My dad had a giant poster of Bertrand Russell hanging in our basement.



I thought all families had a poster of Bertrand Russell hanging in their basement

Jacque Derrida

Adi Shankara

John Rawls



Bertrand Russell



Karl Popper



Ludwig Wittgenstein



[Edited 1/24/07 18:54pm]

heartbeatocean said:

I like your dad.

IrresistibleB1tch said:

I love this man.

Stax said:

My dad almost...yeah, almost...got a PhD in philosophy. I don't know anything about Bertrand Russell or ever knew anyone who liked him also! Can you tell me something about his philosophy?

Now I want to know something about all these people. Maybe we could have a philosophy cliff notes thread. Sum it up in three sentences or less!

David Hume - simply one of the most incredible minds of all time. He anticipated Darwin, he demolished the concept of creationism before it even existed, and he was quite a mean economist as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hume

heartbeatocean said:

I have passing knowledge of him - I read "Why I'm Not A Christian" twelve or thirteen years ago, and basically know him as an ardent atheist and an anti-nuclear activist.

...and he was a very accomplished mathematician if I remember correctly...
[Edited 1/24/07 19:29pm]

I'm kind of fond of Soren Kierkegaard


He is considered the father of existentialism. And from wikipedia: Two of his popular ideas are "subjectivity" and the "leap to faith," popularly referred to as the "leap of faith." The leap of faith is his conception of how an individual would believe in God, or how a person would act in love. Kierkegaard also stressed the importance of the self, and the self's relation to the world as being grounded in self-reflection and introspection. http://en.wikipedia.org/w...ierkegaard

And look what quote I found when I googled to find a pic of him:

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."

That was Cat's 'quote' from the Lovesexy tourbook! I wonder if Prince read Kierkegaard... Lovesexy does kind of fit the idea of the individual's belief in God or in love...


----

I also dig Sartre...



http://en.wikipedia.org/w...aul_Sartre

L'enfer, c'est les autres. (Si vrai!!)

heartbeatocean said:

As damosuzuki points out, he was a mathematician. And a logician and a philosopher.

He is considered one of the "founders" of analytic philosophy, which today completely dominates philosophical study in the west. Seriously oversimplifying, the "goal" of analytic philosophy is to use logic to examine and formalize how language is used to discuss philosophical problems so that we may determine whether a particular statement is true, false, or without meaning. This branch of philosophy is itself divided into a number of branches and has launched other areas of philosophical inquiry, such as the philosophy of language.

All of that stuff is great, but I also like him for other reasons. He was a great teacher (Wittgenstein was his student)and a commenter on a variety of subjects. His book History of Western Philosophy is one of the best general overviews of philosophy ever written. It is completely easy to read and engaging.
[Edited 1/24/07 21:25pm]

Stax said:[quote]
Cool. Thanks. For some reason that link between him and Wittgenstein was buried deep in my brain until you mentioned it. I must have got some of this by osmosis from my dad because I never studied it in school. My dad would make me read books by people like Thomas Aquinas for fun.

Now when you say the philosophy of language, does that have anything to do with post-structural semiotic theory (which comes from linguistic/anthropological theory)? I'm thinking of Jacques Derrida who was the father of deconstruction, who created a philosophy based on deconstructing language.

Or are these two fields of thought totally separate? (the philosophy of language and deconstructionism?)

Sorry about all the questions...
[Edited 1/24/07 21:32pm]

On Derrida's wikipedia page I found this:

Though Derrida has addressed the American Philosophical Association on repeated occasions and is highly regarded by contemporary philosophers like Richard Rorty and Stanley Cavell, philosophers coming mainly from analytic philosophy regard his work as pseudophilosophy...

heartbeatocean said:

Rawls: The most important social and political philosopher since Marx. Author of A Theory of Justice, Rawls built off of John Nash's (the subject of the film A Beautiful Mind) ideas of game theory to devise a set of principles of justice to be used to organize social relationships.

Popper: A lion of the philosophy of science. He developed the principle of empirical falsifiability to demarcate scientific subjects from non-scientific subjects

Russell: See above.

Wittgenstein: This is a tough one to encapsulate in a few sentences. He was the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which he began to write in the trenches of World War I. It was his only book published during his lifetime and it convinced Russell that Wittgenstein was a genius and deserved admission to Cambridge to study with and under Russell. It almost reads like a series of haikus. He is considered a giant of analytical philosophy and the philosophy of language. Oversimplifying, the Tractatus set forth various principles used to determine when a sentence is logically meaningful. All other sentences are meaningless and must be passed over in silence. Wittgenstein was somewhat of mystic, however, because he seems to have felt that the real important stuff about the universe cannot be meaningfully discussed.


I am such a geek.

Stax said:

I love it!!!

I come from the semiotic school of theory, however, that factors in cultural relativity, subjectivity, and ideology, which steps on the toes of logic and analytical philosophy -- implying that it is outdated and elite. (But then Derrida was criticised for being elite too)

But I guess from the standpoint of analytical philosophy, anything that appears ideological is considered pseudophilosophy. But the semioticians would say everything is ideological.

heartbeatocean said:

I have met Rorty, but I didn't ask him about Derrida.

heartbeatocean said:

To the analytic philosopher, almost all philosophy is pseudophilosophy.

A bit more about Deconstructionism:

At its core, if it can be said to have one, deconstruction is an attempt to open a text (literary, philosophical, or otherwise) to several meanings and interpretations. Its method is usually based on binary oppositions within a text — for example inside and outside or subject and object, or male and female.

'Deconstruction' then argues that such oppositions are culturally and historically defined, even reliant upon one another, and seeks to demonstrate that they are not as clear-cut or as stable as it would at first seem. On the basis that the two opposed concepts are fluid, this ambiguity is used to show that the text's meaning is fluid as well.

This fluidity stands against a legacy of traditional metaphysics (that is, Platonist thought) founded on oppositions, that seeks to establish a stability of meaning through conceptual absolutes.

And this is kind of interesting:

No "meaning" is stable: Derrida called the "metaphysics of presence" the thing that keeps the sense of unity within a text; where presence was granted the privilege of truth.

I always consider Derrida a mystic.

I'm a total geek.

heartbeatocean said:

I forgot to add that Wittgenstein once chased Popper around a Cambridge classroom, threatening him with a fireplace stoker.

Stax said:

Too bad! I would have picked his brain!

Stax said:

That sounds pretty philosophical.

Why do I always hear about people writing treatises in the trenches of WWI?

heartbeatocean said:

Stax said:

I miss school.