I’m speechless. You’ve beaten Dunamis in a day. Here a Dunamisian idea:
“The “hot” of the stove and the sensation of pain are but two possible ideations of the body, and therefore hot-as-pain-causing is but one possible idea.”
So no. Sometimes it won’t burn you. 
I am not educated enough, to understand all those big words. Is it possible, that people use those as a smokescreen to cover their own ignorances? I mean you imbarrass yourself if you admit you cannot understand them, do most people, pretend to understand, and continue in ignorance, rather than question and ask that these statements be simplified for them?
I am going to say one more thing tonite. I know why socrates was made to commit suicide. He admitted that his wisdom was the fact he realized the extent of his own ignorance. Well, he was still considered a very wise man. He freely shared his wisdom without selling it out, as his inferior counterparts were trying to do. How could Greece control a population of Socrates’? Their services were made obsolete, and inferior. How can a government lead by people who cannot control themselves, lead people who CAN control themselves? I intend to find out.
Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for life.
socrates thought life was a disease…
what did his last words mean?
teach a man to fish then have him fish for you to repay your schooling him…
-Imp
I see two ironies here working in your favor. First, big words are no evidence of education. One can parrot something they hear without giving it much thought. Second, you are probably not stupid enough to not be able to understand anything ever said, because truths are simple and universal.
So, despite your modesty, you are selling yourself short. Knowing what a word means…means nothing. Hell, dictionaries can do that. Using words contextually is where the architecture is. And you’re right, sometimes words are so deliberately verbose that they are suspicious of buying time or distracting and confusing, while appearing authoritative through complex rhetoric. (rhetoric means roughly: speech style) For example, a politican who pushes an agenda not by logical proofs, but by a series of appealings to various personal desires which would be quenched if “such and such” ideas were accepted. His speech style uses a device to gain the favor of the listener, and before the listener knows it, he believes everything he hears and submits entirely to his opinions.
Man, someone has to call this guy.
answers you will find
truth you won’t
sorry
Detrop, maybe you can answer me this question:
Why do girls like Sartreans? Sartre himself was hideously ugly (not my description, but one I agree with) but when I was a Sartrean (around 17-18, before I learnt that his philosophy is unmitigated tosh) I was quite the ladies man. Now of course deconstruction does nothing for your social life (except allowing you to make exceedingly clever puns) though it a superior philosophy in almost every way, so once again, what makes the girls go for Satreans?
I don’t see Sartre as ugly. He was a normal looking fellow as I recall. You might want to run the looks to value concept by Steven Hawking and see what he thinks about it.
Meanwhile, what is it about Sartre’s philosophy that is “tosh” in your opinion.
Well, there was a time when Sartre wasn’t so ugly, in his thirties and early fourties. Even with the lazy eye, he did well with the ladies because of his overall social prowess and otherwise attractive, in a sort of prestigious “dashing with a pipe” intellectual way, image and disposition. And, just between you and me, I think his association with the beaver and her active feminism, combined with his radical idea of freedom, made him popular with women.
The dude was just all around cool. Seriously. You know he let his students smoke in class and wear what they wanted? And, get this, he hung out with them after school. They’d go to bars together.
I should smack you, young man.
Anyway, women don’t like deconstructionists. I was one while in elementary school and I can tell 'ya the girls weren’t interested. Only in the third grade after I gave a second shot at Transcendentalism, did I begin to have any luck. Fortunately Sartrean existentialism can be closely compared to it in a Cartesian sorta way, so it works.
Can someone explain these words to me, Sartreans, unmitigated, deconstructionist, transcendtalism, and existentialism. I honestly don’t know what they mean, but I would like to learn.
Oh and tosh too please.
a pro wont give you a strait answer anyway so consider urself a pro
Dear all (several responses in one go)
Hawking - similarly ugly, similarly overrated intellectually, similarly popular with the ladies…
Off the top of my head
You could well be right about that, though he did used to beat the beaver…
I’m not convinced
That doesn’t make him a great philosopher…
I’m not looking for a fight, but I’d like to see you try.
Tell that to the wives of Derrida, Foucault, De Man, Deleuze, Norris et al
Cartesianism is tosh also…
Sartreans - followers of Jean Paul Sartre, a french philosopher
unmitigated - I was using in the sense of being inexcusable, but it more generally means
Not diminished or moderated in intensity or severity; unrelieved: (dictionary.com)
deconstructionist - a philosopher or critical thinker of some sort who to a greater or lesser extent follows the arguments and writings of the poststructuralists, a group of late 20th century philosophers, primarily French and American
transcendentalism - a philosophy founded on metaphysical beliefs and allegedly a priori laws of experience, reasoning etc.
existentialism - a movement in philosophy generally thought to have started with Kierkegaard and running at least until the mid 20th century with the French existentialists Sartre and Camus. It has since been superseded in French intellectual society by structuralism and poststructuralism which in my mind are far more interesting and contain more valid arguments
tosh - rubbish, nonsense, poppycock, balderdash, flimflam
Ohhh no you don’t. I’m on to 'ya, bud. You’re that quiet kid who’s super-smart and knows so much he doesn’t even bother with philosophy anymore except to get a degree and make a paycheck every week.
I wouldn’t dare provoke you, SIATD. I’ve been watching you and I know you’re holding back. So don’t play the ‘I’d like to see you try’ games with me, dude. Yeah, I bet you would like me to sign my own death warrant. I wasn’t born yesterday.
So here, take my lunch money and leave me alone.
Ha Ha Ha!!! THAT was a good one!!! …and Detrop takes the lead…this is better than drag racing!!! and I love to race. Good show. Both of you guys. Ultimate Philosophy?? Bring it…
Dear detrop
I’m presently without a paycheck. And I just bought a first edition of Michel Houellebecq’s new novel (not available in the UK until next year) for 29 quid on ebay…
Believe me, if I could find a way of making money purely out of being smart (I’ve thought about becoming a lawyer but I’d rather be a spin doctor) then I wouldn’t spend so much time online dissing other people’s intellectual heroes.
I’m not super-smart but I did stop formally studying philosophy 2 years ago and now only read it for fun and so I can beat people in arguments…
Quiet? Bah! Over a thousand posts (and every response to aspacia) would seem to contradict that.
It wouldn’t be your own death warrant, but I don’t think you’d be able to defend Sartre (particularly in his Cartesian moments) against the attacks I’d make.
Of course I’m holding back, this is an internet forum. Only my very closest friends have access to the finer points of my imagination. And the literary agents who all seem to think my novels aren’t worth publishing…
No no no no no no no no no…
I’m not interested in lunch money, I want you to offer at least a token response to the points I raised regarding Sartre. I think he was little more than a sign of the times, a zeitgeist philosopher who shot to fame because he was timely, because the atmosphere was right. This of course totally contradicts his whole existential ‘the world is my project’ philosophy…
edit - you could to an extent reconcile Sartre’s later work with my comments.
“Why Sartre is Tosh” by SIATD
Then anyone who has ever spoken a philosophical word is tosh. Here we have an attempt at unoriginality when, if he continued, he would be mentioning that these two ‘seem to be’ Brentano but ‘with a little bit more.’
This first one is a piece of straw. Everybody has influences.
His notion of the self starts at Cartesian axioms but ends up moving in an entirely different direction, so that the refutations provided against Descartes do not work like one would suspect against Sartre. He agreed with Descartes insofar as consciousness must always be conscious of itself- this ontological necessity of the cogito, as Descartes would have it. However, for Sartre the proof for the ‘self’ was not the direct knowledge of consciousness, but rather the pre-reflective state of non-positional or non-cognitive consciousness. Spontaneous consciousness is not Cartesian, it only becomes Cartesian when it reflects methodologically on itself- being aware of being aware is the proof of self, therefore non-positional consciousness is pre-reflective and exists before the question can be raised. For example, using a tool that one is familar with, they will act habitually without paying any notice of their tool use, almost as if they did it automatically. But only upon the reflection of the self as using-the-tool does the cogito come into being as thetical and therefore methodological. The spontaneous consciousness is that which directs actions without reflected knowledge or awareness of the actions as intended, and only later becomes identifiable as the ‘self’ during post-reflection of the self’s activity. The method, precisely that which Descartes used to prove his ‘self,’ is in fact fallacious because he does not find proof in ‘thinking therefore I am’ as he can doubt what it is that he is thinking, but because he has formulated a complex association between spontaneous autonomous action and methodological intentional action, revealing the part of his consciousness that exists necessarily as not the action it is conscious of, and therefore transcendent.
Sartre uses an example of a man who ignites a barrel of gun-powder with his cigarette accidentally, and demonstrates that the man has not acted in the sense that he has posited some intention to his action. Only if and when he engages in action purposely does he truely act, and where he does not act, he does not exist. Just as the tool user who does not focus on his actions in using the tool cannot have methodological consciousness, neither can the man who acidentally acts by igniting the powder keg. Both are only examples of spontaneous consciousness and therefore not the reflective cogito. The proof of the self happens when one is thinking about acting, not thinking and acting. The thought is the action of the self when the cogito is in question.
Well you are aware that Sartre held firmly the Marxist ideology of materialism and therefore espoused the determinism of economy and socialism. Ironically enough, he was promoting freedom of the individual by seeking to overcome the very elements that alienate him- his class repression and participation in competative consumer scarcity. His political view can be summed as ‘capitalism causing exploitation of freedom’ because of having too much economic freedom. Funny how things work out historically. Most don’t have the Hegelean telescope necessary to see the whole progression in action- how individual freedom and political determinism function when combined.
That would have to be unpacked a little more. How do you define “meaning?”
This is personal opinion and does not warrant a response. Besides, nihilism is impossible. It is a negative- to believe that things are meaningless is a meaningful activity.
Yeah but see, you could put Sartre in a toga or a spandex jump-suit and he’d be just as clever.
Dear detrop,
Thankyou for your response.
Of course, and Husserl is just Brentano with a little bit more. I dunno that much about Heidegger, having not had the time to read more than excerpts and commentaries.
But some are more original than others, Heraclitus proposed certain ideas (or seemed to be proposing certain ideas) that had very little precedent in philosophy, whereas Plato was for the most part rehashing the word of Parmenides. Sartre is, relative to other philosophers, profoundly unoriginal.
I thought that according to Sartre consciousness had to be consciousness of something, rather than consciousness of itself. Perhaps I’m misreading…
What’s the difference between consciousness and consciousness of consciousness? What is the experienced difference?
One of Descartes’ many fallacies is that he argues by assertion that the waking life is more real than the dreaming life, that while he is dreaming of being on a beach he is really in his chair by the fire. Sartre, similarly, argues that the pre-reflective cogito is more genuine than the non-pre-reflective cogito, though he never offers a reason as to why. In the above example the tool doesn’t feel any different to the man once he’s actually thought to himsef ‘I am using a tool’. That’s just a repetition of certain signifiers to oneself (though how one can ‘hear’ thought baffles me…) rather than any fundamental shift in states of consciousness.
Also the notion of a self reflecting on itself seems at the least confused if not wholly contradictory. Descartes had the same problem, his only answer being to presume that it was he that was doing the doubting as to whether he existed as well as the thing that was being doubted as to whether or not it existed. A ‘rash assertion’ according to Nietzsche, and one which Sartre also presumes.
i.e. one can only identify it after the event, it is a construction of reflection, an abstraction. Ironic, really, that in trying to maintain the line between spontaneous consciousness and pre-reflective consciousness Sartre actually needs pre-reflective consciousness in order to explain spontaneous consciousness. Ironic, and something which begins to unravel the very distinction he needs…
No, he’s spun out a series of logical fallacies into a confused map of unproven assertions. He’s leapt from ‘this thing called consciousness that I at present perceive myself to have had in the past’ to ‘this necessary aspect of this thing called consciousness that allows me to perceive in the aforementioned way’. Both rely on a sort of consciousness-in-itself which is not in evidence and seems like little more than a wishful abstraction that derives from the difference between doing something and thinking to oneself ‘I am doing something’.
If an idiot accidentally sets off a barrel of gunpowder that resulted in Sartre losing one of his testicles he wouldn’t be making spurious assertions that the idiot does not exist. No matter how much Sartre might like consciousness and experience to be separate if I whipped him he’d still feel pain and know it…
The distinction (between intentional action and accidental action) isn’t convincing in the slightest, especially when it’s clear that one can only name an action as intentional after the event and that it is a big leap to claim that in the future it will be so…
But one needs the reflective cogito in order to make that statement…
Thinking is acting. Sartre needs the self to be the origin of action and thought, but is simply asserting that the self is somehow different but also the same when it is thinking as to when it is acting.
It’s very ironic that his (earlier) philosophy has more in tune with capitalism than Marxism, that in fact he was what would now be called a liberal (i.e. a capitalist).
One could just rid oneself of the oppressive notion of individual freedom of the will, and learn a respect for the world…
The whole existential project, that the world is only meaningful because I choose for it to be so via intentional pre-reflective consciousness. Again, it relies on a highly dubious distinction (which originates in Descartes, as you correctly stated) between consciousness and consciousness of consciousness.
It isn’t personal - it is one shared by a great many people.
Of course it is, but that isn’t nihilism. Nihilism is not believing anything, rather than affirmatively believing in meaninglessness.
i.e. not very clever at all (in my view)