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Philosophy 1: Wittgenstein was a beery swine who was just as sloshed as Schlegel

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Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was in a PhD program at Stanford, I had a conversation with my dissertation advisor about Habermas and he said, "I think he's about finished." That was in 1987. Habermas continued to work until his death and published his final book last year.

One of the most important scholars of the last 100 years, known through many disciplines. Also a tireless foe of fascism and fanaticism. Habermas is one of those guys who is known well within high academia but he deserves to be known by normal non-academic intelligent people. He's like Inverse Foucault.
 
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TIL: Aurelius was an average dude who was sick his entire life, plagued by an ulcer that he took something for daily. I also learned that Meditations really didn't break any new ground.
 
Read a funny and apparently oft-quoted Philosophy PhD candidate joke. "We can understand Nietzsche's individual sentences perfectly well but we'll never understand what they add up to. We can understand what Hegel adds up to perfectly well but we'll never understand his individual sentences."

I did find one illuminating statement about Hegel though by this circuitous route: from Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit via A. V. Miller's translation via J. N. Findlay's sentence-by-sentence gloss via Michael Inwood's sentence-by-sentence gloss on that gloss:

Kant said we can never know the thing-in-itself that underlies reality because we can are held prisoner by our cognition and can only see the appearance our mind can recognize. Hegel said it's way deeper than that but also it doesn't matter. Hegel says Kant makes it seem like we could step outside our cognition and compare what we see to what there is, but to do that you'd have to understand reality outside our understanding of reality. But there is no "outside." The analogy of the mind to an instrument with flaws is false, because it assumes an observer separate from the instrument. In a mind, the instrument is the observer. So the bad news is Kant's critique is incoherent but the good news is our immediate understanding (and that's where the "phenomenology" part comes in, which I finally understand) is, by every possible definition of the word, what "is." Your individual mind is not to be contrasted with a universal objective "Brute Fact" or "Mind of God." It is the very is that is. Is is is. Then Heidegger comes along 100 years after, shakes his head vigorously, and says "Be be be."

Now why couldn't they have just said that?
 
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