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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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from Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming
  • This is a really excellent book of a type I don't like (analytic philosophy). That is, I really loathe most philosophy of this type, because it deals with questions of great interest to me, but in way which is not even wrong and thus muddies the waters I would like to clarify (see antiphilosophy ). But this one does a credible job within the constraints of the genre.
    • The main underlying flaw of this and similar works: it assumes something like a rational, unicentric Self, then looks for all the reasons that doesn't really work. From that standpoint, an everyday phenomenon like akrasia becomes an inexplicable yet profound paradox. But it only arises if you start with the (obviously false) presupposition that humans are rational and act rationally by default.
    • There's something almost autistic
      Callard is in fact autistic, it turns out.
       about this book in particular, it reads like an earnest but naive robot trying to understand how humans work. To its credit, it doesn't shirk from dealing with the complexity of human goals, but it attempt to ground them in some kind of more powerful logic seems misguided.
    • So I didn't actually read much of this, sorry. It is obviously Relevant to My Interests. For takes more to my liking see You Must Change Your Life and maybe some A Case for Irony (Korsgaard talks a lot about self-construction, which is sort of a less-autistic version of the same idea, I think).
from anti-antiphilosophy
  • See antiphilosophy. The arguments there for the most part pertain to philosophy as an academic discipline, but it is more than that. It is the universal heritage of thinking beings. And to the extent we have any sort of abstract conceptualization at all, we are philosophers.
from Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought
  • Whitehead, who was a peculiar mixture of a math­ematician and a mystic (perhaps one should call him a Pythago­rean), once statetl: "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists in a series of footnotes to Plato." No doubt, this was meant as praise, but it really was a condemnation, so far as it was true at ail. What it really says is that European philosophy through ail the centuries was unable to free itself from the strait jacket of Plato's essential­ism. Essentialism, with its emphasis on discontinuity, constancy, and typical values ("typology"), dominated the thinking of the western world to a degree that is still not yet fully appreciated by the historians of ideas. Darwin, one of the first thinkers to reject essentialism (at least in part), was not at ail understood by the contemporary philosophers (ail of whom were essentialists), and his concept of evolution through natural selection was therefore found unacceptable. antiphilosophy
from Piaget

antiphilosophy

25 Sep 2022 - 17 Jun 2025
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    • Most philosophy strikes me as amazingly wrongheaded and I can't bear to read it. OTOH, there are exceptions, philosophical writing that is clarifying (Dennett, Andy Clark, that sort, those that are basically theoretical cognitive scientists) or bracing/dizzying (Nietzsche, Deleuze, Sloterdijk). These don't feel like they should be the same field, to be honest, and I certainly read them with completely different sets of motivations and expectations. But they are both better than the kind of dreary analytic philosophy which is the default in the English-language world.
    • I came by my anti-philosophy stance at MIT, of course, where the standard line was that AI and cybernetics had rendered all past philosophical discourse obsolete and irrelevant. This was not quite the case (See Heideggerian AI , and Phil Agre on AI's contempt for philosophy The Soul Gained and Lost )
    • What got me through that period was conceiving the history of philosophy as a kind of ass-fuck, or what amounts to the same thing, an immaculate conception. I imagined myself approaching an author from behind and giving him a child that would indeed be his but would nonetheless be monstrous.
    • Hanno Sauer, The end of history (via WS Discord where it is being roundly mocked):
      • Not so much anti-philosophy, but against the study of the history of philosophy ideas.
      • An example of meta-philosophy? It does, at least, engage directly with the question of what the actual goals of philosophizing are.
    • I think the fundamental question is whether philosophy is more like art (literature) or more like science. In the former case – well, nobody thinks that art automatically gets better over historical time. Modern art is not better than classical art, it's just different, and nobody finds it wrong to read classics that are thousands of years old. If philosophy is more like science though – a body of knowledge, not just a body of work – then it should indeed improve with time as new discoveries are made, and the knowledge should be detached from the names of the original discoverers – as he says, we don't read Newton to understand Newton's Laws.
      • My own opinion is that philosophy really is more like literature, but it has pretensions to science which trip it up (especially true for analytic philosophers; the continentals seems to know they are doing something more like literature or performance art).
    • From Vinod Khare
      • You might find this funny - one of the words for 'crackpot' in Hindi-Urdu is 'aflatoon'. The word 'aflatoon' is actually the Arabicised name of Plato. People perceived Plato's ideas as so crackpot-ish that his name became a synonym of crackpot in those languages. Most Hindi-Urdu speakers are unaware of the etymology so if you go to India/Pakistan and call someone 'aflatun' they will just hear 'crackpot'.
    • The Buddha was not a fan of metaphysics
      • The Buddha always told his disciples not to waste their time and energy in metaphysical speculation. Whenever he was asked a metaphysical question, he remained silent. Instead, he directed his disciples toward practical efforts.
      • Thich Nhat Hanh continued, “Questioned one day about the problem of the infinity of the world, the Buddha said, “Whether the world is finite or infinite, limited or unlimited, the problem of your liberation remains the same.” Another time he said, “Suppose a man is struck by a poisoned arrow and the doctor wishes to take out the arrow immediately. Suppose the man does not want the arrow removed until he knows who shot it, his age, his parents, and why he shot it. What would happen? If he were to wait until all these questions have been answered, the man might die first.” Life is so short. It must not be spent in endless metaphysical speculation that does not bring us any closer to the truth.”
      • Oh "Grasping for Infinity", what a beautiful and useful phrase.
    • Nick Land
      • However awkward the acknowledgment may be, there is no getting around the fact that philosophy, when apprehended within the Western tradition, is original sin. Between the tree of life and the tree of knowledge, it does not hesitate. Its name is indistinguishable from a lust for the forbidden. While burning philosophers is no longer socially acceptable, our canonical order of cultural prohibition—at its root—can only consider such punishment mandatory. Once philosophers are permitted to live, established civilization is over.