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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  3641 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Beyond true and false

Here's why I hate philosophy, philosophers, and philosophical questions:

    Embarrassing as this predicament might appear, Nagarjuna is far from being the only one stuck in it. The great lodestar of the German Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant, said that there are things one cannot experience (noumena), and that we cannot talk about such things. He also explained why this is so: our concepts apply only to things we can experience. Clearly, he is in the same fix as Nagarjuna. So are two of the greatest 20th-century Western philosophers. Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed that many things can be shown but not said, and wrote a whole book (the Tractatus), explaining what and why. Martin Heidegger made himself famous by asking what Being is, and then spent much of the rest of his life explaining why you can’t even ask this question.

Behold: four fabled philosophers who are extrapolating "I" to WE.

Fuck off, Kant. He didn't say that, anyway - he said that there might be knowledge not derived from the senses but that since we can't sense it we can't derive it. He said it in direct contradiction of Plato and Platonic ideas and you know what? They're both wrong and not-wrong. Trust a philosopher to try and turn Buddha's Venn Diagram into Boolean logic.

"No common contemporary critical term raises hackles more quickly than "deconstructionism", and rightly so since those who use the term almost always sound wildly confused. Probably the truth is not so much that they are confused as that they are hamstrung by worship of Heidegger."

- John Gardner





user-inactivated  ·  3641 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Paraconsistent logics actually are useful, not just in philosophy, and the author has done a lot of great work with them. This article just makes his case badly. I think it's because he's trying to leave out anything that might be intimidating, but he made some really strange choices if so; Konig's paradox originally applied to the reals. It applies to the ordinals, because all you need is an uncountably infinite well-ordered set, but everyone is familiar with the reals and not so many are familiar with transfinite arithmetic.

edit: but Venn diagrams are always equivalent to expressions in boolean logic, because of the duality of set theory and logic.

kleinbl00  ·  3641 days ago  ·  link  ·  

But Venn diagrams are used freely and readily by people who would rather drink bleach than study set theory without having to know they're a part of set theory.

Forcing set theory down the throat of people who think in Venn diagrams will never be a wise debate move.