that an "i" is not a possible object of perception, but a feature of the transcendental unity of apperception. The comparison with descartes is misleading

2. The Categories, being pure concepts of the understanding, make judgment possible. They themselves are just empty, formal constructions, a bit like logical operations (though take that metaphor loosely)

3. In a footnote in the third critique, Kant claims that the reason his tables always have three entries under each heading isa corrolary of there being three combinations of analytic/sybthetic and a priori/a posteriori

Nietzsche is a gross neckbeard who tried to address a priori topics with empirical methods.

Some do, but some don't. Feminist philosophy is enourmously complex, just like all subfields in philosophy

As someone who works professionally in academic publishing, I fear for your cavalier attitude to achieving success. I cannot tell you how many friends I know graduated from top phil programs and now struggle to find more than an adjunct gig, even a decade on. It is beyond brutal, much like the rest of the humanities.

Well, i try my very hardest and hope for the very best.

Well i'm going to bed, good chat yall

> Kant thinks that an "i" is not a possible object of perception, but a feature of the transcendental unity of apperception.

Right, but my question isn't so much about their differing conceptions of the "I think" as it is about their methodology for drawing conclusions about the "I think." Kant seemed to think that his methodology was more reliable - but why should we trust transcendental reflection any more than Cartesian introspection?

> The comparison with descartes is misleading

How? I guess this is bound up with the above question.

> The Categories, being pure concepts of the understanding, make judgment possible. They themselves are just empty, formal constructions, a bit like logical operations (though take that metaphor loosely)

Right - but my question isn't about the nature of pure forms of thought; it's rather about other intelligences having those same forms of understanding and/or reason. Kant seems to assume that all intelligences could enter into a rational/moral community with human intelligences - but this seems to assume that all intelligences share some basic forms. My question is about minds whose innate forms might be totally different from any forms of human understanding and reason; Kant seems to discard the possibility of such minds, but I don't see how he could.

> In a footnote in the third critique, Kant claims that the reason his tables always have three entries under each heading isa corrolary of there being three combinations of analytic/sybthetic and a priori/a posteriori

Interesting! I've forgotten that. But my issue is more with the method of discovery of those forms of logical judgement which Kant seems to accept as given *and* as complete; he criticies Aristotle for searching for the fategories without any exhaustive method - yet it seems that that Kant does the same thing in accepting the forms of judgement provided by the western logical tradition, simply taking for granted that such logical forms of judgement were complete (even though, I believe, they were discovered piecemeal and unmethodically (by what Kant's standards would be) over the centuries).

Do you plan on working at McDonalds or BurgerKing after you graduate?

Any advice for 22yo 1st semester dropout who's been wanting to be on the track you're on since being a Sophomore in high school? Did you go to a big 4 year uni and grind your way through?

What do you think of later neo-Kantian "function-concepts" as opposed to category-concepts? Like Cassirer?

Bit of an odd question, but given your deep reading of Kant, how do you think Kant would have dealt with the concept of the unconscious, as a hermeneutic of suspicion?

Do you think Kant would have countenanced the idea of certain categorical frameworks being "grids of specification," epistemologically relative and historically contingent?

why do you hate Nietzschan? :{

His lectures on Parmenides are almost as bad as Hegel's interpretation of Eastern Philosophy

How can I best reach these kids about getting over their little Stirner phase? (Nietzsche, existential nihilism, pick your poison..)

Where did you do undergrad? And what should I be doing at my state uni to set myself up for a good grad school?

>1. Kant
>2. McDowell
>3. Searle
my senpai

How often were you forced (throughout your educational career in philosophy) to bother with philosophical works which felt like a chore with no rewards? Did it pay off in the end in terms of your own development so apart from discipline and grades etc. or was it mostly a waste of time as expected?

I've been a serious autodidact for about two years now and I'm considering going to Uni for it to get an extra edge. The above is kind of what I worry about.

If you had the choice to go back to HS times would you take the same path again?

Sorry about my English.

I really want to go to school for philosophy, but I worry I won't do anything with a degree in it. What do you plan to do with it?

Descartes is a dualist and Kant a monist. It's not so much that the comparison is not valid, but that it is impossible.

I'm back, and I must say, I'm surprised that this thread is still alive

The most I can say with regards to your first question is that while Descartes was doing a kind of substantive investigation, Kant was simply after the necessary formal elements that could be known a priori. Otherwise, i'm not sure, it's a good question.

RE: the categories, experience consists in judgment. This is just another way of saying that experience has propositional content that must be in principle describable, even if the organism doesn't have a language. All organisms capable of experience must also be capable of the necessary forms of judgment, and thus must be in possession of the categories.

Third question: off the top of my head, I don't have an answer for you. Kant believed his methodology was systematic because of its "completeness" (vis-a-vis the various combinations of analytic/synthetic and apriori/aposteriori), so the possibility of there being anything else would be illogical. The history of their discovery is in a way irrelevant, because the circumstances of discovery do not affect, at least in this case, their formal legitimacy. It's a good question.

good memes, my friend

No, I went to a tiny liberal arts college in the midwest. It's hard to give advice when speaking at such a high level of generality, but in general, read carefully, don't be afriad to dismiss stuff as BS, and if you find an author you like and trust, pay special attention to whom they're citing so that you can find other philosophers worth studying.

The history of the concept of "morality" is irrelevant to the objectivity of moral truths. The former is an empirical issue, the latter, non-empirical.

To be honest, I have no idea what you're talking about. Sorry

Force them to read more big-boy philosophy. Fake it until you make it.

I would tell you where I went for undergrad, but my cohort was small enough that I could be easily identified by such info. It was a small liberal arts college. Most important thing for grad school is the writing sample. Polish, polish, polish. Have other people read it and give you feedback. If you can present it within your department, try to do that. Otherwise, see about publishing something, attend a conference, get involved in some extracurricular stuff like a philosophy journal or club of some kind. Establish good relations with some professors who will write you good letters of recommendation. Also, apply widely, and expect rejection most of the time. Don't write a flowery statement of purpose; usually, these statements are extremely cringeworthy and obsequious. Keep it short and to the point. Mention your work and your interests. ALWAYS USE SUBJUNCTIVE - don't come off as too cocky.

It takes people years to just learn how to do philosophy, let alone become good enough at it to be qualified to dismiss stuff. That being said, every once in a while I come across something that I really think is a flaming pile of garbage. Ex: Linda Martin Alcoff's work in epistemology, a lot of "continental" stuff, and some other really specific papers by certain philosophers.

I plan to teach and publish. But a philosophy degree is a kind of intellectual training - you become a reasonable and reflective person, endowed with the power to make the right decisions for the right reasons. I think it's self-evident how that affects every dimension of your life. Being principled, critical, and responsive to reason are constitutive of being a good person.

This is more or less true, but not really what we were taking about

>To be honest, I have no idea what you're talking about. Sorry

In premise 2, B>~A is logically equivalent to ~~A>~B, i.e. A>~B. It's a rule called transposition

Why shouldn't I kill myself?

>It's pretty internesting in that it attempts to formulate truth-relativism in a way that isn't self-contradictory or obviously incoherent.
tel me more pls

>Publish some papers, maybe write a few books, who knows. Philosophy is a beautiful thing because intelligence can be learned, and philosophy teaches intelligence. teaching people philosophy is an excellent way to improve the world as a whole (assuming their phil edu is good, obviously)

>claim to love philosophy
>cannot bear the world as it is

fuck your are an idiot

Well, not knowing your circumstances, I really can't say one way or the other. In general, suicide is better avoided because the dignity of personhood obliges you to do your best to perfect yourself

Well it's way more complicated than I want to get in to (lazy, sorry), but basically MacFarlane argues that there are contexts of use and contexts of assessment. Contexts of use make truth indexical-relative, but that isn't the "interesting" relativism he's after. If a sentence is assessment-sensitive, then it's t-value could vary depending on the context of assessment. The real difference between a t-value relativist and a "nonindexical contextualist" comes out not in assertion, but in retraction. the nonindexical contextualist, according to MacFarlane, doesn't need to retract previous utterances if false, but the t-value relativist does.

Like I said, it's really complicated, but it's state-of-the-art semantics and stuff, so you might want to buy the book and read it yourself. It's not terribly long

say more

god analytics are dumb

is this really what north americans think constitutes philosophy

what problem do you have with it

I'm not sure what you mean by the 'reverser.' C is obtained from ~~C by negation elimination. ~~C is obtained from the foregoing reductio, since its discharged assumption is ~C.

Negation introduction doesn't 'reverse' anything, it's the conclusion of a proof by reductio: you discharge the assumption ~C, and conclude its negation, ~~C. From there negation elimination applies from line 9 alone.

Is analytic philosophy similar to linguistics?

There is a small point of overlap in formal semantics, but otherwise not really

Which philosopher on philpapers.org matches your philosophical views the closest?

Hard to say. Maybe David McNaughton? Mark Platts is up there too

OP

how good are your mathematical skills

can you understand M-Theory or Algebraic Geometry etc.?

Who is absolutely necessary to read before Nietzsche? What order should I read his works? What should I keep in mind while I read? How important is the historical context?

I don't consider nietzsche to be very important. Maybe read his geaneology, but that's it.

Math skills are pretty basic. I don't know if I understand those things bc I don't know what they are.

>I don't consider nietzsche to be very important.

And that's why philosophy hasn't mattered since the 19th century, because you guys ignore the last meaningful philosopher to date.

Also:

>Unironic Kantians

Enjoy your civil servant philosophy, you backdoor Christians.

new to philosophy here. finished up Sophie's world recently because I heard it was a good introduction.

What's the most efficient way to dig through philosophy (obviously, it will take time)? Should I skip the Greeks and just read Stanford's encyclopedia summaries? What seminal works can not be skipped? How was your training sequenced? etc.

Most of his work on ethics is just wrong, not only in the conclusion, but the whole method. Niezsche is more of a historian/sociologist than a philosopher.

>Most of his work on ethics is just wrong, not only in the conclusion, but the whole method.

Far from it, champ.

>Niezsche is more of a historian/sociologist than a philosopher.

He was all of those things in varying degrees. You say that like it's a flaw.

There simply is no efficient way to do it. Philosophy is partly knowledge of a subject, but mostly a skill that can only be acquired through extensive practice, just like a musical instrument. Start with Plato and Aristotle, skip to Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, then Kant. Read a lot of Kant. Hobbes and Rousseau are historically important, but unless you want to do political philosophy, not much use. Skip all of the german idealists. Skip Nietzsche unless you have niche interests in the /history/ of morality. Read frege, avoid everything by Russell.

Once you get to the 20th century, philosophy fragments into a million pieces. At that point, just pursue what you're interested in.

I would also recommend getting a few "readers" on continental and indian philosophy.

>Read a lot of Kant.

Terrible advise. Become au fait with Kant, then move onto Schopenhauer. He corrected Kant's philosophy, anyway.

look, questions in ethics are purely non-empirical. If you think empiricism has any role in ethics, then you're Sam Harris. What is right and wrong, whether morality is objective, and the nature of moral sentences, are all issues that cannot be addressed simply by looking at history

Of course it's a flaw. Imagine if a scientist never performed any experiments or analyzed his data, he just made a bunch of claims based on his intuition. That's more or less equivalent to what nietzsche did, in certain salient ways.

Kant is usually misunderstood thanks to the german idealists. Read kant very carefully, paying special attention to the metaphysical and transcendental deductions, especially sections 17-21. I think it's like B87-B160 or something like that. Don't know the corresponding A version numbers

>questions in ethics are purely non-empirical. If you think empiricism has any role in ethics, then you're Sam Harris.

Well luckily for you, Nietzsche fucking hates empiricism.

>What is right and wrong, whether morality is objective, and the nature of moral sentences, are all issues that cannot be addressed simply by looking at history

That's not what Nietzsche does though. He traces the development and changes of phenomena like morality through history. He certainly doesn't claim you can get any 'answers' from history.

The Ancient Greek he arguably admires most is Heraclitus, which should tell you a lot.

Kant is usually misunderstood indeed, but he was also wrong on several counts.

There's a reason Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung is (practically) universally regarded as the 'correction' to Kant's philosophy. There were some things that Kant very obviously got wrong.

what does a history of morality have to do with philosophy, then?

Also, I was not aware that Will and Idea was so widely accepted to be the correction to the CPR. Either that's false, or I have somehow been extremely unlucky and never encountered anyone who told me that

>what does a history of morality have to do with philosophy, then?

Because philosophy tends to deal with morality. If you want to know where we're morally at right now, it helps to know how we got here. More to the point, it's worthy of investigation. The phenomenon of morality is worthy of investigation, that's all Nietzsche's saying.

Also:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_the_Kantian_philosophy

Enjoy.

awopbopaloobop.blogspot.com.es/2006/04/keeping-ones-distance.html

What do you think of this paragraph from Adorno's 'Minima Moralia'? (I reckon you'll detest it.)
For me, if one were to make a division between analytical and continental philosophy, besides but not independent of style and historical heritage, it would come down to what Adorno calls 'irresponsibility' and 'thinking as playing' in this paragraph. Irresponsibility as a philosophical virtue, actually.

>The history of the concept of "morality" is irrelevant to the objectivity of moral truths. The former is an empirical issue, the latter, non-empirical.

Was Nietzsche'a goal really to disprove their objectivity? I thought he came from the starting point that objective morals didn't exist, and used the history to show the strength/weakness of different morals

Obviously the history of anything that is important to us is going to also be INTERESTING to us, but it is irrelevant to the issues at hand.

You're a cheeky one, aren't you.
I'm sure that you'll immediately reject this, but many of the world's leading Kant scholars believe that Schopenhauer was misreading Kant just like (though not necessarily in the same way) as the other german idealists. The wikipedia page you copypasted even mentions Paul Guyer's thoughts on the matter. Obviously that itself doesn't PROVE that Schopenhauer misunderstood Kant, but if that's what the experts think, then there might be some reason to reconsider...

What is the absolute best secondary source for philosophy? I don't want something that's going to color my opinions, but gives important historical context and things I wouldn't pick up just reading the primary texts. Also I'm looking for something that's supplementary, not something that people read so they can avoid the original texts.

How's Sophies world?

> the objectivity of moral truths
wew lad

>Skip all of the german idealists

It's a bad idea to completely skip Hegel before reading anything of 20th Century phil.

Or you're a synthetic reductionist

OP is proving himself to be hilariously pleb ITT.

Analytic philosophy truly is where you go when you fail at doing real philosophy.

Sophie's World took a while to get good. I didn't have any reason to care about the mystery until halfway through the book. The nonfiction portions were pretty relaxed.

He also included a bunch of scientifific figures and Freud (lol). Definitely, had some biases in there too.

analytical philosophy actually makes sense though

unlike continental "philosophy" aka bad poetry

> while Descartes was doing a kind of substantive investigation, Kant was simply after the necessary formal elements that could be known a priori.

Right, and it seems problematic to me how he trusts that the human mind *just does* have the ability to discover these a priori conditions of possibility. But we seem to be in the same spot on this so I won't pursue it.

> All organisms capable of experience must also be capable of the necessary forms of judgment, and thus must be in possession of the categories.

I was thinking more about angelic intelligences and the mind of God, and perhaps other intelligences that we couldn't experience in this life but could merely think of; if some intelligences can have different forms of intuition which would be totally unimaginable to us (as Kant states), then I don't see it as much of a stretch to admit that there could also be intelligences with different forms of thought that are inconceivable to us. Kant wouldn't like this because it seems to yield the inconvenient conclusion that not all intelligences are necessarily subject to the categorical imperative - but tough. Maybe he'd say that while the unimaginable can be accepted sometimes, the unthinkable can never be, since the principle of contradiction can't be violated - but I'm not sure this would suffice, since I'm not talking about something unthinkable due to any contradiction of our laws of thought, but rather something unthinkable because it's posited as totally separate from our laws of thought. Maybe Kant would instead say that we can't think the concept "that which is not conformable to our a priori concepts" at all, insisting that there is a contradiction hidden in those words after all.

> Kant believed his methodology was systematic because of its "completeness" (vis-a-vis the various combinations of analytic/synthetic and apriori/aposteriori), so the possibility of there being anything else would be illogical. The history of their discovery is in a way irrelevant, because the circumstances of discovery do not affect, at least in this case, their formal legitimacy.

Good point - that's a very plausible contender for how he'd respond.


Are you personally convinced by his mathematical antinomies that space and time are neither finite nor actually infinite? I found this section of the Critique of Pure Reason to be one of the most thrilling pieces of philosophy I've ever read, and it's one of the things that got me hooked on Kant. I remember thinking (in much more simplified ways, of course) about these cosmological dilemmas when I was much younger and knew barely anything about philosophy and nothing about Kant - so I was impressed when he claimed that all human minds naturally end up in that exact tangle, among others.