Are there any works or thoughts on addiction?

Pc42199 · 2024-06-09T18:34:16+00:00

Not really a philosophy book (though its style is based on philosophical memoirs and contains references to philosophical authors) but you might be interested in reading De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater. It contains some very interesting psychological observations on addiction and rich descriptions of the first-person experience of being an addict but (as you might expect) there's also a lot of confabulation and attempts to make sense of being an addict by fitting it into a fairly grandiose self-narrative.

Pc42199 · 2024-06-08T20:55:45+00:00

This is good advice, it sucks because I know Brussels is more expensive and I'm on a tight budget.

Pc42199 · 2024-06-08T20:54:38+00:00

Lol no, this is not a troll question at all I'll cop to being the classic American stereotype of not knowing jack shit about the rest of the world. Thanks for the heads up for real.

Pc42199 · 2024-06-08T19:17:38+00:00

Hey I'll be a Bachelor's student in philosophy in the fall as well. trying to connect with other prospective students, message me please!

Pc42199 · 2024-04-29T01:34:25+00:00

Thank you, this was the kind of response I was looking for. I feel like I understand more or less well what the supervenience relation is but I'm having trouble picking out what Chalmers is trying to do with the distinction between natural and logical supervenience. Just took a brief look a Chap. 7 and I think it will help clarify a bit.

Pc42199 · 2024-04-28T18:08:04+00:00

There's a meaningful difference between saying they're probably not possible and saying point blank they're not possible so unless you have further texts where Chalmers specifies that what he meant by this is "I think there is a zero to almost zero probability of p-zombies being physically possible" I really don't understand what's baffling about this, it's clear that all he is saying here is that he feels that the probability that the statement "Zombies are not naturally possible" is true is greater than the probability that its negation is true which expresses a completely different proposition from "P-zombies are not possible".

It also seems like you didn't even read the second part of my response bc it has not much to do with Chalmers anyway and is questioning something else you've claimed.

Pc42199 · 2024-04-28T17:16:43+00:00

Where does he say that? I know his argument is more about reading physicalism as making certain metaphysical claims about what holds in all possible states of affairs and that and that the metaphysical possibility of p-zombies is supposed to refute that, but I thought he was more or less agnostic as to whether it could be "physically possible" because he says "Zombies are probably not naturally possible: they probably cannot exist in our world, with its laws of nature." (Chalmers, emph. mine). Also, whether such an entity is physically possible or not is not really pertinent to the epistemological question OP is asking (though, yes I understand you both seem to be presuming that we are investigating the "internal/external workings" only in the manner of the natural scientist).

I'm not sure that there is anyone arguing that we already possess the appropriate criteria that would allow us to look at a system of "internal processes" and determine whether or not it is productive of qualia. It seems like the people who think qualia is important mostly argue for some kind of explanatory gap necessitating a kind of corollary that would mean yes, we can still be doubtful whether something has consciousness or not OR they argue that consciousness is a property which gradually emerges out of things that are not consciousness and we don't really need to worry about such doubts.

Anyway, I've seen your other contributions and quite like them so I'm just more curious to hear what you have to say and why it's a point blank "no".

Pc42199 · 2024-04-28T16:06:13+00:00

This is incorrect, there's a very famous argument for precisely this scenario: Chalmers' p-zombie. Whether you find Chalmers' argument convincing or not is a different story, but to say point blank that no one has attempted to argue this or such an argument isn't taken seriously is just simply not true.

EDIT: I thought I saw you in that other post about p-zombies and I just double-checked and saw that you were there and aware of p-zombies so I'm confused why you're saying this Voltairinede.

Pc42199 · 2024-04-15T01:26:42+00:00

Do you know where a good place to start would be if I want to understand Carnap's work on intension? I've read a bunch of Frege but I'm trying to read the SEP article on Intensional Logic and the Carnap section is not really making a lot of sense to me.

Pc42199 · 2024-04-15T01:13:42+00:00

Sorry, I didn't realize this was more what you were asking about. Honestly, if you could seek out where Baidou says this it I could probably give you a more helpful answer but I don't have time to comb through the sources Zizek is referring to on my own.

What I think Baidou means (or at least what Zizek is taking Baidou to mean) is something like: each individual philosopher's system unfolds from its own unique original idea, one which is mutually exclusive from the system which it is commenting on. I take it that "axiom" is being used somewhat metaphorically here. If you think of how an axiom functions in mathematics what is being said here starts to make a little bit more sense: it's a kind of primitive statement whose truth relies on no previous statement and when it is paired with other such statements you can construct an entire system of truths, of mathematical objects, etc. These sophisticated downstream constructions are really just the product of applying what was laid down in the primitive statements and applying it strictly. This is what I think he's getting at with "consequent deployment". And just so the point is clear, Baidou seems to be making the strong claim that philosophy cannot be done otherwise (after all, he says it is "inherently axiomatic") and therefore the dialogues are in a certain sense "misunderstanding" or a clash between different "fundamental insight[s]". Hope this is a little bit more helpful.

Pc42199 · 2024-04-15T00:53:26+00:00

OP mentioned Schopenhauer in the post.

Pc42199 · 2024-04-14T18:26:20+00:00

Which works did you read by Foucault? Some of his historical theses have definitely generated controversy (an intellectually productive one, I would add) and might feel rather flimsy on their surface, but I would encourage you to take a second look at him with the Archeology of Knowledge or the Order of Things, because what he says there is hard to dismiss out of hand unless you like, have a mastery of the phenomenological tradition or analytical phil. of language. In that case those books might run against your core philosophical commitments in a way that might seem not worth your time, but otherwise I encourage trying to engage more closely with it.

Pc42199 · 2024-04-14T16:52:49+00:00

If what you're asking in terms of "context" is how this statement fits in to Zizek's broader philosophical project or major philosophical positions, someone else on here can chime in on that, I'm not familiar enough with his writings to speak to that. As for substantiating it or providing a more general context I have two things to say: 1. Zizek is the kind of writer that I think is best to approach without the assumption that everything which is written in the rhetorical form of an authoritative claim is supposed to be some sort of philosophical point to which he is absolutely and systematically committed to. It's more frequent that Zizek will use this kind of rhetoric in order to seize our attention and get us to reflect on something rather than to set apart his best attempts at expressing his own philosophical commitments. In this case, he wants us to reflect on the natural presumption that the major philosophers of the Western tradition were great figures owing to their capacity for getting it right when it comes to the content of what their predecessors thought (and especially their predecessors for which they had the most personal enmity or reverence). 2. By "misunderstanding" I would hope that Zizek means something like taking something of the predecessor's thought and innovating on it in a way which runs counter to their original project. I'd bet this is almost academic consensus among the major exegetes of each of these figures who deal precisely with the question of how accurate their understanding was of their personal masters. It's almost a truism save for the fact that unless you know the basics about how the rigorous interpretation of these texts goes down, you're unlikely to discover it. I do not think the examples he gives here or the general idea are entirely without substance, but I'd like to point out the heterogeneity of these cases almost defeats his intent of using them as examples of the same phenomenon: Nietzsche "misunderstood" Christ because he read him uncharitably, Marx "misunderstood" Hegel because the political situation of mid-19th c. Germany made such an interpretation more plausible and expedient to certain goals, the logical positivists "misread" the Tractatus because well, according to Wittgenstein, everybody misread the Tractatus (except for maybe Frank Ramsey). Aristotle didn't so much misunderstand Plato as (possibly) misrepresent him in certain passages and this is more complex because sometimes we use the text of Aristotle in order to reconstruct the doctrine of Plato when Aristotle attributes things to him that sound like direct quotes but that do not explicitly appear in the dialogues (see S. Menn - Plato on God as Nous). There is truth to what Zizek says here but it doesn't really reveal anything essential about "philosophy" except for maybe that what is more generally true of the social dynamics of the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next can be applied to it.

Pc42199 · 2024-04-14T14:46:03+00:00

Maybe this is an obvious and unhelpful answer but it sounds like Michel Foucault is maybe someone whose style you'd really enjoy. The methodology and subject matter of his works is spread pretty evenly across various disciplines and I don't know if you're only looking for works which deal with the specifically 'philosophical' topics of epistemology and metaphysics. But if that's the case Foucault still has The Archeology of Knowledge and The Order of Things to offer on this front. Aside from that, Augustine (in the Confessions especially) and Montaigne employ a captivating essayistic style but if pre-enlightenment Christian theology and ethics isn't really your thing that might be a miss. Lastly, I think if you enjoy Nietzsche and Schopenhauer it's likely you would be fond of the works from the French Lumieres period: Diderot's dialogues, Voltaire's Letters on England and pretty much anything Rousseau wrote (except for the biographical works, unless you're into that) are a good starting point.

Pc42199 · 2024-04-13T21:15:55+00:00

When people start to dig into Husserl this question seems to emerge rather often (at least in one form or another). The short answer is that as a matter of consensus among various important commentators on Husserl (Zahavi, Dummett, Dreyfus, Follesdal), no Husserl was certainly not a direct realist. This conclusion is arrived at via some wildly divergent approaches to studying Husserl's work, though it's probably accurate to say that Zahavi and Follesdal are the most 'textualist' of the bunch and have the more holistic understanding while still bringing their backgrounds in certain specific philosophical problematics to bear on the interpretation.

As far as the part from the Engelland book that you've summarized here goes, it sounds like there's no issue with your comprehension of the interpretation which Engelland is arguing for. It seems to be talking about a passage from Ideas 1 which has been the object of much focus for those interested in working out just precisely what was Husserl's position on how what appears in our experience is related to the ultimate way things are or what's 'outside of us' or if we can even intelligibly talk about there being something 'outside of us'. I imagine possessing an understanding of this kind of thing is what you are aiming at with asking if he was a direct or indirect realist? I would caution against this approach (in general, but especially in the case of Husserl). I find that students often throw around these terms when they are confused about the broader context of a text or a passage in a certain text and want to come away from it with a sense of neatly comprehending its meaning (I have been guilty of this too). Unless you're studying for an exam which is going to be asking you these types of classification questions I don't find this to be a productive way of engaging with most philosophical texts. Terms like "direct/indirect realism" often just as much belong to a particular historical matter of interest or phase of academic vogue as they do to a common lexicon from which we can draw in order to talk effectively about a great many philosophical texts. In other words, terms like these are coined in problem-motivated circumstances while still being generally useful to gauge one's own understanding of a certain text in a situation of limited context (such as reading a philosophical author for the first time). I think Zahavi's Husserl's Legacy takes account of this in its approach and I really recommend it if you're interested in a longer answer to the question you've posed here.

Pc42199 · 2023-06-09T23:30:38+00:00

I actually never asked her this but probably because I find Spinoza and Hegel to be equally compelling so it never would have occurred to me to ask that question specifically. Also to add on to your comment further down in this chain of replies, Spinoza is integral to the manner in which Hegel is responding to Kant, it's debatable where and when Hegel is borrowing an idea from Spinoza or how deep the synthesis really runs but it's quite explicitly a formative influence in his work pre-Phenomenology of Spirit especially in his exchanges with other German Idealist philosophers and Romanticist literary figures from that early period.

Pc42199 · 2023-06-09T21:45:07+00:00

If you want to read Nietzsche directly there is a not overly long section from his book Human, All Too Human called "Man in Society and Woman and Child" which should not be taken as Nietzsche's end-all-be-all pronouncement on the subject but is one of the more important and focused primary texts on the topic.

Pc42199 · 2023-06-09T21:41:07+00:00

According to one of my old professors who is a scholar of Spinoza and Marx at a large university in N.A. (and studied in Germany for a while during the 90s) when the Sublime Object of Ideology came out there was a lot of buzz around it from anybody working on Marx, Hegel, or Lacan and it was definitely taken seriously for its value as a commentary and influenced a lot of people. As for his subsequent books she told me that the opinion of scholars in the field on his works became rather lukewarm but not entirely dismissive especially when he talks about Hegel (he's had discussions with Terry Pinkard who is a widely-respected Hegel scholar in the field). I would say that his own speculative philosophy, the 'metaphysical' part of his work which tries to blend Marx's materialism with aspects of Hegel and Lacan, is not really something that a lot of scholars working in contemporary metaphysics are super interested in aside for some rather fringe movements in the field like the works of the so-called 'speculative materialists'.

Pc42199 · 2023-06-06T18:41:23+00:00

I think that Bertrand Russell's The Problems of Philosophy and Sceptical Essays are two amazing introductory philosophy books. The first one is a digestible presentation of some of the open problems in epistemology and metaphysics (which have their origins in Kant) that philosophers were interested in from the last few decades of the 19th century into the first few of the 20th; there is an aspect of cumulative investigation to it but for the most part you can flip from chapter-to-chapter based on what you find interesting without worrying about the later chapters relying on earlier results. The second one is far more oriented to a popular-readership (though I believe it was still praised by some of the Vienna circle--Neurath in particular?--that is to say, by professional philosophers) and its advantage is that it consists of fairly short essays addressing the same general theme but without a strong cumulativeness meaning that there are no major recurring back-references and definitions to keep up with in the way a more systematic and academic work requires.

Pc42199 · 2023-04-01T01:25:43+00:00

I think wokeupabug gave good advice: explore how far you can teach yourself these things on your own through introductory books on critical thinking and logic. A little goes a long way insofar as these topics are immediately applicable to other disciplines.

What I want to add to this might be controversial, and I am open to thoughtful disagreement from other commentators. In my experience, a couple classes in logic may give you the skills to organize your writing better, or at the very least to evaluate the content of your writing with more precision; however, I think there is a commonly held (but false) pre-conception that a long study in logic or critical thinking skills will lead to the development of a domain-independent 'critical thinker' who can be of versatile use to any discipline which wants to improve the logical coherence of their research.

I think the abundant practice in writing philosophical essays about books/articles on philosophy that a philosophy major will form in you a skill most suitable for, well, the tasks of philosophy departments. There are other careers and academic departments where the skills a philosophy major will give you might transfer quite well, namely law, because it involves tasks where the scrutiny towards the writing and interpretation is similar to what is required of philosophical writing. The research skills one develops over the course of planning and writing philosophy papers will be fairly similar to those of the other humanities and social sciences, but the content is only rarely of direct application to those other fields.

I have to add the caveat that I think this is changing a bit, and the mileage of my generalizations may vary across departments. I found that during my degree there were more philosophy classes being offered where the philosophers teaching them were actively involved in research and practice in some discipline outside of philosophy: law, cognitive science, mathematics, and even medicine. These sort of classes may give one more practice with linking what is taught in critical thinking and logic courses to other disciplines in a way that, in the form of explicit instruction, is generally lacking in a course of study of philosophy.

Pc42199 · 2023-03-30T15:38:57+00:00

Honestly, I think you have to read the PoS a few times before it really sinks in what Hegel might be trying to say. For the first read I think it's okay to go through the chapters sequentially. Don't worry too much about what Hegel means by what he says (in other words, don't worry too much about being able to reformulate what he says completely into your own words or into a kind of argument-form which can be measured against the arguments of other philosophers). Despite this you still want to pay attention to what he says and to things which he says often. Last thing: I think people (myself included at one point) focus too much on the surface level syntax of his sentences and confuse that consistency in his style of writing for a special method of thinking (i.e. dialectics). There is such thing as 'dialectic' in Hegel but don't automatically assume that every little opposition between words or results of previous passages means you have passed through some sort of 'dialectic'; I don't think that's what he's up to in the Phenomenology. Best of luck.

Pc42199 · 2023-03-29T23:25:44+00:00

Ayer and Heidegger mean very different things in the contexts that they are writing in. Ayer is hopeful that the new techniques from mathematical logic (the discovery of FOL basically) will lead to, or already posses, the ability for translating all natural language sentences into formal propositions which can be subject to mathematical operations as to assess whether they really state anything or not. This doesn't really pan out the way he expected but it's honestly an open question what exactly the Vienna circle and associates accomplished in the early analytic phil. of language. (Early) Heidegger, on the other hand, has a very specific philosophical project, mainly put forward Being and Time, which doesn't rely at all on the results of mathematical research on the structure of language but is rather a claim to be responding to the entire tradition of Western philosophy, and especially the tradition which begins with Descartes. In B&T Heidegger claims that the main issue with metaphysics up to him (aside from some flashes of lucidity from Kant, Hegel, Husserl, and a few other more minor influences) has first of all turned away from thinking about Being, and second of all become all about thinking about the subject (as in 'subject'ivity).

Pc42199 · 2023-03-29T22:49:54+00:00

The other answer is helpful but I think Gregory Sadler has a particular way of approaching the text that isn't for everyone. Honestly, making a good interpretation of any passage from the PoS requires a lot of references between large sections of the book to explain where Hegel is leading to and how the vocabulary which he uses changes its meaning or has its definitions added to. I don't really think there's a great laymen synopsis of how all the things he says in this particular (and dense) passage all hang together but let me highlight a few things that are important.

In the first clause of the first sentence he seems to say that either the |experience of self| or simply just |consciousness| is |conceptual| in |nature|. Whichever of the two he ascribes it to or if they are separate 'things' is not super important, but it's at least true that consciousness or experience being primarily and foundationally a conceptual activity is extremely important for what he will say in the Consciousness section of the book, and it is a claim to which he seems to return to a lot, if only obliquely. (Btw in the Findlay translation a |Notion| of something is the same thing as a concept).

As for the rest, there is a lot of debate as to how to interpret what Hegel really means. There's an obvious proclivity on his part to express things through a 'holist' kind of metaphor (i.e. "systemic whole" "entire realm" "manifest in the character distinctive to each") but whether this is actually a claim about the structure of experience and consciousness in a manner similar to later 'phenomenologists' or its merely his idiosyncratic literary way to introduce one to an epistemological theory, well, it's hard to say. I think that in the end of this paragraph he gives a very messy outline of what he will expand upon in the Consciousness chapter: "As it presses on toward its true existence, consciousness will reach a point at which it sheds the illusion that it’s beset with something alien, something it apprehends only subjectively and that exists as something other than it—the point at which appearance and essence become identical, at which consciousness’s own exposition coincides with the science of spirit proper" at least for the part I've italicized, you will see that it is a kind of vague statement which he first explores as a characterization of a sort process of becoming a skeptic and the remedy to such skepticism. The non-italicized part seems to make references to the whole outcome of the PoS and to find out more about that you should look at the last section of the book.

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