German metaphysics met French sophistry in a kind of European Coal and Steel Community producing nothing but rhetorical gas... Few professional thinkers anywhere found it advisable to dismiss Sartre's air of intelligence: There was too great a risk of being called unintelligent themselves.... in philosophy, the infinite regress is a sign that someone has made a mistake in logic. In ordinary life, it is a sign that someone is hiding from reality. Sartre hid. Of course he did; and if he did, anybody can, including us; although I think that if we hide in lies, the lies should not be blasphemous. Sartre blasphemed when he took upon himself, and kept for the rest of his life, battle honors that properly belonged to people who ran risks he never ran, and who died in his stead.
Pepe?
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i'm not touching this
MFT, aren't you arguing my point on the inanity of academic philosophy? A geometry prof at Tulane put it best: When Natural Philosophy split off from Philosophy, there was nothing left.
Another beautiful quote of his: If in your problem you run into a difficulty involving mathematical logic, your problem is no good.
Brilliant asshole.
JJ, it's quite possible that I'm misunderstanding you just as much as you're misunderstanding me. Some posts back, I thought you were taking a jab at philosophy in general. If you weren't, fine. If you were, then as a humanities kind of guy, I thought I'd defend (or "justify," depending on one's terminology) it. No, I don't think academic philosophy is inane. I think some of it is inane. But not to the Absolutist degree that you think it is.
Perhaps I'm thinking of philosophy in the historiography of ideas sense, too. And perhaps you're referring to Sartre. But alas, JJ: if we ignore these nut jobs, then we can't respond intelligently to their absurdity and inanities. Fine, fine, fine, but what if other young minds (think French Youths, or American Youths for that matter) do purchase the absurdities as fact and truth. Well, when we come across them, we'd likely have a better arguement about, say, the craziness of Heidegger if we in fact read Being and Time (or was it Being on Time?).
If you want to build better Coanda engines, I think that's great too. But it's intellectual suicide to cut yourself off from what's going on in the periphery, academic/public/city council, or you name it.
Math is great, but also: how do you respond to math being a perfect system that tries to explain a world that is imperfect? And if you run into a difficulty involving mathematical logic, don't you guys go back to the drawing board and try to crunch formula in a different way? Isn't that a form of mathematical philosophy?
Maybe I'm missing something entirely, JJ. Please, in all honesty, let me know.
"i'm not touching this" apparently Versailles is tiring of its Onan
And if you run into a difficulty involving mathematical logic, don't you guys go back to the drawing board
well yeah, or you can just get drunk instead.
I'd opt for the latter too, Pepe. Then again, what about drunk equations?
By not touching this, AA, Pepe can still be Existential in that Sartre sort of way.
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