And my day just got better

I literally jumped with joy when I saw this a few minutes ago. I'm working on my undergraduate dissertation and this is the, "secret sauce" I'll need to round things out. I literally was considering jumping on a plane to New York in the hope of talking to Darren about Rorty and Hilary Putnam. Yes. This is my Christmas and Birthday right here. Thank you so much. I'm truly elated.

@kaimarmalade9660

7 ай бұрын

Fun fact: I thought Hilary Putnam was a lady for like 10 years straight.

@kaimarmalade9660

7 ай бұрын

A small contribution-- I think Rorty's, "no more capital T, "truth"" thinking will be really important in developing the concept of, "mentally ill." We have to at some point drop the distinctions between brain disorders and, "social and personality disorders" and the spiritual disorders that come from a improperly governed soul. All three perspectives are required for proper diagnosis and treatment but M.D.s are really only working in one domain at a time. This creates a crisis where many mentally ill people shun treatment as even when the underlying brain disorder is being treated this creates, "an excuse" not to tackle the aesthetic, social, and spiritual effects of their illness. You see a kind of inverse of this in Alcoholics Anonymous.

@kaimarmalade9660

7 ай бұрын

I was a survivor of domestic violence and all while I was being treated as a teenager I wanted to scream, "I don't need a fucking doctor. I need a Socrates to talk to. I need a friend like Soren Kirkegaard." I'm just now realizing that wasn't such a crazy request!

@willmercury

7 ай бұрын

​@@kaimarmalade9660You may not have a Socrates or a Kierkegaard to talk to, but they're always there to listen to. Keep on truckin'.

@BboyKeny

7 ай бұрын

​@@kaimarmalade9660Sounds very interesting. If your dissertation is released for the public, then I would love to read it. On Socrates I think Dr. Vervaeke has a really good series on Socrates here on KZread. Which focuses on how we can be Socrates for eachother. It's not just stories and insights about Socrates but also guided meditation and exercises. Maybe you've seen it already, but if not I would highly recommend if you can find some time.

The first 10 minutes of this lecture = a semester long history of modern philosophy course for freshman. Bravo; couldn't have explained more succinctly.

0:00 Title Sequence 0:26 Introduction to who Richard Rorty is. 1:16 Moving in a Pragmatic Direction 1:45 Commitment to Democracy. 2:08 No Absolutes, Many Forms. 2:26 Critique of Philosophical Tradition, Truth, Reality. Bring back “little p” philosophy. 2:57 _Philosophy and The Mirror of Nature_ 3:20 A Medium, A 3rd party, truth as correspondence 4:06 Rene Descartes 5:26 Veil of Ideas. Skepticism. 5:51 Do our ideas correspond with Reality as it Really Is? 6:42 Contingency across cultures. Conceptual Schemes are contingent. 7:50 Language and Meaning; Mind and Ideas. 8:39 Why bother giving foundation? 9:02 God’s Eye View, (Perfect Sight.) 10:05 Plato’s Philosopher King 👑 The Komitzar of High Culture 10:37 Architectonic Cultural Role. Poet to Scientist to Philosopher. 11:17 Free Play of Disciplines. No one is The Queen of All The Sciences. 12:36 Theory of Truth. Trivialized. Wrong. Cliché. 13:43 “Truth is nothing more than a property of sentences.” 14:48 “Truth is what’s good in the way of belief.” 15:14 Change The Conversation. 19:14 Anti-Realism 20:22 Little p philosophy • Relations 25:24 No Big Reality, they’re all contingent. We are the center. There is nothing outside of us. 26:43 “My Love is a Rose.” 🥀 🌹 28:07 Strong Poets. 29:32 Postmodern, Bourgeoise, Liberal Society • Ralph Waldo Emerson • Frederick Douglas • Albert Einstein 31:21 Final Vocabulary and Doubt. 32:40 Yurgen Habermas 33:48 Cruelty of Humiliation. 34:48 _The Invisible Man_ 36:17 How many people even care about Philosophy? Shared life. 37:00 We is Our Ethnos. Our Kind of People Don’t Steal. 38:34 Ethnocentricity of The West distrusts itself and remains open. 39:47 No Public Algorithm. 40:17 Cultural Implications. 41:03 (Open Society.) Philosopher not a master on high Rather Philosopher is a jack of all trades 42:39 Literary Critics have expanded out of talking about literature. Literary critics grew into an eclectic cultural critic. 44:23 The expansion of philosophy to the common people.

@_PanchoVilla

7 ай бұрын

Not all heroes wear capes

This man's intellectual swagger is immaculate.

@brianmaguire6814

7 ай бұрын

Like that hair 😂

@Ethan2Tone

7 ай бұрын

@@brianmaguire6814 yes, first thing I noticed. 😂

“Babe get over here, the new Dr Staloff lecture just dropped”

One of your absolute best, Professor. Rorty is the one modern philosopher I love to hate.

*lights joint

@Mai-Gninwod

7 ай бұрын

Hey Willy B it's Willy D here right there with you

@kaimarmalade9660

7 ай бұрын

Also a, "smoke pot and Sugrue out" cat. Taking a break now to get my REM sleep cycles back. Cheers WillyB. Pursue truth always brother.

Slavoj zizek typifies the cultural critic he talked in the last minutes of the lecture

Been waiting for the next installment... Woot🎉

Beautiful presented

Such an amazing lecture

Good lectures are better than bad lecture, and this lecture is better than a good lecture

Thank you!

All these years later putting a name to a face. Used to listen to you guys on cassettes! All the best

Hello Dr. Sugrue! Was just wondering if it’d be possible for you to talk about your thoughts on bulgakov’s master and maragarita. Been reading a lot of satirists like hunter Thompson, will rogers, and vonnegut for a class on satire, with that one being my absolute favorite I’ve read this year. Even just a brief mention in one of your unplugged episodes would be huge!

@thejackbancroft7336

7 ай бұрын

No

Woah new Michael sugrue? Lit

I almost cried at the end of this. I don't think I've ever heard words more liberating

Just what the doctor ordered ❤

There will be no final answers, nor should we even want them. The point is just to keep talking; that's the end in itself

@kaimarmalade9660

7 ай бұрын

I'm really into this but why is it that when I, "talk a certain way about electrons" I get computers and when I talk about, "pointy atoms causing me to feel pain when I eat a pepper" I don't get computers? What about Adam Smith? I fail to see how Rorty can really explain the affluence of the west other than it being a kind of historical fluke. Perhaps I'm asking a lower case, "p" philosopher to do technological anthropology and that's misguided.

@kaimarmalade9660

7 ай бұрын

"We're better at talking to each other" seems to satisfy sufficient but not necessary conditions for giving an account of why the United States' produces Rortys and Putnams and the Kingdom of Tonga by comparison typically does not. Obviously not picking on the Tongans here.

No we can apply a physics model to it. It would allow for a deeper understanding, it takes the woo out of it by focusing on what we can know.

21 minutes in i became enlightened

Great hair and teeth! Mr Rogers-like sweater. Will check back in 25-30 years to listen to the professor. Bet he's a runner, too.

The problem with "tolerance" is that it's always you being asked to tolerate something egregious, and the person saying that you must tolerate it essentially becoming another little king. Whom you now are expected to bow to, yet again. So you get the charade of people being jailed for protesting in one city but not another, and people making good money tearing apart innocent victims because they work in a "hospital." This is Tolerance.

@vincentmalloy8423

7 ай бұрын

how do you define tolerance then? and if not tolerance, then how should we function?

@mixedmattaphors

7 ай бұрын

Good question. I don't know. I guess I just thought it seemed a little easy how the doctor says it, but it's also easy how I'm saying it, here. I guess it's more perplexing, than I thought. @@vincentmalloy8423

@Th3BigBoy

5 ай бұрын

Excellently stated.

@Ortho_Clips

17 күн бұрын

⁠”should”

Strong poet is someone who is good at creating and using memes

@gerhitchman

Ай бұрын

exactly

Can someone explain to me why Rorty's take on truth as a linguistic property is different from Wittgenstein's perspective of it?

@codawithteeth

3 ай бұрын

rorty’s take is inspired by wittgenstein’s

a clear description of the intellectual und ethical bankruptcy of pragmatism leading to the present day nihilism in the west.

Maybe there is no "queen" of all the sciences, but, after listening to hundreds of hours of philosophy lectures (Sugrue, Staloff, Roderick, West, etc.), I'm certain that literature is a much better medium for imparting wisdom (not necessarily didactic) about how best to live a fulfilling life here on earth. Philosophy falls short.

@Mnimosa

Күн бұрын

Interesting observation, and not to forget that Rorty joined a department of comparative literature. What we call philosophy has different identities according to the historical period you look at. At the birth of modernity, its abstract language allowed a relatively safer space to question an extremely intrusive authority that pretended to possess the ultimate secrets of human existence. Philosophers at the time had to face straight on and deconstruct an elaborate language of justification for an oppressive order. Later this abstract language perhaps became an impediment to a more straightforward conversation. At the time of the Greeks, philosophical schools helped develop a vocabulary to compare existential choices that they observed in their commerce with other cultures. You may question the relevance of philosophy today... I would say reading it historically helps quite a bit in putting it all together (or apart). If you value literature, the pragmatic point of view may let you consider philosophy as just one literary genre among others, and a quite interesting one.

@christinemartin63

Күн бұрын

@@Mnimosa Maybe you're right that philosophy may have started with its heart in the right place. But now? The academicians, mental acrobats, and self-absorbed opportunists have stripped the heart of its flesh and drained it of its blood. If you profess to be a philosopher (or a priest or a psychologist or a professor), much is expected of you--the audience is listening. My plumber needs to know how to fix faucets. The philosopher needs to know the wisdom of the world, interpret it, and impart it. Getting and retaining "a job" is nowhere near enough. But, hey, it's OK. Big Daddy AI will take care of everything for us. Not to worry 😱😏.

This objective to end all suffering only compounds it, we have that experience now with Nietzsche's last man. The objective ought to be to change our attitude to suffering, to be able to perceive it as an opportunity for growth and development.

nice

The foolish ones took their lamps but did not take any oil with them.

Yes

A shared solidarity??

We could say that about the academic interpretation of Nietzsche

YES!!!

Prof. Sugrue's Mini Me

The philosopher would become the conductor of an amazing orchestra.

My soul used to encourage me to steal and he used to scream " this is Sparta" . It was very much a part of my training to become fearless.

Hello World!

@kaimarmalade9660

7 ай бұрын

Hello Erickomar. It's nice having you.

I can hear Hilary Putnam giggling somewhere

If we teach and encourage people to focus on what is within their control, their response to their thoughts, feelings and external events, to stop imposing their morality on Nature and instead seek to understand it, they can establish their own values and define their own morality, would this not be true democracy, a decentralisation of power.

We could start with the first line of the gospel of Saint John.

Rorty is, for me, as an eager autodidact, bliss:----pure, unbeleaguered bliss.

"What is truth?"

@dr.michaelsugrue

7 ай бұрын

This is what Pilate asked Jesus, who did not reply. The Word is not a word, thus Tarski's true, uninformative tautology.

Ah no, I for one have a duty to Nature. What else ought I do with my freedom.

In terms of its basic assertions, isnt this basically nietzsche?

@dr.michaelsugrue

7 ай бұрын

Rorty has always impressed me as being country club Nietzsche, the "software" version of an antidepressant meds for jaded suburbanites, who, like Rorty, believe themselves possessors of superior powers of moral discernment, and, again like Rorty, cannot and will not attempt to justify such a belief because it obviously and admittedly cannot be justified. A guilt free ego trip for those whose will to power is expressed as moral preening. What a breakthrough.

@willmercury

7 ай бұрын

​​@@dr.michaelsugrueIndeed. And downstream, we have Rorty's and the postmodernists' ongoing project: the "emancipatory" dismantling of institutional power/knowledge tarted up as a sales event at United Colors of Benetton. Dress deftly yourself in stupid stuffs, phrase the immense weapon of your hair! The revolution is always televised; although, as Sartre charged Camus, it is less a revolution than a posture of perpetual revolt. Not so much a will to change the world as to fuck it up. So much for the fashionably omniscient. Cheers, Michael.

The Quentin Tarantino.....

Quine is wrong.

Need to organize your playlists if you want anyone to watch these videos

@_PanchoVilla

7 ай бұрын

I hope you take this as a compliment

Ahhh.. the Pragmatists.. Very endearing.. Well.. you need something to cling to..For me..well I like Peirce I have to say..I really really hope Dr. Sugrue doesn’t go down this line! Something that works ‘satisfactorily’ .. emmm

@shaunkerr8721

7 ай бұрын

The shame in owning that this is our life instead of playing make believe, seriously...

This is the retch with no vomit! Now I am no Alan Watts follower.. but Dr Stallof is ALWAYS retch with no vomit. In fact that is his epitaph !? I think Dr. Sugrue has touched on his Epitaph..How strange!? ‘ The Greatest Man who did not write a Book! OR ‘It was coming trust me’

@thegeordierambler4373

6 ай бұрын

But hey.. Socrates did not write a book!👍

No, the philosopher's role is to teach people to think for themselves, it's to turn lead into gold.

Rorty appears to have had a wildly inaccurate understanding of language and how it relates to thought. Thoughts and language are not the same. Was he reading Diderot or something? Also, his view is just pure, unbridled nominalism, which is another conversation we've been having for thousands of years - a conversation that continues to lead to nothing. Rorty didn't change the topic of conversation. He was just so nominalist that he didn't recognize any other theory, including nominalism, as existing outside his own thought. If he thought what he had to say was "new," then it was. It's nothing more than a regression, but I suppose we get someone like this every century or so. He demands his subjective reality is fixed, while defending this notion with the nominalist notion of no fixed reality. It would have been nice if he ever picked up a book on Diogenes, William of Ockham, Buddhism, or Taoist Philsophy before he died... in other words it would be nice if he actually listened to what was being said in the conversation, before commenting on what was missing.

@eastphiladelphia8134

7 ай бұрын

Also, Rorty's take on Hegel was that everything in history is contingent and without some great purpose, but also that all of history was leading us towards the great purpose of tolerance and Rorty's form of "pragmatism." That sounds like Hegel's historicism alright. 😂

@eastphiladelphia8134

7 ай бұрын

Also also, no one had heard "freedom" in relation to chattel slavery before Frederick Douglass? Douglass was born in 1817. John Holt, Lord Chief Justice of England ruled in 1706 "as soon as a Negro comes into England, he becomes free. One may be a villein in England, but not a slave." Most of the Americans he's talking about were not Native Americans. They came from Europe, where the abolition of black slavery was already going around for at least a hundred years before Douglass was born. Ohio's constitution abolished slavery in 1802. Did these guys bother to pick up a history book at any point during there historicizing?

@eastphiladelphia8134

7 ай бұрын

"What holds us together is a sense of solidarity - a sense of usness that we're one." I too have heard of the Zhuangzi's Tao. Ironists are trying not to be a copy, he says...

@eastphiladelphia8134

7 ай бұрын

Then, after all that talk of Tolerance and openness to alternative views, Rorty says xenophobic bigotry and specism are not just present but good and necessary, because our compassion should be considered limited. Further, there are no absolutes, except that shame and guilt are absolutely wrong. How convenient. Well, shame and guilt ("humiliation") are a form of public discourse that help sensitize people to the suffering of others (thanks for the Buddhism, btw) and encourage people to be less cruel by teaching them that past cruelties were wrong. Are you going sit in your ivory philosophy tower, tell me my vocabulary is wrong, and humiliate me into changing it, like the commisar of correct ideas? Where's your Tao now, Rorty? I guess he didn't look broadly enough at other people's ideas to qualify as a "cultural critic" (what a nice new term for "philosopher-king").😂

Well you could call it a theory, but is it not true that as things in themselves we can't control our thoughts and feelings. That's easy to prove. As Heidegger said, people still don't think, and they don't. The big mistake being made is crediting people with Reason when they don't Reason at all. This is why Hume said Reason is a slave to the passions but that's not Reason in my view. For there to be Reason there has to be no desires or aversions.

I couldn't contain a laugh when he started talking about how the west is uniquely capible of checking it's own ethnocentrism. What a fantasticly self serving notion.

@willmercury

7 ай бұрын

Possibly, but it also happens to be true. The West is the only civilization that sponsors and rewards its own critics. For the last five hundred years, the West has progressively produced cultural representations as both celebration and critique. There has never been so much diversity and inclusion in human history. Forget equity, which is utopian, and denies that disparity is mostly a function of differences in individual ability and priority. And yes, we profit by this economically, ethically, and epistemologically-- as does the rest of the world. Beware: oikophobia is an intellectual limitation, and tolerance will be withdrawn when those who love perpetual revolt become themselves revolting. The Woke are precipitating us to that very point.

@poi2lkj3mnb

7 ай бұрын

@@willmercury There is a sense in which in which I understand your point. After all there is much that has been gained from critique, but yet I still violently disagree with you in another sense. You see this culture of critique has not moderated the West's ethnocentrism, it has exacerbated it. Take for example how the British expanded their malthusian empire under the banner of the emancipation from slavery, or how the Anti-Duestch purged themselves of their German guilt such that whoever they supported in Eastern Europe became above reproach. One could even look at how the CIA funded the Congress for Cultural Freedom, turning this critical cultural into an explicit tool of American imperial policy. One does not need to hate the west to know the west contains histories greatest chauvinists.

I completely bastardise the English language.

That's not true either, there is an overarching narrative. Right now for example we are experiencing an inversion of the hierarchies. The question ought to be " Who is the Ubermensch? The rise of Stoicism is a good clue.

That sounds like complete Hell. I couldn't imagine a worse Hell

Pragmatism, while true is also just so lame. Why study this at all if doesn't help you aspire to a better life and give you a foundation?

@steivshore4844

7 ай бұрын

That's why pragmatism encourages you to do what works for you, and encourages others to do what works for them. Practically speaking, it's the most libertarian perspective for society, providing the most freedom to individuals, given that they don't infringe upon other freedoms. Sometimes boring is good lol what do you think?

I have read a fair chunk of Rorty. He's a great writer and personally I find him quite likeable. But I think his project is sophistic. He wants to "solve" complex questions regarding reality and historical progress by merely deeming them irrelevant, or downgrading them to trivialities. This is a cheap move.

@saimbhat6243

7 ай бұрын

Because most of the things are trivial, almost everything is trivial in the sense that importance in itself is something that we label on things. Rorty is very honest in accepting that most of the conflicts or problems are just disagreements of opinions/tastes/judgements or sensibilities. There is no right or wrong or true or untrue about them. Pragmatism is anglicized version european nihilism going back to nietzsche. While as nietzsche tells you : Nothing matters therefore you are free. Pragmatism tells you : Nothing matters therefore let us decide what we should pretend to matter. In my experience, on macro level, i see people, societies and countries work pragmatically, almost all the time. The illusion of morality, TRUTH, ethical, right or wrong are just tools employed by people to get what people want to get. When someone tells you : doing X is wrong, it is certain that he just doesn't want people to do X. Him calling X as wrong or immoral or unethical or false or something is just a grammatical trick. There are some Xs which most of the people think is immoral, it is just that most people do not want other people to do that X. And rorty is correct in saying that we should keep on focus on deciding the X and not on providing metaphysical justification of the X. Justifications will come anyway.

@mostlytranslucent

7 ай бұрын

​@@saimbhat6243Thank you for an insightful comment. Here's my thoughts. I am mainly concerned with history and politics. Rorty is an ambivalent Nietzschean. Rorty wants to embrace Nietzche's anti-foundationalism but wants to make those claims consonant with a progressive/whig outlook on history that Nietzsche would never conscience. This is why I, not lightly, accuse Rorty of sophism. He posits a theory of history where the emancipatory gains of the bourgeois revolutions, national liberation projects and Enlightenment generally, are 'real' or 'true' while at the same time saying that there was no explicable basis for these achievements beyond sheer contingency. Whereas myself and others would claim that these social changes display a kind of universal human reason that grasps dialectically towards greater freedom, Rorty instead chooses to call this activity "pragmatism" - doing what works. In his hands it ends up a quite contradictory and ideological notion. The combination of his pragmatic anti-foundationalism with his strong historical morality leads Rorty into some absurd commitments - such as claiming that democracy as the prime imperative, yet being unwilling and unable to offer any arguments in favour of democracy other than "it works". Which, under our current socioeconomic conditions, with Rorty's post-Cold War optimism firmly in the rearview, seems more and more glibly tendentious.