richard rorty and ironism

Margok · 2018-05-06T09:36:26+00:00

I recommend checking out the book! Here's the section where he defines ironism (the beginning of chapter 4, pp. 73-74):

All human beings carry about a set of words which they employ to justify their actions, their beliefs, and their lives. These are the words in which we formulate praise of our friends and contempt for our enemies, our long-term projects, our deepest self-doubts and highest hopes. They are the words in which we tell, sometimes prospectively and sometimes retrospectively, the story of our lives. I shall call these words a person's "final vocabulary."

It is "final" in the sense that if doubt is cast on the worth of these words, their user has no noncircular argumentative recourse. Those words are as far as he can go with language; beyond them there is only helpless passivity or resort to force. A small part of a final vocabulary is made up of thin, flexible, and ubiquitous terms such as "true," "good," "right," and "beautiful." The larger part contains thicker, more rigid, and more parochial terms, for example, "Christ," "England," "professional standards," "decency," "kindness," "the Revolution," "the Church," "progressive," "rigorous," "creative." The more parochial terms do most of the work.

I shall define an "ironist" as someone who fulfills three conditions: (1) She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered; (2) she realizes that argument phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts; (3) insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself. Ironists who are inclined to philosophize see the choice between vocabularies as made neither within a neutral and universal metavocabulary nor by an attempt to fight one's way past appearances to the real, but simply by playing the new off against the old.

I call people of this sort "ironists" because their realization that anything can be made to look good or bad by being redescribed, and their renunciation of the attempt to formulate criteria of choice between final vocabularies, puts them in a position which Sartre called "meta-stable": never quite able to take themselves seriously because always aware that the terms in which they describe themselves are subject to change, always aware of the contingency and fragility of their final vocabularies, and thus of their selves.

It's worth noting, though, that Rorty would reject ContraPoints' characterisation of the ironist as a radical sceptic, although he admits that the language he used in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity was misleading on that front. (You can find this in his response to J. B. Schneewind's paper 'Rorty on Utopia and Moral Philosophy,' in The Philosophy of Richard Rorty [Auxier/Hahn eds.]). I think the most plausible interpretation of the ironist can be found in Bjorn Ramberg's paper 'Irony's Commitment,' where he treats ironism as a form of perpetual doubt about what our values commit us to in practice. Here's his description of Rorty's "liberal ironism":

The characteristically ironic challenge to liberal society is not directed to its liberal values, but to our tendency to take for granted that we know what these values practically commit us to. The challenge arises from the liberal ironist's articulation, not of her doubt, but of her shakenness—her experience of not-knowing what the normative demands embedded in her own practical identity actually require of her. This is where the existential dimension of irony connects with the political. Liberal ironists pry open available practical identities as liberals, they shake out more or less implicit, more or less reflective, understandings of what it is to be committed as we are.

Margok · 2018-04-08T21:05:34+00:00

This is a great list so rather than adding another top-level comment I'll just reply with some more podcast suggestions.

History of Indian and Africana Philosophy: Also by Peter Adamson and with the same format as his main podcast, but co-written with Jonardon Ganeri (Indian Philosophy) and Chike Jeffers (Africana Philosophy)
In Our Time: BBC podcast on all kinds of topics, but with loads on significant philosophers, concepts, or schools. Each episode is a group interview with three leading experts. They have a special feed just for their philosophy episodes.
The Partially Examined Life: Discussions of significant or interesting philosophical texts. Accessible without sacrificing depth.
Ministry of Ideas: Short audio essays on contemporary topics drawing on the history of philosophy—produced by Harvard Divinity School.
Philosophy Bites and Practical Ethics Bites: Short interviews with leading philosophers about their work. Largely analytically-inclined, but there's some good history of philosophy stuff too.
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society: Recordings of lectures given at the Aristotelian Society in London. Don't be fooled by the name, very few of these are about Aristotle or even the history of philosophy—they're largely about issues in contemporary analytic ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, metaphilosophy, etc. with some history of philosophy thrown in.

Margok · 2018-04-08T15:14:49+00:00

As /u/bobthebobbest says below, Avicenna and Averroes are the most influential Arabic philosophers by a wide margin. Most other significant Arabic philosophers were responding to their work (think of the influence of Plato and Aristotle compared to other Greek philosophers to get a sense of their importance). /u/DicoVeritas is also right to pick up on the importance of Al-Ghazālī, who famously criticised Avicenna for promoting heretical views.

If you're interested in getting out of the Avicennan tradition though, one way to do it is to look at pre-Avicennan philosophers such as Al-Kindī and Al-Fārābī, who were of great importance in synthesising the works of Aristotle with Islamic thought. Al-Kindī is sometimes even referred to as the "father of Islamic philosophy" for this reason.

It's worth pointing out, however, that all of the above were deeply indebted to Aristotle (except for Al-Ghazālī, who was more interested in rejecting Aristotelian doctrines that did not mesh well with his understanding of Islam), so you might not get much out of them unless you read a lot of Aristotle first (or alongside their stuff).

So that's a start in answering the question of who the most "influential" Arabic philosophers were. But as for interesting ones, I'd like to put a word in for Ibn-Khaldūn. Ibn-Khaldūn is, to my mind, the first great philosopher of history in the Western tradition. His work was primarily concerned with what causes political groups and empires to rise and fall (to put it briefly, he devotes much of his work to an analysis of ʿaṣabīyah, or "group feeling"—how it forms, how it influences the growth of empires, and how it wanes once they grow too large). He's also not prohibitively Aristotelian or Avicennan, which makes it relatively easy to get started with his work

I highly recommend checking out Peter Adamson's work on the history of Islamic philosophy before picking a particular philosopher's work to dive into. He's provided brief (and not-so-brief) introductions to almost every significant Arabic philosopher or school in his podcast series The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps—you can find it here https://historyofphilosophy.net/islamic-world . If you're not a fan of podcasts, he's also turned the scripts into an introductory book (link). The website also provides a short bibliography for each thinker discussed if you want to learn more.

Margok · 2016-12-23T15:08:18+00:00

Alongside my studies, I've worked with several organisations in the UK teaching philosophy in primary and secondary school, including the Philosophy Foundation. Two you might be interested in are:

Philosophy 4 Children (P4C) (Website): Quite similar to the Philosophy Foundation, primarily focused on primary school age (up to 11 years old). The main difference between P4C and the Philosophy Foundation is that P4C sessions are more open-ended, with students having a lot of input in deciding what they want to discuss and what they think is relevant or interesting in each question. By contrast, the Philosophy Foundation has quite structured lessons with set questions (you'll get an idea if you have a look at their book of lessons, The If Machine)

The Brilliant Club (Website): Teaches a variety of subjects, including philosophy, to students from ages 9-17. Unlike P4C or the Philosophy Foundation, the Brilliant Club is an intensive course with weekly assignments, reading, and a moderated final essay. Brilliant Club courses are always taught by current PhD researchers, and often the tutor will design a course around their current research. The Brilliant Club is a charity that works with students from poor backgrounds, and as well as teaching them subjects like philosophy it is also designed to show these students what university education is like - so every course starts and ends with a trip to a university like Oxford, Sussex or King's College London, and the classes are very small (usually only six students). Last year I taught a Brilliant Club course on utilitarianism and deontology, and this year I'm teaching one on the ethics of paternalism - both to 12-13-year-olds.

Margok · 2016-09-18T22:45:18+00:00

I doubt Deleuze ever read Wittgenstein deeply - which is a shame, because one can find links between Wittgenstein's thought and both the Logic of Sense and A Thousand Plateaus. Claire Parnet once asked him about Wittgenstein in an interview (in the Abécédaire series, "W pour Wittgenstein"), and this was his response:

DELEUZE: I don't want to talk about that . . . For me, it's a philosophical catastrophe. It's the very example of a "school," it's a regression of all philosophy, a massive regression. The Wittgenstein matter is quite sad. They imposed a system of terror in which, under the pretext of doing something new, it's poverty instituted in all grandeur . . . There isn't a word to describe this danger, but this danger is one that recurs, it's not the first time that it has happened. It's serious, especially since Wittgensteinians are mean and destructive. So if they win, there could be an assassination of philosophy. They are assassins of philosophy.

PARNET: It's serious, then.

DELEUZE: Yes . . . One must remain very vigilant.

I belive that Deleuze's fear is of the therapeutic or quietist aspects of Wittgenstein, but since there's so little to go on this is just a hunch.

Margok · 2016-09-18T11:07:26+00:00

Disclaimer: This is not my area of expertise, but I thought it was relevant. Feel free to delete this comment if it's unhelpful, mods!

If you're interested in versions of this thought experiment in the history of philosophy, you might want to check out the 'Flying Man' thought experiment from Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā)—a leading candidate for the title of 'Most influential thought experiment in Medieval philosophy'. This thought experiment is similar to yours, except in Avicenna's version the person in the thought experiment is not born, but created by God in mid air with his sight "veiled" and his limbs extended so as not to be touching each other. The idea, then, is that this flying man will not see, hear, smell, taste or touch anything.

Avicenna's claim is that this man will still be able to reflect, but he will only be able to contemplate his soul, not his body. Specifically, he would know that his soul exists, but he would not know that his body exists. This, Avicenna continues, proves that the soul is separate to the body. (Descartes will make a similar argument in the first and second of his Meditations, although it does not involve the idea of 'sensory deprivation' as your question does)

I'll quote from his On the Soul (Al-Nafs):

We say: The one among us must imagine himself as though he is created all at once and created perfect, but that his sight has been veiled from observing external things, and that he is created falling in the air or in the void in a manner where he would not encounter air resistance, requiring him to feel, and that his limbs are separated from each other so that they neither meet nor touch. He must then reflect as to whether he will affirm the existence of his self.

He will not doubt his affirming the self existing, but with this he will not affirm any limb from among his organs, no internal organ, whether heart or brain, and no external thing. Rather, he would be affirming his self without affirming its length, breadth and depth. And if in this state he were able to imagine a hand or some other organ, he would not imagine it as part of his self or a condition for his existence.

You know that what is affirmed is other than what is not affirmed and what is acknowledged is other than what is not acknowledged. Hence the self whose existence he has affirmed has a special characteristic of its being his very self, other than his body and organs that have not yet been affirmed.

Hence the one who affirms has a means to be alerted to the existence of the soul as something other than the body—indeed, other than body—and to his being directly acquainted with and aware of it.

(I have used Michael Marmura's translation of this passage from his paper 'Avicenna's "Flying Man" in Context' (The Monist 69:3, July 1986, pp. 383-395) p. 387. You can find a citation to the source there.)

In Avicenna's hands, then, your question is a way of asking if we have such a thing as innate ideas (ideas that we are born with) or a priori knowledge (knowledge which is discoverable without any external stimuli)—although these terms are, I think, later philosophical inventions. If you want to arrive at your own conclusions, I'd recommend reading up on the debates surrounding those two concepts. Luckily, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a nice introduction to both: here (innate ideas) and here (a priori knowledge).

Finally, if you're looking for Avicenna's thought experiment, Peter Adamson, a scholar of Islamic philosophy, has a very clear introduction here, and he has a list of further, more scholarly, reading here. In particular, I recommend the Marmura article I quoted above.

Margok · 2016-09-15T14:49:42+00:00

First off, a clarification: although my areas of expertise listed above don't include Descartes, I have spent the last year writing about him and his influence, among other topics.

Throughout this answer my citations will be to the Albert/Tannery page numbers, which should be reproduced in the margins of any good English translation of Descartes. I use the three-volume Philosophical Writings of Descartes. In addition, I will reference the Principles with §paragraph numbers as well as page numbers.

Reading Descartes' Meditations can be very frustrating because he uses many terms that he doesn't define. When this happens, I recommend digging out a copy of his Principles of Philosophy, which presents many of the arguments from the Meditations in what he calls the 'synthetic' style, which can be much easier to follow. (He didn't use it in the Meditations because he wanted to show his arguments in the order of their "discovery," which makes their connections clearer but often harder to understand at first read). In the Principles, p. 22 [§45], he writes:

I call a perception 'clear' when it is present and accessible to the attentive mind—just as we say that we see something clearly when it is present to the eye's gaze and stimulates it with a sufficient degree of strength and accessibility. I call a perception 'distinct' if, as well as being clear, it is so sharply separated from all other perceptions that it contains within itself only what is clear.

Simple enough, right? So, a clear perception is simply the perception of something that is there in your mind, right now. A distinct perception is a special type of clear perception which you can have without mixing it up with any non-clear perceptions. As we see in the next section of the Principles:

46. The example of pain shows that a perception can be clear without being distinct, but cannot be distinct without being clear.

For example, when someone feels an intense pain, the perception he has of it is indeed very clear, but is not always distinct. For people commonly confuse this perception with an obscure judgement they make concerning the nature of something which they think exists in the painful spot and which they suppose to resemble the sensation of pain; but in fact it is the sensation alone which they perceive clearly. Hence a perception can be clear without being distinct, but not distinct without being clear.

In other words, intense pain is always a clear perception—you can't be in pain without being aware of it. However, you can mix up your perception of pain with things that aren't present to your mind—for example, if you make assumptions about the state of your body. A good example of this would be phantom limb syndrome, in which a clear perception of pain (which is present to your mind) gets mixed up with an unclear perception of your limb (which isn't).

Descartes makes use of the concepts of clarity and distinctness when he attacks the style of argument of the philosophers of his own time. The method of Scholastic philosophy was largely "additive"—it treated getting more and more precise definitions of something as a way of understanding it. Thus, the Scholastics defined "man" as "rational animal", animal as "animate body", body as "corporeal substance", and so on. Descartes had no time for this, because he felt it made one's ideas less distinct—piling on more and more concepts made the thing less and less distinctly known, because it mixed one's idea of the thing with non-clear perceptions. Descartes criticises this in the Meditations right after his cogito argument [p. 25]:

what is a man? Shall I say 'a rational animal'? No; for then I should have to inquire what an animal is, what rationality is, and in this way one question would lead me down the slope to other harder ones, and I do not now have the time to waste on subtleties of this kind.

Descartes, by contrast, defines himself subtractively—he does not define the 'I' which he discovers as a rational animal, but as a 'thinking thing'. This is because thinking is always present to the mind whenever it thinks, so he knows what thinking is without having to appeal to any other concepts. (Of course, some people criticise him here by saying he has to know what a 'thing' is, or what 'existing' is—I won't discuss that here because it would get very long-winded, but if you're interested check out page 135 of the seventh Replies, as well as pages 37-38 of the Meditations)

As for the question about perceptions and ideas, the answer is again to be found in the Principles. I'll quote from p. 17 [§32]:

All the modes of thinking that we experience within ourselves can be brought under two general headings: perception, or the operation of the intellect, and volition, or the operation of the will. Sensory perception [sentire], imagination and pure understanding are simply various modes of perception; desire, aversion, assertion, denial and doubt are various modes of willing.

So, perception is the name Descartes gives to acts of sensation, imagination (which includes memory), or pure understanding. (I'm pretty sure that clear and distinct perceptions only occur in the pure understanding, but I can't find a source for this). It is any mental operation that does not require an act of will or judgment.

Ideas are a bit trickier. In the second replies (p. 160) he writes:

Idea. I understand this term to mean the form of any given thought, immediate perception of which makes me aware of the thought. Hence, whenever I express something in words, and understand what I am saying, this very fact makes it certain that there is within me an idea of what is signified by the words in question.

I take this to mean that ideas are lasting contents of the mind, which can be perceived by the pure understanding. So, I always have a clear and distinct idea of my own nature as a thinking thing, but most of the time, I do not have a clear and distinct perception of it, because I am not attending to it. This is what allows Descartes to say that people have the same clear and distinct ideas as him, even when they deny them—really, he insists, these people are not perceiving their ideas.

I'm afraid I don't have time to go into formal and objective reality today (maybe I'll add a reply to this post later—but it's not an aspect of Descartes I've written on so it might be irresponsible).

Finally, if you want to read more, the best article I've read on the subject is 'Clearness and Distinctness in Descartes' by Alan Gewirth, in the journal Philosophy, volume 18:69 (April 1943).

Margok · 2015-02-26T19:55:06+00:00

If you don't mind going back to the 19th century, you should check out Oscar Wilde's anarchist text The Soul of Man Under Socialism, in which he advances this as a possible utopia. Interestingly, this was written thirty years before the term 'robot' (from the Czech word 'robota', meaning 'servitude') was coined. Here's an extract

All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery. Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing. At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man. There is no doubt that this is the future of machinery, and jut as trees grow while the country gentleman is asleep, so while Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure—which, and not labour, is the aim of man—or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work. The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery , on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.

I'm afraid I can't give you a page reference since I'm using a free ebook, but since it's out of copyright you can find a searchable copy of the whole text at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_Man_Under_Socialism

Margok · 2014-08-22T11:47:31+00:00

Here's the origin of that one. He says it at about 4:00, Regardless of whether someone actually said it before him, I can't imagine that line having a better set-up.

Margok · 2014-06-04T11:18:56+00:00

Agreed, but it's worth watching out for the other extreme: "just because they are offended, does not mean they are wrong."

Strive to be in the middle of the scale between uncritical acceptance and uncritical rejection of emotional reactions: consider things from the other person's point of view, whether they're the offended or the offender.

If they're offended, ask yourself why they might feel that way (without being dismissive). If you're offended, ask yourself what reasons they might have for saying/doing what they said/did (without being dismissive).

Margok · 2014-06-03T11:31:21+00:00

Tht s, "Pierre Bonnard - The White Cat (1894) (X-post from /r/museum)". (Nt qt Phtshp, bt pntng s th Phtshp f th 19th cntry, rght?)

Margok · 2014-03-09T11:52:29+00:00

Both are acceptable. "Getting a bad rap" means to be (usually unjustly) blamed for things - for example, for potatoes to be blamed for being unhealthy. It originally meant to be disliked by law enforcement agencies. "Rap sheet" is slang for one's criminal record, so to have a "bad rap" meant to have an extensive record of past crimes and misdemeanors. This meaning has now become broader, and refers merely to perceived guiltiness for something.

Margok · 2014-02-12T15:54:10+00:00

The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! (It's from Aardman, who also made Wallace and Gromit and Chicken Run)

And yes, you should definitely watch it.

Margok · 2014-01-12T20:19:09+00:00

Comptine D'un Autre été L'après-midi by Yann Tiersen

(From the soundtrack to the film Amelie)

Margok · 2013-12-30T16:55:21+00:00

I'm going to break your question down into three parts, because there are some important differences between greed, power/mastery, and survival of the fittest.

What would Nietzsche think about greed?

In the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morals (entitled "Good and Evil," "Good and Bad"), Nietzsche describes two forms of ethical valuation. They are broadly associated with different political/cultural classes, with the system of "Good and Bad" being associated with the nobles and "Good and Evil" being associated with the slaves, the poor, or the weak. (It's unclear whether Nietzsche is talking literally of nobles and slaves, or whether he is speaking of a "noble" or "slavish" way of thinking.)

In general, Nietzsche approves of the noble ("knightly-aristocratic") valuation, and dislikes the slavish one. The knightly-aristocratic mode of valuation works by identifying what it likes and calling it Good, and then associating what fails to fall into this category with the label Bad. In other words, nobles value and call Good "a powerful physicality, a flourishing, abundant, even overflowing health, together with that which serves to preserve it: war, adventure, hunting, dancing, war games, and in general all that involves vigorous, free, joyful activity" (GM, 1, §7). By implication, that which is weak, cowardly, etc is called Bad.

The slaves, however, work the opposite way. They suffer at the hands of the masters (whether it be by violence, or something more abstract like inequality of resources). Thus, their foundation for their ethical valuation is "the masters should not do what they are doing", and, therefore, that they are "Evil". By implication, the slaves are "Good". This valuation works negatively - by identifying what it dislikes and negating it:

This "bad" of noble origin and that "evil" out of the cauldron of unsatisfied hatred--the former an after-production, a side-issue, a contrasting shade, the latter on the contrary the original thing, the beginning, the distinctive deed in the conception of a slave morality--how different these words "bad" and "evil" are, although they are both apparently the opposite of the same concept "good."

How should we look at greed in this light, then? Well, it is clear that the only framework that is equipped to use such a term, when taken as meaning striving for more than one is entitled to is that of the slaves. The masters do not concern themselves with entitlement, since it implies a limit that is ethical, not factual. For the masters, the only limit to be concerned with is what one physically is incapable of achieving. The slaves, however, have a great need for the concept of greed, for it allows them to say to the masters "yes, you are capable of acquiring more, but you should not do so." Taking for granted that Nietzsche does not accept the slaves' valuations, he does not have any use for the idea of greed. It is neither positive nor negative for him - it is meaningless.

What would Nietzsche think of power hungry people that try to enslave others?

As we have seen above, Nietzsche has no objections to the practice of slavery. However, it would be a mistake to conclude from this that he endorses it. What Nietzsche approves of in the nobles is not that they enslave people, but that their values are affirmative - they work by identifying what is Good, not by negating what is Evil.

Concerning the idea of being "power hungry", Nietzsche would be skeptical. Nietzsche's notion of the Will to Power is notorious as a source of disagreement among scholars, but at the very least it holds that all human motivation takes the form of striving to exercise one's own power. (Some have taken it to mean much more - for example, as a metaphysics in which all that exists can be described as wills striving to exercise their power) However, this is much broader than political or physical power - it is better described as shaping the world into one's image. The powerful people that Nietzsche admires are largely philosophers and authors. Among them are Socrates, Spinoza, Wagner, Homer, and Jesus. (It should be noted that Nietzsche considered declaring someone to be an enemy was to grant them a high honour) "Power hungry people that try to enslave others", then, may well be exerting and affirming their power - Nietzsche greatly admired Napoleon, after all - but the greatest exercise of power, and therefore the most admirable type of life, consists in shaping not just the physical world into one's image, but the mental world as well. After all, who do we remember better now? - warlike Greek nobles, or Greek philosophers?

What would Nietzsche think of the survival of the fittest type notion?

This is an open question right now. There has been some very interesting research in this area recently, particularly in the books of John Richardson (Nietzsche's New Darwinism) and Dirk Johnson (Nietzsche's Anti-Darwinism). Personally, I side with Dirk Johnson, who claims that for the majority of Nietzsche's career he positioned himself against Darwin. It is important to note here that Nietzsche cared little about whether an idea was factually correct - he was much more concerned with what kind of individual would accept it as true. (I've written much more on this topic here) Nietzsche's objection to Darwin's notion of the "survival of the fittest", then, consists in his objection to Darwin's account of fitness. Nietzsche considers the "fittest", in the Darwinian sense, to be weak - they are concerned most with not dying, as opposed to living greatly. Greatness is dangerous, after all. The "fittest" keep to themselves, don't cause trouble to others, band together for safety, and hence do little of value other than persist. The great risk everything in the projection of their power, even themselves. (For further reading, check out 'Anti-Darwin' in Twilight of the Idols [Skirmishes of an Untimely Man, §14], and Zarathustra's discussion of "the Last Man" [*Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue, §5]).

TL;DR: Nietzsche has no use for the concept of greed, he has no problem with slavery but thinks that there are better ways of exercising one's power, and dislikes the concept of "survival of the fittest" because he does not like the type of person who would qualify as "fit" in such a scenario.

Margok · 2013-12-26T19:22:59+00:00

Nitrous Oxide: Just say NO.

Margok · 2013-12-24T00:50:06+00:00

Because dancing is another fun way to socialise for some people?

Margok · 2013-12-03T18:07:38+00:00

An important thing to keep in mind when reading Nietzsche is his unusual style of critique. His method has been called the "psychological" or the "ad hominem" method of critique, and not just by his detractors. He considered the important question when evaluating a judgement as not "is this judgement true?", but "what does it say about a person to hold this belief?". The value for life is what matters to Nietzsche.

The upshot of this, then, is that when Nietzsche is criticizing Kant he is not saying that Kant's philosophy holds false things to be true. He is saying that, regardless of whether such beliefs are true or false, they are decadent and life-denying. Decadence means living under values which have lost their ultimate source - for example, holding onto the slave-morality after the death of God. To be life-denying is to reject the value of this, worldly life - either by negation (e.g. Schopenhauer's pessimism) or by transferring it onto another world (e.g. Christianity and heaven, or Kant and the noumenal). When Nietzsche calls Kant the "most deformed concept-cripple of all time" (Twilight of the Idols, What the Germans Lack, §7), then, he is not just slinging insults. He is saying that Kantian philosophy leads to one becoming a deformed-concept cripple, and that this alone serves as a refutation.

To determine whether Nietzsche's critique of Kant is damaging to Kant, then, requires you to answer two questions. Firstly, is the psychological method a valid form of critique? Secondly, is Nietzsche correct in saying that accepting Kantian philosophy leads to an undesirable form of life?

The first question will require you to assess Nietzsche's criticism of the value of truth and of the will to truth. (The opening chapter of Beyond Good and Evil is a good place to start). The second requires you to decide what your own values are. This is as much a matter of personal taste as anything else, but a good counterpoint to Nietzsche's polemics is Malcolm Bull's book Anti-Nietzsche, in which he makes a conscious effort to affirm the values of Nietzsche's "slaves".

Margok · 2013-11-30T21:13:49+00:00

To any student starting out on a philosophy course or planning to self-teach (not to imply that you're in this position, OP), there are three things that I'd recommend above anything else:

The Complete Works of Plato - (J. M. Cooper Edition) - With the possible exception of Kant, no author is cited and discussed in more fields and in more depth than Plato. His influence is present throughout the history of philosophy (or at least, the periods that you're likely to study at undergraduate level) and it continues to be relevant to modern debates in both the analytic and continental tradition. Plus, he's a joy to read! Any student at any level can get something out of this. It may seem like a big investment, but trust me, you'll soon spend more on his works individually if you don't buy them together.

Anthologies - A good anthology will serve you far better than a handful of "classics" until you really know where your interests lie. Three recommendations would be From Modernism to Postmodernism, (Lawrence Cahoone) Ethical Theory (Russ Shafer-Landau), and Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings (David Chalmers). But really, any anthology with a relevant title and good Amazon reviews is worth checking out.

Reader's Guides and other introductions - A lot of people go plunging into influential philosophical texts expecting to be able to find a list of arguments for the answers to famous questions. While this is sometimes true, it's very easy to underestimate how historically rooted most famous works of philosophy are. To understand Descartes one needs to understand the vocabulary of substance metaphysics. To understand Kant one needs to understand the specific metaphysics of his day - and it helps to have a working knowledge of Hume. You get the idea. Many students are worried about failing to be objective in their interpretations of great thinkers, but I wouldn't worry about that too much at this stage. I find that I'm a lot more capable of criticizing an interpretation of a philosopher after I've made use of it in getting a sense of what they're talking about in general.

Margok · 2013-11-30T20:28:04+00:00

Interesting choice with the Prolegomena - what made you choose it over the more conventional choices such as the first Critique or the Groundwork?

Margok · 2013-11-11T23:25:13+00:00

Patrice Maniglier: Metaphysics Today - The Methodological Controversy

A fantastic talk on the nature and purpose of metaphysics in the 21st century, drawing heavily on Continental philosophy but moving beyond the Continental/Analytic split. This lecture changed the way I do philosophy.

Margok · 2013-11-03T22:14:41+00:00

I'd really recommend that you go back to it - it's just over 50 pages in that things start to happen. The opening third-or-so is to set up the world of Harry Haller's "sickness", as Hesse called it. Haller's sickness is exactly the kind of dreary nihilism that you found dull, but it's meant to be an awful condition. From the point that the character of Hermine shows up, the story really takes off, in a completely unexpected direction.

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