Tag Archives: Thrasymachus

What Hegelian e-girls understand and Ken Wilber doesn’t

11 Sunday Aug 2024

Posted by in Dialectic, German Tradition, Politics

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My fortysomething self is trying to come to grips with the apparent phenomenon of Hegelian e-girls (scroll down a bit on the linked page for details). I have still not really figured out exactly what an e-girl is in general: it often seems to involve having an anime-based appearance or aesthetic, like pink pigtails, but the girls in question here don’t look very anime to me.

anna kw and Nikki the Hegelian, from their Twitter feeds.

Specifically, the leading Hegelian e-girls appear to be two young New Yorkers on Twitter who go by anna kw and Nikki the Hegelian. There’s nothing particularly startling about two people combining a feminine online aesthetic with Hegelian philosophy on their own; the Internet is full of people who make a niche by combining one thing with another thing. What’s more striking is their apparent popularity: it appears that these two held a Hegelian e-girl event and 700 people RSVPed.

I don’t think that any of this is a joke. On the internet it is always so hard to tell who is being ironic or trolling. But as far as I can tell, anna and Nikki are serious about being Hegelian philosophers and are not making up the popularity of their event. If so, it feels to me like a really pleasant surprise. I’ve been hoping more young people would discover the continuing relevance of philosophy, but despite my own love for Hegel I would never have expected it would be him – not given the notorious difficulty of his work.

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What we learn from the negative moments in Plato and Thucydides

05 Sunday Dec 2021

Posted by in Economics, Friends, Greek and Roman Tradition, Hope, Politics, Sophists

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My oldest friendship is with Nicholas Thorne, whom I met in the 1970s. That’s not a typo, even though he and I are in our mid-40s; the friendship began, so our parents say, when he crawled up to my house’s doorstep, before we were old enough to walk. He is probably the one who most sparked my interest in philosophy, when he studied in James Doull’s Hegelian department at Dalhousie University and was delighted by what he found. It was through him that I found my lifelong interest in Hegel. Eventually, both of us got our PhDs in philosophical fields but, as is so typical for our generation and those after, neither of us found long-term full-time faculty work.

Nevertheless, we both kept up our passion for philosophy and kept writing. I’m delighted that Thorne has now published a book, Liberation and Authority, and I’m pleased to review it here.

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Verifying normative claims

12 Sunday Nov 2017

Posted by in Epistemology, Foundations of Ethics, M.T.S.R., Natural Science, Politics

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Several months ago I wrote a post defending scholars’ normative (“should”) claims, in response to Craig Martin’s attack on them. Craig responded right away on Facebook with what he described as “initial, provisional responses”. My reply to these replies is considerably more tardy, but here it is. First, Craig’s provisional replies (which he graciously gave me permission to quote):

1) I think you’re wrong that should statements are as intersubjectively verifiable as empirical statements. Even if you hate my politics you can see that, given a shared definition of “cat” and “house,” it’s clear that I have 3 cats in my house. Should they be declawed? How would answers to the latter question be equally intersubjectively verifiable?

2) Of course the methodological principle I advance is itself a normative claim. Two things can be said about this. Continue reading →

Relativism and reason (II)

15 Sunday Jul 2012

Posted by in Epistemology, German Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Hermeneutics, Metaphilosophy, Sophists, Truth

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In last week’s post I began responding to my friend Momin Malik, who had defended relativism against ideas of universal truth. Momin had argued for relativism based on the need for internal understanding: we need to understand others in terms that make sense to them. I agreed with this – noting that every universalism needs a theory of error, and one which understands others in those kinds of internal terms is the best one.

Momin responded that this was not possible: “An internalist theory of error would require the universalist to give credence to the internal dynamics of another system, which would violate its universalism.” Continue reading →

A relativist gongfu ethics

23 Wednesday Jun 2010

Posted by in Confucianism, Epistemology, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, French Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Modern Hinduism, Morality, Politics, Sophists, Truth

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In his talk at the conference this year, SACP president Peimin Ni pushed further on the claim he made last year: the idea of philosophy as a technique. I was fortunate to spend a long and enjoyable lunch discussing the talk and its ideas with him further. (I love the SACP conferences because their format is designed to encourage the emergence of mealtime conversations like this; last year I enjoyed a similarly thoughtful discussion with Ted Slingerland.) The present post recounts the ideas expressed at the lunch, naturally from my own side; I hope I am being fair to Ni’s arguments in what follows.

Ni’s talk focused on the Chinese concept of gongfu 功夫, dating from the early centuries CE and meaning any practical art – it could include calligraphy, sports, cooking, good judgement or statecraft. (Although the word gongfu has long ago passed into English with an alternate spelling, it is probably best to keep using the Pinyin spelling rather than confuse people with a term most associate with goofy movies about roundhouse kicks.)

Gongfu as Ni understands it then bears some resemblance to the Greek concept of technē, or Alasdair MacIntyre’s concept of practice, with one crucial difference. Aristotle’s technē involves a telos; it is embedded within a larger determinate framework of human flourishing. With gongfu, on the other hand, Ni agreed with my earlier characterization of the process as a technique. It is open to us to choose our aims; gongfu merely allows us to achieve those aims. There is a gongfu of killing as well as a gongfu of saving. Continue reading →

What does postmodernism perform?

21 Sunday Feb 2010

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Epistemology, Faith, French Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Islam, Logic, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Modern Hinduism, Politics, Sex, Sophists, Truth

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The term “postmodernism” (or “poststructuralism”) is notoriously elusive; it’s sometimes said that if you think you know what it is, you don’t. But that doesn’t stop its practitioners from talking about it, and I don’t think it should stop anyone else either. I will use “postmodernism” to refer to a set of ideas, widely held among academics in the past 30 years, which takes inspiration from Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, and denies the worth of claims to truth. One will frequently find postmodernists (John Caputo is one of the more explicit about this) claiming that “the truth is that there is no truth.”

The claim that there is no truth is false. It contains a contradiction that cannot be resolved unless one takes it to mean something very different from what it appears to mean. Nor is this one of that narrow group of paradoxes which could be taken as true on the grounds of Graham Priest’s dialetheism. Priest tries to argue that most of the problems with contradiction stem not from accepting some contradictions, but from accepting all; but if one accepts “there is no truth,” one comes much closer to allowing all contradictions in. Indeed postmodernists often approvingly quote the philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend in telling us that “anything goes.”

It is not true that there is no truth. What is crucial about this and other postmodern claims, however, is that its truth value is not the point. Like Stanley Fish, postmodernists shift our attention away from contradiction and truth entirely, claiming they’re not the important thing. (Caputo at one point approves one of his opponent’s moves because “it drops the stuff about contradiction and actually addresses the issues.”) Drawing on J.L. Austin’s theory of speech acts, postmodernists will argue that the reason to make such a claim against truth is its performative dimension. The point, that is, is not what the sentence says, but what it does.

It is on this last point, however, that the evidence against postmodernism seems strongest. What, exactly, has postmodernism accomplished? I have previously mentioned cognitive dissonance and spiritual transformation as reason to be concerned about contradictions. But these are typically not at the forefront of postmodern concern. Rather, most postmodern writers express some sort of concern for marginalized political groups – women, gays, transgendered people, the poorer or working classes, people in nonwhite racial groups, people from colonized societies. But what has postmodernism actually done to improve their situation?
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