I would expand on how fucking ridiculous my philosophy class was in my rural community college if I weren't drunk and apathetic but lets just say there was more than one reference to double dildos in my introductory philosophy course.
No it absolutely is marxist jargon when used in this sense. I took a philosophy course in college and never heard it used this way until I got into the left. Normals don't philosophy so if you tell them anything they think they understand is wrong you are immediately fighting a losing battle.
edit: don't abandon the idea but talk around the word
I took a philosophy course in college and never heard it used this way until I got into the left.
This shows two things:
i.) that philosophy in the Anglosphere is bad and still glued to old eurocentric greek philosophy and a few non continentals, but more importantly ignoring Marxism and the Materialist turn, which was one of the most important ones in practice. Sure you can just go to a random empiricist and say: See how much better this is?! But ignore the material base of the shift that way.
ii.) that you didn't hear enough courses. While in Germany you can do also finish your degree without encountering Marx (if you chose your university accordingly and your focus accordingly) you will have plenty of student and other groups that give some kind of introduction to Marxist though. However if you look at German philosophy of Hegel and around there is no way materialist/idealist conception and I did actually learn the philosophical definition before uni in school in regards to the materialism/idealism battle linked to Plato's idealism conception.
So maybe use the word but say half a sentence in what way you use it (then people might still not accept the word or understand it, but if that is the crux they might be able to say: "Wait a minute!" and then they learn something that is beneficial even outside of Marxism).
my philosophy course called Hegel the first materialist, which is hilarious in retrospect. but at the time I was like hmm, maybe I should read some Hegel.
I have a PhD and specialize in philosophy of science. I never encountered Marx in a single course at any level. I picked all of that up on my own out of interest. It's just not taught in anglophone philosophy programs unless you very deliberately seek it out.
That is quite interesting, though in terms of philosophy of science I get when you skip Marx in the three semesters before research starts and focus on the meat and bones of the base and what is important for your specialization. Quite a cultural difference. It really interests me (but don't give yourself away). How large were philosophers of the linguist in your degree? I guess as substitution for Marx/Hegel/etc. you could go a line between Frege to Russel and Wittgenstein maybe with a bit of Quine (Popper/Kuhn and alike I take for granted).
If not do they substitute Marx with a few people like Hegel/Feuerbach etc. to get some turn towards scientific materialism going?
Of those you mentioned (other than Popper and Kuhn, whom I got a lot of), I definitely got the most Quine, mostly by osmosis. A bit of Frege and a bit more of Russell, but mostly in the context of general history of analytic philosophy stuff as an undergrad. Of the two graduate-level history of philosophy classes I had to take, one of them was on Darwin and the other was on early modern philosophy of science (mostly Descartes, but some Hobbes and Hooke, and so on). My exposure to the classic "Western canon" is actually pretty minimal considering the number of years I spent studying philosophy.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing, in my opinion: I do philosophy of complex systems theory and climate science (especially computational climate models), and I ended up taking a lot more courses on that stuff (and math) than on traditional philosophy. I think that was actually much more useful to me, on the whole: my work doesn't make a whole lot of contact with "regular" philosophy, and I was mostly in a philosophy department because my project was so screamingly interdisciplinary that I didn't really fit anywhere.
Thanks that is quite interesting. I still have some texts about Haeckel in my pile of shame (bit of support of Darwin, bit of finding the threads of eugenic and scientific racism in his work and where the anchors of the nazi racial science were and what parts they did not dock on to).
(bit of support of Darwin, bit of finding the threads of eugenic and scientific racism in his work and where the anchors of the nazi racial science were and what parts they did not dock on to).
Yeah, we actually spent quite a bit of time on this part, and when I've taught this stuff in years since, that tends to be what I emphasize too. The thread from his work to contemporary "social Darwinist" and neo-reactionary stuff is really interesting. Darwin was pretty hostile to that sort of use of his work in his time, and seems to have been a decently chill dude for an English bourgeoisie weirdo.
Insisting that people learn your jargon instead of meeting them where they are at is ultraleftism. If you can't understand that you're going to have a miserable time convincing anyone of anything.
Insisting that people learn your jargon instead of meeting them where they are at is ultraleftism. If you can't understand that you're going to have a miserable time convincing anyone of anything.
There is a large space between: "giving up your terms completely" and "meeting people where they are".
You are correct that I'm not in the US (anymore at least), but it's probably best not to read too much into my spellings, which don't really 100% match with a particular region, and definitely not the one I live in (quick search says program is more common here actually).
I think this does demonstrate that using marxist jargon to explain Marxism makes you harder to understand.
Materialism isn't Marxist jargon though, it's pretty basic philosophy jargon, especially since it's the opposite of idealism
Do you have any idea how many people there are whose entire philosophy education is from reddit? Basic philosophy jargon is too much
Philosophy is when you want to fuck your dad
unironically yes. If you consider yourself a "philosophy understander" you need to understand how stupid everyone thinks what you do is.
I like the thinky people what can confuse me good
I would expand on how fucking ridiculous my philosophy class was in my rural community college if I weren't drunk and apathetic but lets just say there was more than one reference to double dildos in my introductory philosophy course.
that's dialectics
I wish it were that simple
ok I'm going to need you to tell this story in full
No it absolutely is marxist jargon when used in this sense. I took a philosophy course in college and never heard it used this way until I got into the left. Normals don't philosophy so if you tell them anything they think they understand is wrong you are immediately fighting a losing battle.
edit: don't abandon the idea but talk around the word
deleted by creator
This shows two things:
i.) that philosophy in the Anglosphere is bad and still glued to old eurocentric greek philosophy and a few non continentals, but more importantly ignoring Marxism and the Materialist turn, which was one of the most important ones in practice. Sure you can just go to a random empiricist and say: See how much better this is?! But ignore the material base of the shift that way.
ii.) that you didn't hear enough courses. While in Germany you can do also finish your degree without encountering Marx (if you chose your university accordingly and your focus accordingly) you will have plenty of student and other groups that give some kind of introduction to Marxist though. However if you look at German philosophy of Hegel and around there is no way materialist/idealist conception and I did actually learn the philosophical definition before uni in school in regards to the materialism/idealism battle linked to Plato's idealism conception.
So maybe use the word but say half a sentence in what way you use it (then people might still not accept the word or understand it, but if that is the crux they might be able to say: "Wait a minute!" and then they learn something that is beneficial even outside of Marxism).
deleted by creator
my philosophy course called Hegel the first materialist, which is hilarious in retrospect. but at the time I was like hmm, maybe I should read some Hegel.
I have a PhD and specialize in philosophy of science. I never encountered Marx in a single course at any level. I picked all of that up on my own out of interest. It's just not taught in anglophone philosophy programs unless you very deliberately seek it out.
That is quite interesting, though in terms of philosophy of science I get when you skip Marx in the three semesters before research starts and focus on the meat and bones of the base and what is important for your specialization. Quite a cultural difference. It really interests me (but don't give yourself away). How large were philosophers of the linguist in your degree? I guess as substitution for Marx/Hegel/etc. you could go a line between Frege to Russel and Wittgenstein maybe with a bit of Quine (Popper/Kuhn and alike I take for granted).
If not do they substitute Marx with a few people like Hegel/Feuerbach etc. to get some turn towards scientific materialism going?
Of those you mentioned (other than Popper and Kuhn, whom I got a lot of), I definitely got the most Quine, mostly by osmosis. A bit of Frege and a bit more of Russell, but mostly in the context of general history of analytic philosophy stuff as an undergrad. Of the two graduate-level history of philosophy classes I had to take, one of them was on Darwin and the other was on early modern philosophy of science (mostly Descartes, but some Hobbes and Hooke, and so on). My exposure to the classic "Western canon" is actually pretty minimal considering the number of years I spent studying philosophy.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing, in my opinion: I do philosophy of complex systems theory and climate science (especially computational climate models), and I ended up taking a lot more courses on that stuff (and math) than on traditional philosophy. I think that was actually much more useful to me, on the whole: my work doesn't make a whole lot of contact with "regular" philosophy, and I was mostly in a philosophy department because my project was so screamingly interdisciplinary that I didn't really fit anywhere.
Thanks that is quite interesting. I still have some texts about Haeckel in my pile of shame (bit of support of Darwin, bit of finding the threads of eugenic and scientific racism in his work and where the anchors of the nazi racial science were and what parts they did not dock on to).
Yeah, we actually spent quite a bit of time on this part, and when I've taught this stuff in years since, that tends to be what I emphasize too. The thread from his work to contemporary "social Darwinist" and neo-reactionary stuff is really interesting. Darwin was pretty hostile to that sort of use of his work in his time, and seems to have been a decently chill dude for an English bourgeoisie weirdo.
Insisting that people learn your jargon instead of meeting them where they are at is ultraleftism. If you can't understand that you're going to have a miserable time convincing anyone of anything.
There is a large space between: "giving up your terms completely" and "meeting people where they are".
deleted by creator
Of course. Most americans get even less philosophy education than I got, so think about that.
That's interesting, I had obligatory philosophy in my preuniversity programme and it definitely came up
Well that explains why you learned it. The US is a desert of philosophy
You are correct that I'm not in the US (anymore at least), but it's probably best not to read too much into my spellings, which don't really 100% match with a particular region, and definitely not the one I live in (quick search says program is more common here actually).