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The true philosophers (a dream)
Oct. 14th, 2009 05:05 pmSo, the rooms in our* house were waist deep in water, and Nietzsche - one of the people there - insisted that to be true philosophers we needed to swim underwater.
*our?
*our?
As promised, here's some guidance for your reading of "What Are Scientific Revolutions?" a Thomas Kuhn essay that Google Books is giving you in its entirety here, running uninterrupted from p. 13 to p. 32, at least for the time being (though my experience with Google Books is that what pages it gives you can change without warning). First, a brief explanation of why I'm interested in Kuhn in the first place (beyond the fact that I think this sort of thing is fun).
( Why Kuhn? )
( paradigms )
( Why Kuhn? )
( paradigms )
Nietzsche 4.5
Dec. 19th, 2008 05:29 pmIf you're interested, I've added new comments to Nietzsche 3 and Nietzsche 4 in response to previous new comments from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dubdobdee and the Artist Formerly Known As mooxyjoo.
dubdobdee and the Artist Formerly Known As mooxyjoo.Nietzsche 4
Dec. 9th, 2008 09:44 amAccording to Nietzsche, if I'm reading him right, Plato stood truth on its head by denying perspective. But I think it's a mistake for Nietzsche to use the word "perspective," it's a residual from Kantianism. I can believe that the earth rotates around the sun and I also can believe that the sun rises in the east and in certain circumstances that the sun rises on the left, and that's all a matter of perspective but so what? The trouble with "perspective" is that it implies an independent thing that we're all looking at, and so someone can get from the word that, yes, bias is inevitable. But that's not what Nietzsche is aiming for at all. When Copernicus decided the planets were material objects like earth that didn't cause a change in perspective but more like a wholesale change in an activity, like going from watercolors to ice hockey. You could say that what Nietzsche really means by "perspective" is "serves some human interest," and maybe that's what he should have said, but that's Dewey not Nietzsche.
( degrees and subtleties of gradation )
( degrees and subtleties of gradation )
Nietzsche 3
Dec. 9th, 2008 08:30 amOK, now to the "will to ignorance" thing. Right in the preface Nietzsche says that philosophical dogmatizing is a "noble childishness," and he means "dogmatizing" as an insult but "noble" as a compliment. This is a tension in Nietzsche. On the one hand he wants us to grow up and recognize ourselves as the creators of our truths, and so take responsibility for our truths rather than believe that truth emanates from some nonhuman deity or "reality." And so Nietzsche wants us not to value truths for their own sake but for what we can accomplish with them, and perhaps to prefer uncertainty and error if those accomplish more. But on the other hand he takes history as a series of different people creatively erecting different "eternal" truths in succession, often, Nietzsche says, on the flimsiest of bases.
( So if I were talking to Nietzsche... )
( So if I were talking to Nietzsche... )
Nietzsche 2
Dec. 8th, 2008 06:17 pmMARK:
however i think nietzsche's (not-entirely formulated) answer is that you can distinguish between "stuff that formally gets acknowledged as being of the Type of Truth; and stuff that's, y'know, TRUE"
so what's at issue is less his criterion of truth (which he apparently thinks will take care of itself), more - to borrow from steve colbert - his criterion of truthiness
Well, this is what I would want Nietzsche to believe, that truth takes care of itself, people come up with the criteria they need as they go along (which is to say that philosophy has nothing interesting to say about truth), but I'm not sure it is what he believes.
( villains always blink their eyes )
however i think nietzsche's (not-entirely formulated) answer is that you can distinguish between "stuff that formally gets acknowledged as being of the Type of Truth; and stuff that's, y'know, TRUE"
so what's at issue is less his criterion of truth (which he apparently thinks will take care of itself), more - to borrow from steve colbert - his criterion of truthiness
Well, this is what I would want Nietzsche to believe, that truth takes care of itself, people come up with the criteria they need as they go along (which is to say that philosophy has nothing interesting to say about truth), but I'm not sure it is what he believes.
( villains always blink their eyes )
Nietzsche 1
Dec. 8th, 2008 10:49 amAm studying Nietzsche's Beyond Good And Evil in preparation for an exam tomorrow. The book is far harder to understand than I was expecting. A major problem is that Nietzsche usually speaks in pronouncements rather than giving examples or making arguments, and he's spare on analogies as well. And he'll use hotly contested terms - "Platonism," "Christianity," "democracy" - as if what they represent goes without saying (so he doesn't say it) or, when he does say it, as if what they represent is a monolith.
( wild ambivalences and corresponding subtleties )
( wild ambivalences and corresponding subtleties )
