Hyperion
1d ago
There are plenty of philosophers like Hume, who awoke Kant from his dogmatic slumber, or the late Daniel Dennentt, who aren't building on this pile of nonsense.
There are also various social scientists, historians and other academics who just roll their eyes at this nonsense. There are prominent ones like Alan Sokal and Richard Dawkins who even poke the hornets nest from time to time.
It's not hard to tell, there is real stuff being discussed it's just not being discussed by this inbred movement within academia.
Hyperion
2d ago
If Derrida can do it, then anyone can. Post-modernism is the intellectual equivalent of a banana duct-taped to a wall.
Hyperion
2d ago
I think the biggest issue is that he assumes all these 'great' thinkers of the past actually had a point. From my perspective it's all a tower of nonsense with more dung being flung on top and each successive generation just adding more nonsense to the pile.
Saying that Adorno or Horkheimer said something isn't a valid argument if Adorno and Horkheimer were making bad arguments in the first place. You can't just cite each others claims as authoritative if those claims are bullshit in the first place.
Not that Zizek cares, his whole philosophy runs on vibes and free association. He is a clown and he likes it when you laugh at him. Trying to argue with a clown is like wrestling with a pig.
Hyperion
5d ago
There is some in the Balkans, but you have to remember that after WW1 and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, there were massive population transfers between Turkey and the Balkans. Ataturk, father of the Turks, is almost certainly just a Turkicized Albanian, what with his bright blue eyes.
I assume Mongols, Magyars, Turks, and so on don't count?
Not that it matters, but their blood lies, spilt, in the dirt of the Pannonian Plain, not in any modern Europeans in appreciable quantities.
I think you're regurgitating a lot of, far leftist, Frankfurt school theory uncritically. Stuff like The Authoritarian Personality, and countless other works. There is a whole cottage industry of stuff like this by post-modernists and cultural Marxists. Not that I have any sympathy for the far right either; but, to uncritically regurgitate Marxist-Freudian psychoanalyses done by their ideological opponents seems like a bad way to get to the bottom of their actual psychology.
I mostly just wish people would take to the idea that Marx and Freud were bad social scientists and that the entire edifice built on their works should be cast aside.
Hyperion
6d ago
No, with pillarization everyone is still under the same government with the same laws. The millets were more like autonomous zones, but defined entirely by ethno-religious affiliation, not by the territory the people lived in. They had formal laws and collected taxes.
Pillarization is more like what the middle east was like before the millet system and now after. People lived in pillarized ethno-religious communities with in the various states, but there was no formal system of legal division at the level of the state.
These philosophers are talking about stuff that overlaps with social science and science in general. Philosophy isn't some separate world where you can say whatever you like. It is bound by the same rules as everything else. If you are making a point about how humans operate you are making a point that overlaps with economics, sociology, history, psychology, etc. Continental philosophers often make claims about humans that go against what we know about those areas, not to mention claims about physics or mathematics. Sokal makes a big deal in his debunkings of post-modernism the ways that they used ideas from mathematics and physics incorrectly.
'I confess myself a worshipper of Mazda, a follower of Zarathushtra, one who hates the Daevas and obeys the laws of Ahura'
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