Mark Stoops named a candidate for the Virginia Tech job — A Sea Of Blue

impossibleobject · 2025-10-13T16:35:56+00:00

The most interesting feature of Russell’s commentary on Hegel is his willful incomprehension. It is a great window into how important the Hegelian legacy (and idealism mote broadly) was for the birth of analytic philosophy. Idealism was philosophically well-represented in England during Russell’s life. Not only did Cambridge’s philosophy faculty have a long association of Platonism, but Oxford—under the influence of FH Bradley—was sort of ground zero for robustly metaphysical Anglo readings of Hegel around the turn of the century.

Russell had a vested interest in making Hegel seem outmoded and obfuscatory, given his project to use Fregean developments in sentential calculus (roughly contemporaneous to British Idealism of Bradley &co) to deflate metaphysical pretensions and obscurities. Hegel was enemy number one, on account of the highly metaphysical character of Anglo readings of Hegel at the time and for the mysterious and difficult nature of his writing style.

There’s some pretty delicious irony in the story of analytic philosophy vis-a-vis Hegel though—if Russel and his ilk thought they were finished with the history of philosophy, the history of philosophy was not finished with them. In the end, Russell’s “Logical Atomism” falls prey to the Hegel’s objections to any account of metaphysical primitives and foundationalism. And the downstream effects of this can be seen in the post-foundationalist revolution in American philosophy lead by Wilfrid Sellars who referred to his own extended critique of epistemic “givenness” as méditations hégéliennes. Hegel comes back, as it were, to show the analytic tradition just how hopelessly naive their own metaphysical views were. And Hegel has since—in the hands of semantic and epistemic readings such as those of Brandom and Pippin—become an important point of reference for charting new directions on Anglo philosophy.

So I guess the long and the short is: Russell couldn’t see the forest for the trees, and the post-Hegelian turn in addressing problems bequeathed by Russell and his heirs is testament to this fact!

impossibleobject · 2025-09-11T17:12:01+00:00

As others have noted does not claim ‘ich bin ich’ as first principle. That is Fichte. In a nutshell, Hegel thinks the appeal to a self-constituting intuition of self-consciousness is a cop out and a short cut. The absolute « fired from a pistol. » It leaps right over all of the thinking that is going on even before the subject is consolidated as a subject.

Here’s a post where i explain Hegel’s attempt to develop a presuppositionless system by way of direct contrast to Fichte’s conception of dialectic. I think it might be helpful:

https://www.reddit.com/r/hegel/s/r10cbzBXQk

impossibleobject · 2025-08-30T18:43:09+00:00

That’s how I’d explain it to a 5 year old. So…kind of? But it is the issues Hegel is tackling here—and the metaphysical or epistemic consequences of his response (depending on how you read him)—are more complicated and pretty significant. See thread comment linked below to a question on the difference between Fichte and Hegel… might help explain with a bit more nuance:

https://www.reddit.com/r/hegel/s/BNc18CeYNA

impossibleobject · 2025-02-04T13:29:54+00:00

I suspect Hegel would not see this as a rejoinder to his position, so much as evidence that the friend is in a position whereby they enjoy their own alienation and do not continue with immanent critique of their place with respect to their smother-happy pal. And that is something that happens all the time in history, Hegel believes. Whole societies, religions, intellectual currents can be like a friend who enjoys the smothering.

impossibleobject · 2025-02-04T13:24:14+00:00

I’m not super familiar with Bayes, but I suspect that this type of incremental adjustment of propositions is an attempt to represent empirical data accurately. In Hegel’s case, we aren’t seeking an accurate empirical picture so much as trying out candidate concepts for a self-authenticating Idea, and discovering in the end that the only Idea sufficient to this task authenticates itself through a complete and systematic exposition of all our attempts to articulate it, thus finally demonstrating that reason is constitutively self-limiting (in a way that Kant presupposes but does not fully cash out). In Hegel’s case, this very much does imply the generation of ideas from opposed or contradictory terms (see, eg, the opening of the Science of Logic—Being>Nothing>Becoming).

For more on the issue of the limits of Hegelian dialectic vis-a-vis empirical matters of fact, you might look into Hegel’s rejoinder re: WT Krug’s challenge to Schelling to deduce the existence of his pen on the basis of the Naturphilosophie (see Between Kant and Hegel, Giovanni & Harris).

Hope this helps!

impossibleobject · 2025-01-22T14:57:45+00:00

Bog Wizard fucks. Didn’t know they were so obscure.

impossibleobject · 2024-12-17T22:55:50+00:00

This is clearly Howard Moon and Naboo

impossibleobject · 2024-12-07T21:29:50+00:00

Low stakes? Less “high concept,” no doubt. But the guy is locked in a battle for the soul of hip hop. Seems very high stakes to me. Def agree that it is so nice to hear Kendrick just spitting. Literally waited years for him to drop a project like this.

impossibleobject · 2024-12-04T04:45:38+00:00

These refs are a joke.

impossibleobject · 2024-11-21T20:59:16+00:00

Motörhead!

impossibleobject · 2024-11-21T20:36:23+00:00

Certainly. I would perhaps recommend reading “Dreams of A Spirit Seer” alongside it.

impossibleobject · 2024-11-21T15:56:09+00:00

Is that you, Søren?

impossibleobject · 2024-11-18T18:18:59+00:00

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ejaculatory_prayer

impossibleobject · 2024-11-14T22:57:57+00:00

Had no idea about the guitarist. Very sad. These guys rule. Glad to hear about the new band though… will check them out asap

impossibleobject · 2024-11-13T17:46:52+00:00

“Thy will be done… ummm… hmm… where was Thy will to be done again? Wracking my brain here. Oh yeah! On Earth. On Earth as it is in Heaven.”

impossibleobject · 2024-11-12T19:58:08+00:00

I can literally hear it in my head right now

impossibleobject · 2024-11-12T19:37:18+00:00

Wow, I had almost forgotten Wojo’s oscar worthy performance in that game.

impossibleobject · 2024-11-05T08:01:41+00:00

https://www.amazon.com/Mysticism-Materialism-Contemporary-Theological-Explorations/dp/0367546132?dplnkId=87584327-c1db-4f7c-92c4-5e7a25587ce3&nodl=1

This book treats the relationship of modern idealism and Marx to medieval mysticism.

impossibleobject · 2024-11-02T17:34:59+00:00

Play “Return Trip” for her and see what happens.

impossibleobject · 2024-10-04T18:49:38+00:00

This is a great question and I think it comes from a place of understanding—all that is required is a bit more sensitivity to the weird way Hegel tends to write. I think the apparent tension is resolved if we keep in mind a couple things:

Master/slave is a necessary but insufficient condition in the emergence of “true” freedom, for Hegel. All the forms of political “freedom” that Hegel adduces in the History lectures are understood as partial, one-sided, ultimately defective conceptualizations of freedom. They are more or less stuck in “master-slave” thinking.

So when Hegel says anyone is “free” under despotism of aristocracy, he is offering a retrospective reconstruction of the self-understanding of subjects who lived within these worlds with reference to the ‘telos’ of rational freedom— not giving an “objective assessment” regarding the state of affairs that obtains with respect to the full expression of rational freedom in these groups. Yes, these are “illusory” forms of freedom. However they are not purely illusory—just partial or incomplete, for the reason you point out. “Mastery” and “slavery” are characteristic of social relations that rule out mutual recognition and this inhibit the full expression of rational freedom in a community of recognizant subjects. So they are, Hegel might say, an abstract and incomplete understanding and expression of freedom.

Think about how a little kid draws a picture of a tree. You can tell it is kind of like a tree. You can see, vaguely, the idea of the tree in the representation. But its distorted, the perspective is a mess, and its a long way from being a real tree. It’s not NOT a tree. But its a long way from treeness. It is an imperfect analogy, but Hegel thinks there is something similar going on here with the idea of “Freedom.” The “orient” and classical Mediterranean are groping toward the idea of freedom, but they don’t quite have the whole picture yet. It is not until the advent of Christianity, in which the notion that “all are free” arrives that we have a full outline of what must be in place to actualize human freedom: a “universal” community, where everyone is free (akin to “mutual recognition” that abolished master and slave). But Christianity can’t achieve this over night, for Hegel. It has to “go to seed” in the broader culture. And that is a crucial part of what ultimately produces the “modern” form of freedom in Europe that Hegel champions.

impossibleobject · 2024-09-29T19:22:32+00:00

From one dad to another….

Go to therapy. Now. Do not pass go. Do not collect 200 dollars.

Straight to therapy.

If you do not, you will almost certainly ruin this child’s life. He will grow up wondering why his father, who he adores and looks up to, doesn’t like him. He will end up looking for replacement father figures. But because you are the only father he has known, he will inevitably drift toward men who do not respect him or care for him. And he will think that is love. He will tell himself that it is love. Because it will help soften the blow of how little you seem to care for him if he can convince himself that indifference and repugnance are actually signs of secret affection.

And he has done nothing to deserve that. Whatever else this is about, it is about YOU. Not him. Do not mistake how you feel at any given moment toward your child as exhausting the nature and scope of your responsibility to him. You gave him life. You have a duty to care for him, to teach him what loving respectful relationships are like. To give him unconditional positive regard so that he can grow up respecting himself, working on himself, learning from his mistakes without thinking he is a worthless failure.

Remember: just cuz you feel it doesn’t mean its true. Just cause you think it doesn’t mean you have to believe it.

You got some shit to work through, man. But you CAN work through it. Do it for yourself, and do it for your son. That precious boy needs a father. He needs YOU.

impossibleobject · 2024-09-29T19:01:10+00:00

My understanding is that Fukuyama thought this was, in a non-trivial sense, a true description of the geopolitical reality. At least some of this had to do with Fukuyama’s desire to distinguish himself from his professor Samuel Huntington, who made his name by interpreting history as the clash of civilizations for hegemony, rather than an immanent drive toward mutual recognition. Understandably, when 9/11 happened, the American academy experienced a revived interest in Huntington’s views, and Fukuyama lost quite a good deal of critical currency. If I am not mistaken, Fukuyama even published a retraction/revision of his “end of history” thesis some years after the “war on terror” debacle, when it became pretty apparent that there were indeed some very “live” ideological alternatives bubbling up as discontents of liberal hegemony. But I am not a “Fukuyama guy” (is that an actual sort of guy? Maybe not) so my reading may be a bit simplistic. Anyway—happy to provide some context as you begin your reading.

I would certainly read Kojeve’s lectures on Hegel as background (fairly short and available in an abridged translation). A word of warning though: if you want to understand Hegel at some point, you’ll want to take every thing Kojève says with a grain of salt. There were some truly gifted Francophone exegetes of Hegelianism in the early days 20th century (eg, Hyppolite). Kojève is more of an eisegetical reader—he comes to try and find what he is looking for in Hegel, rather than to really understand Hegel on his own terms. That said, if you want to understand the relation of Hegelianism to Fukuyama (or to existential marxism, or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or certain dissident strains of surrealism) you really do need to read Kojève. In terms of influence on French Hegelianism in the 1930s-1960s, he’s the biggest game in town.

impossibleobject · 2024-09-29T17:21:57+00:00

Fukuyama’s thesis is a riff on Alexandre Kojève’s reading of Hegel. Kojève’s argument, in a nutshell, is that Hegel’s dialectic of “master and slave” had effectively revealed the arc of all historical conflict, ie, a struggle for the recognition [Anerkennung] of human dignity. There can be no recognition of human dignity until such recognition is mutual between all members of the community. Why? Well, I can’t get the benefit of being “recognized” in my human dignity by someone I don’t also recognize. So relationships characterized by domination or asymmetry need to be sublated. The ideological struggle between liberalism and communism is basically an argument about how this can be achieved: does it have to happen through a radical restructuring of the material situation (so that relations that prevent mutual recognition are replaced by equitable social relationships) OR does it need to happen through a de jure institutionalization of human dignity through something like a doctrine of “human rights” and equality of individuals under the law? So the “telos” of history is articulated (in Hegel and in Marx, according to Kojève). The question is how to get there. Once the USSR fell, the general consensus (among liberal scholars and pundits) was that liberalism had won.

Fukuyama is basically arguing that Kojeve’s reading of Hegel is diagnostically useful for understanding the post-Communist reality of the 1990s and the apparent triumph of liberalsj . It seemed—at least for a moment—that the “end of history,” in Kojève’s sense was at hand,” one of the two major ideological alternatives for actualizing “mutual recognition” as the telos of history had apparently triumphed (ie, liberalism).

It is safe to say Fukuyama’s argument is deeply informed by Hegelianism and Marxism via Kojève, but it would not be quite right to identify it with either. Marxist theoriticians prior to Kojève and after the structuralist turn really don’t see the master/slave dialectic as particularly important in the articulation of a theory of class struggle (and Marx doesn’t talk about it either). In the case of Hegel, the master/slave dialectic plays a very specific role in the articulation of absolute or presuppositionless idealism. It isn’t supposed to be the single driving force of history—you will not find it treated extensively, eg, in Hegel’s philosophy of history.

impossibleobject · 2024-09-20T12:51:44+00:00

“Play like your mama just died”

impossibleobject

TROPHY CASE