Epistemology is about reducing something down to what we can know. Identifying the building blocks of knowledge if you will. It follows the guideline of Occam's razor that the simplest explanation is probably the best. Calling it reductionist is missing the point. Reductionism isn't a bad thing necessarily.
I like some kinds of reductionism, so I used the qualifier "painful". I just don't see the use in the idea - where it adds any information to our understanding, or makes any novel categorization or classification, or even just as a fun concept to toy around with. That's probably my own shortcoming, but also maybe there's a reason Stirner isn't taken very seriously in academia.
Epistemology is about reducing something down to what we can know. Identifying the building blocks of knowledge if you will. It follows the guideline of Occam's razor that the simplest explanation is probably the best. Calling it reductionist is missing the point. Reductionism isn't a bad thing necessarily.
I like some kinds of reductionism, so I used the qualifier "painful". I just don't see the use in the idea - where it adds any information to our understanding, or makes any novel categorization or classification, or even just as a fun concept to toy around with. That's probably my own shortcoming, but also maybe there's a reason Stirner isn't taken very seriously in academia.
Philosophy is the most fun you can have being frustrated and I wish it was easier to have discussions about it over message boards.