Do we need a new Philosophy?
I feel that society has a lot of problems that could be altered by philosophy. I feel we need to challenge norms and preconceptions still. I think we need a radical confrontational philosophy not one that delineates and attempts to justify the norms, nor just a dry fairly helpless theorising.
Comments (56)
I would include the work of Ken Wilber in that.
I'd be interested in hearing what you have in mind.
Two possible scenarios:
1.) People are starved for new ideas and the intellectuals and leaders who will marshal those new ideas are preparing themselves for that role.
2.) The most influential intellectuals and leaders of today--the ones who are mentoring tomorrow's intellectuals and leaders--want to give up on finding new ideas and instead jump on the trans-humanism trend and replace human thought with powerful artificial intelligence.
I sense that 2.) is the most likely. I hope that I am wrong.
This sounds a lot like Leftist Post-structuralist philosophy like you find in:
Gilles Deleuze
Jacques Derrida
Michel Foucault
Julia Kristeva
Judith Butler
Edward Said
Jean-Francois Lyotard
Louis Althusser.
Their ideas would help in the matter.
Karl Marx
Is it philosophy that is lacking, or is it knowledge about the world (and its political/social/economic problems) and the will to struggle for change that is lacking?
Very large numbers of people appear to want change, but they do not know how to marshal their strength and use it. This is one of our political problems. A few people are immensely wealthy and have control over essential institutions, and their interests operate against all others. This is one of our political problems. Many people are engaging in self-destructive, counter-productive activities which add to other social problems.
Is it philosophy that is lacking here?
In America, yes. We are divided into three groups, and two of them--the Conservatives and the Centrists--support foreign colonialist wars, laissez-faire freedom for the corrupt damaging Banks, the ignoring of racist police brutality and pipelines over Native American land; and they are opposed to social advances such as Medicare-for-All, free college, and a living minimum wage.
So, the rest of us Progressive Humanists need to work harder to support the fight against the first group, the fight for the second, and the spread of the Progressive philosophy and its benefits to those centrists who are still likely or even possibly to embrace it.
We can either spin our wheels trying to stomp out weeds such as police brutality while other weeds grow or we can attack the whole system at its neo-liberal roots.
Decentralizing power and giving power back to local communities is the key to positive change, in my estimation.
In other words, using police brutality as an illustration, the solution to the police brutality in places like Ferguson, Missouri won't come from putting progressive elites in power in Washington, D.C., it will come from giving power and control to ordinary people at the local level.
The people of places like Ferguson, MO need the power to deal with their problems themselves. They don't need top-down solutions from the neo-liberal puppets of multinational corporations in Washington, D.C. Being a puppet who is progressive rather than conservative does not make you any less dangerous to the common people who are suffering from the system that gives you your power and privilege.
It's not an either/or. Working to address and diminish racist police brutality is a priority in itself, just like stopping Jim Crow laws and segregation was an issue in itself. If MLK and the Civil Rights movement had waited until they attacked the whole system, Blacks would still be drinking from separate water fountains and kept away from lunch counters.
I have no idea what you mean by progressive elites. Elites are politicians like Obama, Clinton, and Trump who work for elite corporations, banks, and rich people. Progressives working to help the people and not working to primarily serve those entities are not elites. And we do need them in office since they are the ones who pass the laws. Just a few weeks ago, an elite Centrist Democrat shelved the vote on Medicaid-For-All in California. If he had been a progressive, he would have let the vote go through. Representation matters.
And local people don't have any power over the elites. It's progressives in office like Bobby Kennedy as Attorney General who made a huge difference in the Civil Rights Movement and was a vital ally to it and its leaders like King. He was able to send down the national guard to make sure colleges were de-segregated. Local citizens can't come close to the needed power/authority in accomplishing such things.
Or the oppression of African-Americans in the Jim Crow South was simply transferred to other people such as those employed in Third World sweatshops.
If you think that you can convince me that it is not a zero-sum game I will listen.
But I am convinced that the change the OP seeks will only be realized by ending the game.
No, it wasn't since there already was third world racial oppression before American segregation and there is still anti-Black racism in our American police system.
I don't waste time trying to convince people away from their delusions. But if you really believed it was a zero-sum game, you wouldn't advocate doing things as you've been doing.
That's fine, and it has nothing to do with anything I said.
Power needs to be decentralized and given back to local communities.
Do you agree or disagree?
I am talking about a system that is global in scope. Neo-liberalism affects everybody. I simply used Ferguson, MO as one small illustration.
If you are not looking at it from the perspective of neo-liberalism and globalization you are not talking about the same thing as me.
I have no reason to believe that a "progressive" in office who does not recognize and consciously oppose neo-liberalism is going to make any difference.
You didn't address anything I said in my post I quoted. When you do so, I will answer your question.
And I showed you it why it needs to be addressed specifically and at the national level. You have yet to respond to what I said.
I am talking about the same thing as you, I just showed you why keeping things restricted to just hitting neo-liberalism and globalization won't suffice. Again, you failed to counter what I said.
I don't care what you believe. I've shown you why your belief is wrong and you've failed to counter that, too.
Absolutely. Some of the ideas lodged in various minds that need to be attacked:
Americans don't need to feel unusually guilty about their history. What is important is that we undo the damage of past generations, and improve society now and in the future.
It isn't case of taking sides but challenging foundational assumptions. Where are these radical academic philosophers?
When I studied philosophy as part of my degree I saw plenty of avenue for radical opinions but the course material didn't encourage this avenue. The course material raised some profound issues but then tried to fit them into the existing value system. For me philosophy is nothing to do with defending our societies and our actions now.
I'm in the UK I think we are still dominated by class hierarchies and stereotypical right-left divides/dichotomies. It is such a tired political scene leaving a sense of apathy. Trump has given some British people a false sense of superiority and colonial smugness
You have been talking about apples.
I have been talking about oranges.
Let's just leave it at that.
No, I have been the only one really talking, and you have failed to address anything I said.
Let's just leave it at that.
All right, but the very act of challenging foundational assumptions takes place in the present by someone in particular, and they need to understand what they are about. For instance, one can uproot any foundational assumption -- like "individuals have the right to fulfillment" or "taking care of the poor is a good thing". One can stir up a great deal of uproar. (There are some who do that here -- like by insisting on the rights of unborn people to not be born, as if they could make a decision as non-existing beings.)
Even though I live in a mature capitalist society which many people seem to like a lot, I still think it is dead wrong to organize production for profit. I have to find a way of putting that in terms that people who think capitalism is good for them can understand.
So, we have to take into account the society we are in now, and the persons we are now, so that it is clear where we are coming from.
Higher education, the place where philosophy has taken up permanent residence, has been corporatized.
In other words, it's not that the current intellectual state of philosophy can't effectively contribute to better understanding social problems. It's that philosophy is dependent on institutions that are mostly interested in academic work that has immediate, highly-profitable commercial applications?.
In other words, philosophy needs a new home, not a personal makeover.
You wrote some good stuff, including in the paragraph above. But minorities/POC aren't just oppressed as part of the general suppression of the working class; they are also oppressed for the color of their skin and their ethnicity.
Blacks are still inordinately made victims of police brutality and murder, even when they are unarmed and/or running from the police.
Blacks are still profiled when driving, and that includes upper-middle and upper class Blacks who are often just pulled over for being Black and driving a nice car.
Sentences, including death penalty ones, are still racistly unfair, with white rapists often given month long sentences, if anything at all, while Blacks and Latinos are often given sentences in years for non-violent drug offenses.
Quoting WISDOMfromPO-MO
"Whose "that" are we going to leave it at?" said the rat in the hat.
That is because it had very little relevance to what I had said.
All problems usually have aspects which can be addressed by differing approaches. Enforcing (or changing) laws about fair housing, fair employment, equal educational opportunities, and so on are one approach. Limiting stop-and-frisk actions may or may not help (I don't know). School integration has been employed. Social programs have been dumped (like AFDC = Aid For Dependent Children) and replaced by 'welfare to work' programs. Welfare benefits are skimpy and get trimmed every now and then. All of these (and other) approaches have failed to make much of a dent in racism. Frontal attacks on racism on college campuses (minority safe zones, hate speech rules, etc.) don't seem to have helped a lot either
The fundamental fact for a majority of colored people in white societies is that they are poor, have very low status, and continue to be the object of discrimination, abuse, scorn, and so on -- and they don't have many resources to draw upon to improve their situations.
Poor white people (white trash) are in the same boat. They are scorned and discriminated against, have low status, are abused, and so on -- and they don't have a lot of resources to draw upon to improve their situations, either.
What poor people need are jobs that give them independence, capacity to improve their lives, afford better education, better housing, better diet, better medical care, and so on -- and the one way to get that is through work. The pride of self advancement can't be dumped on people.
If the poor can't improve their lot as working people, then they are just totally screwed. That's why economic distribution of wealth is a working class issue that very much touches upon racism and white trashery. Access to at least some wealth through work provides the best and (for the most part) only means to empower one's self. (I'm not a big believer in symbolic empowerment.)
As much as work is over rated and can be a very disagreeable experience, it's still the best place for people to forge bonds with others, and to build a community base. Healthy poor black and poor white communities used to exist that had mostly working people, had community organizations that helped tie life together, provided a place to feel pride and authenticity, and all that good stuff. A lot of those communities were deliberately destroyed by urban "renewal", suburbanization, industrial flight to cheap labor, and so on.
No, poor white people are not in the same boat. There are not nearly as many incidents of police gunning down unarmed white men and boys as there are of police gunning down unarmed black men and boys. A microcosm of this inequity is 12 year old Black Tamir Rice was gunned down in an empty gazebo with a toy gun; White Dylan Roof--who gunned down 9 blacks in a church--was taken alive and taken to Burger King.
That being said, I agree with what you said about what the poor need.
THE COLOR OF LAW: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
Richard Rothstein
2017
W. W. Norton & Co.
On Hand (see Erik)
AMERICAN APARTHEID: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass
Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton
1994
230+ pages
Harvard University Press
MAKING THE SECOND GHETTO: 1940 - 1960
Arnold R. Hirsch
1983
Cambridge University Press
FAMILY PROPERTIES: How the Struggle over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America
Beryl Satter
2009
Henry Holt & Co.
THE NEGRO GHETTO
Robert C. Weaver
1948
Russell & Russell
Some of the police violence against blacks is just plain incompetence. 12 year old Black Tamir Rice would probably not have been killed IF the responding officer had followed tried and proven de-escallation procedures: Stop the police car a good distance from the suspect (even a 12 year old). Use a loud speaker (or voice) to instruct the suspect what to do (like drop the gun or object and walk away from it). THEN approach the suspect, slowly.
Instead, the officer roared up to the 12 year old, rolled the window down, and shot him -- all with in 2 seconds stop time. Very, very bad procedure, never mind it being a crime in itself.
One sees the opposite approach in all sorts of situations: A police call is made (might be a shoplifting complaint) and 4 or 5 police cars roar into the intersection or driveway...whatever, and jump out and start running around. It's a wonder they don't shoot each other. They are OVER REACTING which is very bad practice, but you see it all the time.
But blacks and whites in poverty are in the same boat, because once you reach poverty, the chances of economic recovery are poor -- for anyone. It's just very hard to rebuild a life after you have been ratcheted down. For instance, well educated people who commit crimes and go to prison, usually have a very difficult time gaining employment (any job, not just the kind of job they used to have) once they leave prison. Felony convictions and prison are the kiss of economic death.
Blacks and Whites may be suffering some of the same economic inequities and anti-poor government policies, but they are not in the same boat. Rice wasn't just killed because of poor police strategy; he was also killed because he was a black child whose death would never cause the same local and national uproar as that of a slain white child. That's because Black poor have to suffer police racism and institutional racism that white poor do not have to endure. Also, whites still have an easier time getting hired than blacks at all levels, including fast food restaurants and other lower end jobs. And when they get the jobs, blacks are much less considered for management and higher positions than white poor.
So, no, black poor and white poor are not in the "same boat." The white poor are in a terrible "boat;" the black poor are in an even worse one.
One thing I would challenge is land ownership and ownership in general and the notions of countries and borders. In the Israel/Arab conflict a lot of time is spent on saying who owned what land and who has what rights. It is a microcosm of the issue of what constitutes a country and borders. Countries are made by brute force and there have been lots of conflicts over borders.
My challenging ownership I am not advocating a free for all of acquiring things but a reasonable reflective stance and a cooperative approach.
I also think we need to challenge the considered right to have children and make the process of having children harder and more reflective and not a free for all. I also think crude moral notions pervade societies that need attacking vigorously.
You have just given a list of names can you give some indication of what they were saying and doing? I think academic philosophers have a cosy Job and salary and can be provocative but without really campaigning for change.
I thought Sartre was someone who was seen more with the public living amongst the issues.
In the UK the most prominent philosophers are the most bland and they can make a lot of money out of it. Richard Dawkins isn't a philosopher but he has stirred up controversy but his main target has been religion. Jeremy Corbyn is quite radical and has made an impact but I think they are still working with in the current framework of dichotomies. The lack of philosophy of politicians in general is dire.
Agreed. In fact, the situation is so bad that I feel sure that a good humanist philosopher with some PR savvy determined to change the world could do so.
Profit can be a side-effect rather than raison d'etre, if the economy is managed. The fact is nobody is going to efficiently organize the development sale and distribution of say, roofing materials, unless there is an incentive to do so. Private enterprise and fair competition is a pretty efficient mechanism of delivering many types of product. Of course, without proper governmental/national international management it can easily become bloated, exploitative and overall inefficient.
Sartre was someone who made sure he was seen among the public living among the issues. His actual societal contributions were less impressive as he spent an extended period of time with his female students and is believed to have taken a job many others refused because it was vacated by a fired (and likely camped) Jewish professor during Vichy France.
Academic philosophers hardly have a cosy job or salary. Most of them, like most humanities professors, greatly live paycheck-to-paycheck and fight hard for tenure that is more easily denied them out of bias than science or math professors.
As to the philosophers I mentioned:
Jacques Derrida--During his life he was always politically active, working with anti-Apartheid movements in France and South Africa and helped publish a Leftist magazine, Tel Quel. His Post-Marxist, Post-Freudian, Post-Nietzschean philosophies emphasized that our ethical, aesthetic, ideological and power structures were--in connection with and mitigating material reality--constructed around a myriad of binaries both buttressing and drawing from strong central beliefs such as God, America, Manifest Destiny, or Laissez-Faire Capitalism, and these binaries and central beliefs continually deconstruct and reformulate and deconstruct and reformulate throughout history.
Gilles Deleuze--I'm not sure of Deleuze's political activity, but his and the psychoanalyst Felix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus did a landmark job of splicing Marx and Freud into their "code-deciphering schizo" model seeing humans in Capitalist societies as seeing a myriad of interrelated value codes--not too dissimilar from Wittgenstein's Language Games--that continually fetishize or de-fetishize objects, values, and ideologies in our systems. The "schizo" who can process the most codes effectively succeeds as opposed to the good, well-informed person of the enlightenment. This is not political activity, but a very strong analysis and indictment of the de-emphasis of legitimate ethics in the Capitalist world.
Michel Foucault--Again, I have little knowledge of Foucault's political activity, except he was greatly involved in Gay rights movements and a de-vilification of BDSM movements and activities, and he was a participant in both. As most people know, Foucault's most significant theory was his one of Power as a synchronous and diachronous matrix that is/was predominantly top-down in directions but also moves in multiple fractal-like directions like Derrida's deconstruction. This is similar to Gramsci's Hegemony, but is less regimented in a Marxist manner, so the Marxist model it more takes from is Althusser's ideology.
Julia Kristeva--A psychoanalyst and philosopher, Kristeva was greatly involved in feminism, but kept a skeptical distance from feminist "movements" as she had a general Foucauldian distrust of all power-centered organizations. She was one of the main editors of Tel Quel with Derrida as well. Kristeva's greatest theory was the post-Lacanian "Semiotic." Lacan had moved Oedipal Freudianism out of the bedroom and into language and culture by saying that people's growth wasn't dictated by their parents, but by how they were able to fit into language and culture and how the dominant ideas and linguistic structures--the Symbolic--allowed them to do so. Kristeva believed this structure opened up the un-recognized and even vilified spaces usually occupied by the artist, the marginalized, and the ones who think "outside the box" in their realm--The Semiotic. This idea was a huge one to understanding the value of Modernist Art and how the marginalized or misfits could assert their value, or even superiority
Quoting Jake Tarragon
Politicians reflect their constituents.
And your premise that people in power being more philosophically sharp would lead to greater good is highly questionable. David Smail sums it up this way:
"Global society constitutes a system of inexpressible complexity. It is like a huge central nervous system in which ‘social neurons’ (i.e. people) interact with each other via an infinity of interconnecting and overlapping subsystems. The fundamental dynamic of the system is power, that is the ability of a social group or individual to influence others in accordance with its/his/her interests. Interest is thus the principal, and most effective, means through which power is transmitted.
Here, already, is the starkest possible contrast with our conventional psychology: what animates us is not rational appraisal and considered choice of action, but the push and pull of social power as it manipulates our interest. It is not argument and demonstration of truth which move us to action but the impress of influences of which we may be entirely unaware.
Reason, then, is a tool of power, not a power in itself. Just like moral right, rational right is not of itself compelling and, when it is in nobody's interest to regard it, will be disregarded. Those who - like Thomas Paine for example - seem successful advocates of Reason in its purest form, may fail even themselves to see that it is in fact not reason alone that makes their words persuasive, but the causes (interests) to which reason becomes attached. No doubt Mein Kampf was as persuasive to those already sold on its premises as The Rights of Man was to 18th century revolutionaries in America and France. This does not mean, to those who value reason, that Paine's writing is not worth infinitely more than Hitler's; it means simply, and sadly, that Reason alone is impotent. What really matters is power itself.
In her mordantly compelling Lugano Report2, Susan George vividly draws attention to the inadequacy of rational argument as a means of influencing people. In starting to consider alternatives to the potentially disastrous practices of global capitalism, she writes:-
"This section has to start on a personal note because frankly, power relations being what they are, I feel at once moralistic and silly proposing alternatives. More times than I care to count I have attended events ending with a rousing declaration about what ‘should’ or ‘must’ occur. So many well-meaning efforts so totally neglect the crucial dimension of power that I try to avoid them now unless I think I can introduce an element of realism that might otherwise be absent.
…because I am constantly being asked ‘what to do’, I begin with some negative suggestions. The first is not to be trapped by the ‘should’, the ‘must’ and the ‘forehead-slapping school’. Assuming that any change, because it would contribute to justice, equity and peace, need only to be explained to be adopted is the saddest and most irritating kind of naivety. Many good, otherwise intelligent people seem to believe that once powerful individuals and institutions have actually understood the gravity of the crisis (any crisis) and the urgent need for its remedy, they will smack their brows, admit they have been wrong all along and, in a flash of revelation, instantly redirect their behaviour by 180 degrees.
While ignorance and stupidity must be given their due, most things come out the way they do because the powerful want them to come out that way..." -- David Smail,Power, Responsibility and Freedom
Judith Butler--A traditional philosopher and Hegel and Kant scholar, Butler was one of the first to use Lacan and Derrida's ideas to show the constructed notions of gender and to break down the notion that sexuality was purely biological and gender was purely cultural, showing how each are both. She also emphasized how out gender's and sexualities always involve performance and performativity. The former being a conscious expression, such as "I'm a man, I better not cry," the latter being a man's unconscious decision not to cry because his culture and other external surroundings have shaped him not to do so. Butler is extremely politically active in LBGT movements and has been a recent proponent of the Trans communities and movements, as not only idiot conservatives like Trump discriminate against Trans people, so do some people who consider themselves "liberal" or 'enlightened.
Edward Said--A classically trained pianist and classically trained Palestinian literary scholar who was involved in the Palestinian and other POC-oriented movements and even formed a Palestinian-Israeli orchestra with the renowned Israeli conductor Daniel Berenboim. Said's main concept and book Orientalism showed how Western literature/culture, and particularly Victorian literature/culture (his specialty), not only shaped its characters on the exoticizing and dehumanizing of non-White/non Western people, but very often depended on such activity. He ran through diverse texts as The Merchant of Venice, Titus Andronicus, The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, and Jane Austen's Persuasion. This book pretty much started the Post-Colonial discipline in the Humanities.
Jean Francois Lyotard--Lyotard was a pretty private person, and I have no idea of any of his political activity, but he was a huge thinker in Postmodern philosophy and Humanities, as he focused on Postmodernism reflecting the inevitable human rejection of the constructed Meta-narratives--huge narratives encompassing many others--such as the Enlightenment, Hegelian Marxism, Christian Eschatology, Manifest Destiny, or the American Dream.
Louis Althusser. Again, I know little of Althusser's political activity, but his ideas had great political impact on politically-oriented Marxist thinkers, as it freed Marxism from its substantial threads of extreme materialism and neo-religious notions of Hegelian eschatology and dialectics of Spirit. Althusser rejected the late Marx' Manichean binary of the material Real and false Ideology--so prevalent in The Matrix--replacing it with an ideology model that depicts ideology as our ideological engagement with ideology's engagement with it's non-binary opposition, the material. Thus, as in Derrida's deconstruction, which this notion greatly influenced, we are always in a field of partially-constructed, partially real elements of ideology and material that are meant to be worked through, not solved.
Another key idea of his was, building on Lacan's structure of the Symbolic, that ideology wasn't just top down, but was filtered in a dispersal mode so it could be--in an individual moment--spread in areas of little power and by people of little power, just as it could by areas or people of great power. This idea had a huge influence on Foucault's Power theories.
I was aware of Foucault's power structures ideas which I think in the form I was taught it,are very compelling, in conjunction with discursive psychology. I think narratives are weak in the media and public life and need a discourse analysis by a philosopher cum Journalist.
I think people get caught up in discourse and power relations and are busy situating themselves somewhere in preexisting dichotomies and subject positions.
I suppose you could call me left wing but I never label myself because then you get dragged into a shallow debate of stereotypes. I think some of the aforementioned philosophers etc are too abstract and technical to make a quick impact.
To me philosophy should be focused around logic so that any position can be attacked for it's logical coherency. That way there shouldn't be a dogmatic philosophy but a constant scrutiny of claims.
I think some of the most problematic structures are norms. The idea then is that it is just politicians who are in the wrong or lawyers or businessmen etc. Change must have to come from each individual (I think Jordan Peterson advocates this) but norms allow complacency or helplessness imo.
You're welcome, and my pleasure.
I think I've pretty much shown they're not too abstract at all and are very well steeped in the classical philosophical tradition, and they have already made a huge impact in the Feminist, post-colonial, and LBGT movements as they have greatly used their ideas in their modes of challenging the power structures oppressing them and labelling them "deviant" or inferior."
I hope you realize your own predilection for what philosophy should be can't be what it should actually be. That would be a bit solipsistic. Philosophy from the Pre-Socratics to the Post-Structuralists--and both those groups have a lot in common with each other as well as with Medieval Theologianx--has done much more than just attacking logical coherency, and that is a concept that needs unpacking an analysic in itself. If you limit it to that, you cut off philosophy's expansive and artistic potential, something great philosophers from St. Augustine to Kierkegaard to Walter Benjamin embraced and never excluded.
But if you want a philosopher who breaks down logical consistencies in current structures, you won't fine one better at doing that than Jacques Derrida.
While it is true that people are unlikely to be persuaded through rationality alone, I feel sure that people are reachable through a combination of rational argument and emotional appeal. Or just emotional appeal of course. The extra "trick" that any politician wishing to implement rational humanist policies must pull off is to have emotional appeal, charisma and PR skill. I think the scientific community, concerned at how rational argument has failed in many spheres of social and economic activity to result in the adoption of good policies are now recognizing that argument alone is not enough, and they are expressing the need to be able to reach people through emotional appeal. There seems to be a surge of interest in some science magazines about social psychology and what makes people tick, and an understanding that this scientific knowledge should be put to good use by campaigners.
"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Butler#Reception
To me a radical philosopher should say things that are logical and coherent and approachable to be of real value or motivation.
Life is complex, but there are easily criticised or examined values and claims. Also as they say actions speak louder than words. Peter Singer defends the idea we should give away all our excess wealth but says he isn't doing because other people aren't (or something like that.) I feel apathetic myself, infected by an atmosphere of apathy and fatalism and entrenched prejudices.
Why is the world so dysfunctional? I think bad individual and social philosophy is a big cause
There are few things less intellectual or philosophical than judging a thinker, particularly a brilliant one, on one paragraph...even if you did get the punctuation right.
The radical philosopher Butler does the first two all the time. But "approachable" is a subjective term, and philosophers shouldn't dumb down for those unable to approach their works because of poor education, poor reading skills, or slow thinking.
Judith Butler is an excellent individual and social philosopher. If you read her actual work, you would see that.
This is from the page you pinned:
Darin Barney of McGill University writes that:
“
"Butler's work on gender, sex, sexuality, queerness, feminism, bodies, political speech and ethics has changed the way scholars all over the world think, talk and write about identity, subjectivity, power and politics. It has also changed the lives of countless people whose bodies, genders, sexualities and desires have made them subject to violence, exclusion and oppression."[48]
I was not judging her whole output I was just highlighting the problem of the inaccessibility of ideas deemed radical (or otherwise). Continental philosophers have sometimes deliberately written in a convoluted manner as a stylistic choice.
If someone is starving in a poor country or struggling on the breadline in affluent country or behaving stupidly and damaging the environment and other lives how much time have we got to decipher this prose?
I am not saying these philosophers have nothing to offer or that they cannot be be profitably adapted and adopted but that doesn't mean you can't have campaigning and immediately accessible philosophy.
Moral philosophers never fail to disappoint me. I think moral nihilism should be the default position. Instead we get convoluted or simply weak attempts to cling onto norms and intuitions.
It seems non philosophers have been more powerful than philosophers at causing moral change. They simply demanded change and highlighted cruelty. It is easier to ignore or dismiss a position if it is presented in an elongated over analytic style.
And again, that's a mistake to claim inaccessibility of ideas based on one paragraph. It's intellectually and scholastically lazy, the opposite of radical thought. And no continental philosophers have purposely written in a convoluted manner. That's what people who have difficulty reading their work erroneously say.
Sorry, many people including myself read it very well and teach it very well. You only say it needs to be deciphered because you have difficulty reading it and haven't even really read it. Again, that's lazy scholarship that is counter to radical thinking.
Most philosophers aren't immediately accessible. I guess you want to get rid of Kant, Hume, Aquinas, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx and most other philosophers. .
Sorry, no non-philosophers accomplish anything without keen thought and solid theories, and the best, like Martin Luther King, are always well-read on some philosophy, and usually high philosophy. And you call it elongated because it is elongated to you. To say it actually is, when you've barely read any of it, is pretty solipsistic. You clearly don't think much of philosophy and philosophers. So, why are you here?
Aristotle, Politics
I have proven nothing but what I wrote in my last post, Andrew4Handel.
Fascinating....
I appreciate some of what I have read concerning Foucault but Has he been applied in a radical way?
I am not keen on what I have read from Butler Which seems to be typical left wing bias and word games.
It would be helpful, Andy, if you realize that many people have many different definitions of "improve life." I've already shown how people have used the ideas of those philosophers for human and social progress. So your question is just trolling.
Many times by many marginalized groups.
You haven't taken the time to actually read her stuff beyond a paragraph, so I don't care what you're keen on concerning Butler.
In the evolution thread I was challenging whether we needed the word animal at all and you were defending it's indispensability as a classification. Yet Judith Butler seems happy to dispose of the biology of gender or sex for viewing gender as a performance.
Do you support this stance in contradiction of your advocacy for a concrete definition of animal?
I defended the idea of words as power tools and constructs.
So? Animal is an indisputed classification. I'm sorry you never took biology in high school. Sex and gender are openly-debated terms in the scientific community. I'm sorry you don't grasp the difference.
That's an erroneous loaded question. Not impressive.
You defended your incorrect usage of words. Apparently, you never took English class either.
So do you have a problem with the notion of a genetic male and female or that human reproduction requires males and females to exist? Sex has a stronger genetic physical basis then the category animal which is broad and abstract.
I think questioning the reality of sex and gender is very unhelpful and arguably harmful.
How can tell the history of women and the oppression of women in the light this selective oppression if we have no agreed on definition of a woman?
It seems selective what people are willing to call a social construction.
Since I have no interest in teaching you further, I will no longer read any more of your posts.