I'm feeling a little late to the party I guess. Why didn't I find this channel a little bit earlier?! You're simply amazing man. Time just goes like a knife through butter with your videos; the best thing, well not the best but one of the best things I liked about your style is, you anticipate where the listener can misconstrue something and then clarify it right then and there. Case in point: 23:22 in this very video. I simply love it. Doesn't happen with most of the informative content we come across here on RU-vid. At last, just wanna say thank you for bringing this knowledge to us. Also keep being awesome and doing what you do best! ❤️
I'm a philosophy student and tomorrow I have an exam on semiotics and hermeneutics, so right now I'm procrastinating (kinda) by listening to your podcasts! they are exactly the amount of information and laid back attitude that I needed I really enjoy these :) p.a gentle suggestions that are greatly biased: Bertrand Russell or Emil Cioran :)
This probably the most thought-provoking episode. I always find the content incredibly accessible without Stephen West making it tedious nor condescending. But this one makes everything ever uttered by thinkers up from that reference of time, appear wrong. Keep up the great work and the content relatable to your listeners Mr. West. I love your podcast!
YES! Thank you Stephen for starting a series on the post-structuralist school of thought. There are a lot of miss informed folks out there who need to hear their side of the story :)
Alot of a person's style and individually is from their surroundings and time.. you know where this is really evident: If you look at a highschool yearbook from 1970, the 18 year-olds kinda look like 70 year olds (cause they still have the same hair style and clothes and little style choices).. works better with a 1950s yearbook but you get the idea :)
In regard to our individual beliefs/mindsets/viewpoints as a consequence of the narrow structure in which a person may operate within any given culture, this truly sounds all encompassing and provides the individual little to no influence on himself or the larger part of society/culture he is in. "Did Napolean change the world, or did the world create Napolean?" We are of course molded and shaped in a great degree by the socio/economic landscape in which we grow, learn, change and create, but to say that is ONLY what we are, i think is incorrect. I do belive we are free, autonomous individuals with free will, only because however we ARE a product of a kind of determined world and culture/environment. True it is that I may once have had narrow perspectives on certain facets of life and existence as a result of my objective cultural upbringing, to which i have little ability to make any dramatical or significant impact on, but knowing that I am in such a situation allows for me to take notice of it, question it, and maybe not completely escape it, but rise above it in a free thinking philosophical manner. "The culture and time period you're in dictate the narrow parameters of what you can possibly think". Absolutely true, If and only if, your thinking stays within those parameters at all times. For if they do, what other possible solution could one reach? You will forever be limited to those narrow parameters! Stagnation takes hold, this is the beauty of pulling from multiple sources to learn from, questioning the norm and standards you and your culture operate in. It allows one to rise above such a mire. It is the subjective rising above the objective. The objective is still there nonetheless, though now the subject finds itself in a different realm altogether, and it is there that the subject creates or changes the world, as a result of the world first dictating the subject. The objective deterministic quality of our narrow slice of life, time, culture that shape us is to be regarded with utmost gratitude and respect, for that objective nature allows the overcoming of it by the subject. So long story short, it is both. We are at once guided and led by our own free will as subjects, as well as a deterministic reality.
Previous episodes have made perfect sense to me. This one is completely unintelligible to me. I'll hear the following ones and revisit this, but I don't expect it to work.
"The word cow means something to us only in the sense that it is not the word cat or...". I don't get this part. For example, if I know the word cow in a language in which I know no other word, I still know what the word means, don't I? Or have I completely misunderstood this part?
You would know the meaning of the one word because you would compare it to your native language. It means the word has none of the essence of the thing being described (I think) so the word has to be compared to the rest of the language, and if all the other items have their own name then that leaves the one choice. Lightening fast deduction, comparing representations?
So, say you are trying to understand a new language. Since you don't know anything about it, the first approach would amount to someone pointing a cow and saying "cow". You may think you know what the word cow means, but then you start to ponder, ¿does "cow" means the skin or the entire animal?, ¿does cow applies to only that type of cow or to other type of cows?, ¿is cow the name of the species or just a pet name (like naming your dog hashiko)?, ¿does cow applies to males and females, and to baby cows also?, ¿how about a representation of a cow (like a statue)?, ¿is that also named "cow"?. So in order to eliminate all this other possibilities you need to learn more words. You may learn there is a word for skin so the cow and the skin of the cow are two separate things, you may learn that all cows are named cows but there are some variations like calfs, bulls and steers, etc. Only by having all those others words you trully understand what "cow" means for the people of said culture.
I think the best answer to your hypothetical scenario is that you understand what cow means only because you understand that it does NOT mean something else. It doesn’t matter that you don’t know what other things are called in that language.
25:05 Atheism (non-belief) has been around in various forms for ages-not at all impossible for someone to be an atheist in an ancient religious time period/culture. Tom Whitmarsh finds atheism in Ancient Greece/Rome, extending back 2,500 years. Alec Ryrie, historian at Gresham college, lectures on atheism in the Middle Ages. Also Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins are fools when it comes to the nuance of religious belief, constantly making ad hominem attacks on believers-they are idiotically unaware of the fascistic dimension of their banal cultural atheism. Listen to Mehdi Hassan or Slavoj Zizek shred Dawkins ignorant arguments against religious belief.
Completely agree. There are many smarter atheists than those two, and atheists have always existed. I would say, though, that what atheism entails is very much affected by what society you live in. Also, different things do some more or less reasonable depending on the language you speak. For example, in Modern English we speak of bad and evil as two separate things. This wasn’t so obvious to the Romans of St. Augustine or of Cicero. I actually argued this in my undergraduate thesis, where I wrote about how this difference in language impacts our ability to understand the actual reasonableness of the ancient Roman pagan religion. But it doesn’t determine one’s thought completely one way or another. I think a good way of thinking about it would be thinking of chess. If you were given similar pieces and a similar board as chess and asked to come up with a game, you might come up with something very similar. But someone with another upbringing might come up with something very different more easily. But to piece your pieces in just THIS way seems so reasonable to you!
It is funny to me how, once philosophers become primarily interested in a pragmatic, practical, and political approach to understanding the universe, their views become uninteresting, shallow, and largely empty to me. This feels true to me with the Frankfurt views of recent videos, and this video on Structuralism, or any inherently dry, political, societal view of our thoughts and lives, whether or not I agree with their theories. They speciously utilize deep concepts, but at the base of their world understanding is the unspoken, internalized conviction that people are largely stupid and easily manipulated, and mostly robotic, which is something I have come to feel has little truth to it. These modern, practical philosophers remind me of great artists who, in order to seem relevant, began producing "activist" art which supported whatever populist social movement was in style, and which has become nearly completely rejected and forgotten over time. Just my opinion, but I believe these more modern "philosophies" will fade from memory over time, and will never hold a candle to those philosophers of the past (and those unknown in the present) who attempted a richer, more individual, and uncompromising understanding of existence, especially those without any other agenda but the desire of understanding.
You should know that the dichotomy of dry and deep philosophy as you describe it is already very biased. And it is impossible for structuralism to not hold any significance in future thought when its so embedded within our understanding of humans today. What you say is that the people of the time greatly overemphasize the systematic nature of thought and discard the lively parts of it, which many as well as I agree with. But it would be wise to reconsider discrediting something entirely just because you feel it's boring. Root out the reasons why it's boring to you and clear up your biases as well as structuralism's. Then you can return to the older thoughts and combine contributions from both to get closer to what you truly believe.
