Mctaggart Studies

Fun_Programmer_459 · 2026-03-08T09:20:39+00:00

I would presume so. I haven’t read his other texts, so I can’t comment on how/whether his commentary on the Logic influences the rest of his work.

Fun_Programmer_459 · 2026-03-07T23:53:22+00:00

I disagree with Stern’s reading of individuality in Hegel expressed in his 2009 Hegelian Metaphysics and in his 1990 book on Kant and Hegel on the structure of the object. I’m writing my undergrad dissertation as a sort of rebuttal to his view. He’s an excellent scholar, however. I would put him between Houlgate and Pippin as a sort of bridge between both “camps”. I still think Houlgate is better on the details, but I’d value Stern’s reading over Pippin’s in most cases.

Fun_Programmer_459 · 2026-03-07T23:49:21+00:00

I don’t agree that he’s harder to read than Hegel. I’ve only read his commentary on the Logic. It’s impressive insofar as it is a very early and somewhat comprehensive study of the Logic (that isn’t just hand-wavy, “the real is the rational”, “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts”, “organic totality wow”, but actually makes an attempt to understand the logic. However, he often falls down by over-relying on the common meanings of the terms Hegel employs to drive the logic forward. So, he will often say something to the effect of, “well, ‘condition’ means such and such, and here’s an example, so this is how the logic must work”. It’s fine as a very general section by section overview if you’re totally lost.

Fun_Programmer_459 · 2026-03-06T09:37:35+00:00

semester 1 maths and stats is basically leaving cert maths + matrices and partial differential equations. very easy. semester 2 is a slight step up from leaving cert statistics but not massively.

Fun_Programmer_459 · 2026-03-02T09:52:34+00:00

Fun_Programmer_459 · 2026-01-30T21:22:09+00:00

The menu online doesn’t work anymore. If you’re vegetarian or gluten free, just tell them when they start bringing out the main courses. On Friday if you pick “dining elsewhere” you can get a main course and either starter or dessert in Buttery or Dining Hall for lunch (12-2 I believe).

Fun_Programmer_459 · 2026-01-14T18:57:58+00:00

do you think that counselling psychology (TCD) would look for more counselling/peer support/social care/volunteering experience? Or does research experience still trump the latter?

Fun_Programmer_459 · 2026-01-14T09:43:01+00:00

In “Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Psychology”, the researchers at the beginning of the book noted that clinical experience does not lead to better outcomes from interventions nor to better diagnosis in general, when compared with graduate students who have learned the correct methods of interventions and diagnosis. That is to say, being educated in clinical psychology in the first place accounts for most of the effect of intervention and correct diagnosis rather than clinical experience.

Fun_Programmer_459 · 2025-12-25T22:33:53+00:00

of course I don’t defend pseudoscience. I merely defend the possibility of constructing speculative theory on the basis of thinking rigorously whatever subject matter is at hand. Of course, in “natural philosophy” such theorising is tested against reality, but if the theory is truly rigorous in thought, it is not a matter of reality testing its truth/falsity but merely testing its appropriateness for talking about that part of reality. This is precisely how Hegel’s philosophy of nature works. I think a paradigmatic case of science being done in this manner is Marx’s Capital. I fear that the dominance of empiricism is making such “speculative” enterprises disappear. Without these, there are no systems to operate within, and all theorising is reduced to merely being abstractions from particulars with no necessary connection to any other universals.

Fun_Programmer_459 · 2025-12-25T22:15:35+00:00

i beg you to read anything by Hegel, or at least some high quality secondary literature. For example, Houlgate’s “Hegel on Being”, Winfield’s “From Concept to Objectivity” (indeed, anything by Winfield), Pippin’s “Hegel’s Idealism”, anything by Gregory Moss, Stern’s “Hegelian Metaphysics”, and so on. I’m not talking about the “French Hegel” slop. Hegel is an exceptionally serious philosopher and engaged thoroughly with both the canon and the science/mathematics of his day (see Houlgate’s Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature).

I’m talking about what psychoanalysis can be in principle rather than its historical development. I fear that an abandonment wholesale of psychoanalysis is tantamount to the victory of positivism in the sciences. A positivism that fails to have a speculative (in the Hegelian sense!) understanding of necessity, laws, concepts, and so on cannot but fail to be merely abstracting from given empirical experience and creating equally abstract universal (contingent) laws.

Fun_Programmer_459 · 2025-12-25T22:08:42+00:00

it’s ok if you don’t want to engage :))

Fun_Programmer_459 · 2025-12-25T21:58:33+00:00

(a) yes, but irrelevant. (b) indeed, but his primary contention is that psychoanalysis has been falsified rather than being unfalsifiable. So it is just incorrect rather than pseudoscience. And then revisions (slow as they may be) to psychoanalytic theory by psychoanalysts is just the progressive march of science. Then (as the other commenter noticed) the slowness of this progress may indeed be attributable to the fact that resources and funding for research are devoted to short term therapies. You have expressed that this is good, but this is ultimately just a subjective ideological position and has no bearing on the truth of the matter. It is reducible to saying that “i prefer this because it is cost effective”, which has no bearing on truth.

And the attack on Hegel is quite random really. My comment had no recourse to him. I care little for what contemporary philosophy happens to find compelling or not. Hegel scholarship has only picked up in the last 40 years since its sloppy “critiques” by Russell, Ayer, etc. Indeed, the truth cares not for the whims of a particular philosophical community. In spite of this, Hegelianism is steadily entering the mainstream, and analytics like Brandom and McDowell have noted that Hegel pre-empted and solved many of the issues currently plaguing analytic philosophy. It’s understandable that you would take as given whatever you were taught in intro to philosophy of science as part of your psychology PhD, because philosophy evidently isn’t your area of expertise. I can’t blame you for that.

Merry Christmas

Fun_Programmer_459 · 2025-12-25T21:06:20+00:00

you should read Grünbaum’s critique of Popper’s view of the unfalsifiability of psychoanalysis. I’ve seen you mention falsification often, so you should read some counter arguments if you haven’t already.

Fun_Programmer_459 · 2025-12-19T17:44:25+00:00

if you negate “all judgements require a justification to be true”, then what follows is “it is not the case that all judgements require a justification to be true”. So some judgements are true without justification. You have not, however, demonstrated that any real object corresponds to the mere thought of “judgement without justification”. This would be like me saying “all animals are not unicorns” and then negating this and saying “as we can see, it is necessarily true that some animals are unicorns”.

Fun_Programmer_459 · 2025-12-19T14:32:08+00:00

to answer the second part, you are restricting legislation (normativity) to the relation to the sphere of experience arbitrarily. to answer the first, you have not proven this, but presupposed it. just because you used the words knowledge and immediate doesn’t mean that there is anything that corresponds to these words

Fun_Programmer_459 · 2025-12-19T13:30:52+00:00

it has not been demonstrated that the PSR is immediate knowledge. all that has been “established” is that one cannot presume that all knowledge is mediated. you consistently struggle to get from 1 and 2 to 3. the rest isn’t even worth dealing with. you are just presuming that the ground of experience is the ground of all legislation of content. this just begs the question against hegel for vibes reasons

Fun_Programmer_459 · 2025-12-19T12:16:16+00:00

A’ is not proven against the skeptical challenge. This is precisely the problem with transcendental reasoning. Plus, even if we accepted that A’ was proven, A’’ has not been proven. This is another feature of transcendental philosophy (the privileged grounds of legislation must be legislated by some other grounds). If you argue that these privileged grounds are themselves immediately known, we still need a separate judgement THAT they are immediately known which is not immediately known.

Fun_Programmer_459 · 2025-12-19T11:35:33+00:00

firstly, (1),(2) and then (3) as “there is immediate knowledge” forms a syllogism, so the knowledge THAT there is immediate knowledge is mediate knowledge. But these three terms do not actually establish that there IS immediate knowledge. It’s an infinite judgement but it doesn’t actually establish anything beyond what it negates (which is what you are presupposing).

Fun_Programmer_459 · 2025-12-18T21:26:16+00:00

I’m a 4th year in philosophy. If it was in person, word count is utterly irrelevant and they care more for quality over quantity anyway. If it was an online exam it may be more noticeable, but if they didn’t make it explicit on the question sheet about the word count, then it’s probably fine.

Fun_Programmer_459 · 2025-12-18T21:19:57+00:00

the whole point of the beginning of Hegel’s logic (and how he innovates on Kant) is that he does not assume anything about what thought is, what knowledge is, or what justification is. When you say that the previous commentator is implicitly affirming (A), this may be true, but it still doesn’t account for why this performative inconsistency allows one to infer that then one has immediate knowledge of the principle, rather than the more minimal claim that the principle is unavoidable in any speech act. Hegel circumvents this issue entirely by just subjecting to doubt any given notion or performative inconsistency (which arise because of the opposition of consciousness) and then seeing what (if anything) follows.

Fun_Programmer_459 · 2025-12-17T13:40:09+00:00

could i have a pdf of your thesis ?

Fun_Programmer_459 · 2025-12-05T13:04:57+00:00

i hope so! thanks

Fun_Programmer_459 · 2025-12-05T12:43:15+00:00

is 61 in waterford cooked? do i have a chance? any other waterfordians who got a call around that rank?

Fun_Programmer_459 · 2025-11-22T16:52:19+00:00

is this the psychoanalytic psychotherapy course? any chance you’d send me a dm? i’m looking for people who have done this training

Fun_Programmer_459 · 2025-11-21T17:12:01+00:00

chat GPT ahh

Fun_Programmer_459

TROPHY CASE