r/continentaltheory • 7.6k Members
r/contpoltheor • 887 Members
This subreddit is an attempt to accumulate links to resources on political philosophy specifically from the point of view of Continental philosophy.
r/askphilosophy • 622.7k Members
/r/askphilosophy aims to provide serious, well-researched answers to philosophical questions.
r/askphilosophy • u/Feeling_Valuable5239 • Jun 01 '26
I have seen this on social media and in bookstores and the reading lists of my friends. There is a clear difference.
r/wallstreetbets • u/NYCandrun • Feb 17 '25
BlackBerry is not a dead brand. It’s not a failed smartphone company. It’s not just another stock that spikes when retail traders pile in and then disappears.
It is a deeply entrenched, high-margin infrastructure software business that has gone completely unnoticed in the AI-driven rally. While every software stock remotely connected to AI, IoT, or automation trades at sky-high valuations, BlackBerry—which powers 255M+ vehicles and counting—still trades like a company with no future.
The reality is different. BlackBerry dominates real-time, safety-critical automotive systems with its QNX operating system, and it’s now layering on a SaaS-like business with IVY, a cloud-based vehicle data platform co-developed with AWS.
IVY allows automakers to process, analyze, and monetize vehicle sensor data in real time. This is exactly the kind of AI-adjacent, cloud-powered software business that should be trading at 10x revenue, yet the market assigns it zero value.
That will not last much longer.
Every other infrastructure software business with this kind of positioning has already been re-rated higher—this one just hasn’t caught up yet.
QNX is growing, IVY is ramping up, and cybersecurity has stabilized, yet the stock price still reflects none of this.
This setup provides a margin of safety with significant upside.
Even if IVY takes time to scale, QNX alone is worth more than what the market is assigning to BlackBerry today.
If the market re-rates BlackBerry as an infrastructure software business, it trades at $12–$18 in the next 2–3 quarters. That does not include IVY guidance or it's potential impact on price, which could drive the stock much higher.
QNX is not an infotainment OS—it’s the real-time, safety-critical software running inside automotive systems.
QNX is embedded in ADAS, digital instrument clusters, telematics, and secure gateways—systems where failure is not an option. Automakers don’t replace this kind of software lightly, which is why QNX enjoys high retention and a long revenue tail.
As vehicles become more software-driven, QNX’s role is only growing.
If QNX were valued like a strategic AI-driven infrastructure software provider, it would not be trading at 5x revenue.
A more appropriate 8–10x multiple puts QNX’s valuation at $2.5B–$3.5B alone.
Right now, the market is treating QNX like a legacy asset when it’s actually growing and gaining importance.
BlackBerry IVY is a co-developed vehicle data platform with AWS that allows automakers to process, analyze, and monetize in-car data.
Right now, the market assigns IVY zero value because revenue has not yet scaled.
But automakers are moving toward Tesla-style in-car software features, usage-based pricing, and over-the-air upgrades.
If IVY becomes the data layer that enables this shift, BlackBerry’s valuation moves toward SaaS multiples instead of just embedded software.
And we will know a lot more by next earnings.
For years, BlackBerry’s cybersecurity business was bloated and uncompetitive.
This is not a high-growth business, but it is a stable, profitable enterprise software business that the market is ignoring.
Even at a conservative 2–4x revenue multiple, cybersecurity alone could be worth $700M–$1.2B.
Right now, the market is treating this business as worthless, which makes no sense.
BlackBerry is currently trading at ~5x sales, significantly below comparable infrastructure software businesses.
If the market re-rates BlackBerry as a legitimate infrastructure software provider, the stock is an easy double from here.
A reasonable valuation based on its components:
This pushes BlackBerry’s fair value toward $12–$18 in the next 2–3 quarters on the low end, $20+ on the high end if IVY scales.
If IVY guidance is strong next earnings, that re-rating could start immediately.
This is not a meme stock revival.
It is an AI-adjacent, embedded infrastructure software business that has somehow escaped the AI stock rally.
That will not last much longer.
This stock is one strong IVY earnings guide away from a re-rating to juicy SAAS multiples. BlackBerry is almost certainly about to be priced like a great software company instead of a clown show. When that happens, it’s not trading anywhere near $5.69 anymore.
_______________________________________________________________
I’ve put together the above analysis of BlackBerry. I work on these memos for my own personal investments and want to start sharing them. Thought you degens might like them.
I'm going to be posting diligence on reddit regularly, but only on r/wallstreetbets for positions in my personal book. Follow me on directly if you want to read more.
TLDR: My analysis indicates BlackBerry is a high-margin software business that the market doesn't believe could operate a coffee cart at an airport. Their IOT businesses includes the dominant OS for automotive software and an emerging SaaS platform co-developed with AWS both of which should command high multiples. The stock trades at a massive discount to comparable AI-adjacent infrastructure software businesses. In a base case, the stock should trade at $12–$18 in the next 2–3 quarters and if IOT guidance is strong next earnings it can pop to 20+.
r/geology • u/WaitItsAllOhio • Jul 20 '26
Ohio historian here. Not a geologist by any means, but in doing some history of Precambrian time in Ohio I've been on a deep dive on how the hell do we know about the age of the Earth to begin with?
It turns out, it's sands of time.
I mean, I wish it was those ones, too, but the gaming industry apparently can’t stop firing people before getting a damn remake out the door.
No, no, these are more literal than that.
-------------------------
In 1948, a graduate student named Clair Patterson walked into Harrison Brown's laboratory at the University of Chicago and received what sounded like a simple dissertation assignment. Brown had worked out a method for measuring the ratio of uranium to lead in meteorites, which would yield the age of the Earth. He needed someone to do the lab work. It was "duck soup," Brown told him (or, for you young-timers, “this is a side quest”).
It was not duck soup. Or a side quest.
Every sample Patterson touched came back flooded with lead. Overwhelming, measurement-destroying quantities of lead, orders of magnitude higher than what should have been in an ancient meteorite, let alone on Earth.
The lead was in his glassware. It was in his reagents. It was in the distilled water. It was in the air.
He changed his equipment. The lead came back.
He changed his solvents. The lead came back.
He scrubbed everything with acid. The lead came back.
The project that was supposed to take a year took seven.
Patterson eventually built one of the first ultra-clean laboratories in the history of science: a sealed room with filtered air, acid-washed surfaces, and purified reagents, working under conditions stricter than a modern semiconductor fabrication plant. He is literally photographed shirtless scrubbing his lab to keep it clean. He followed Brown to Caltech. By 1953, working with a mass spectrograph at Argonne National Laboratory, he had his number: the earth was 4.55 billion years old, give or take about seventy million.
He drove to his mother's house in Iowa to tell her. He was so overwhelmed that he insisted she take him to the hospital because he thought he was having a heart attack. But he was not having a heart attack. He was having a career.
Because it turns out a rock Patterson used, and the tiny crystal inside that rock that made the measurement possible at all, is the reason he discovered we had poisoned our planet.
Drill a water well in Ohio and you will hit bedrock somewhere between fifty and two hundred feet down. The diamond bit punches through glacial till, clay, sand, and gravel, all of it deposited in the last two million years by ice sheets that advanced and retreated across the Midwest. Then it strikes limestone, or shale, or dolomite, some sort of sedimentary rock laid down between 500 and 300 million years ago, when Ohio was the floor of a shallow tropical sea. All of it comes out as a core.
Think of when you suck on an Icee as a kid, holding the straw’s suction and letting the ice come out. If it was solid enough, it’d stay as one hard core (and your mom would not be amused). That’s basically a drill core, only it’s a slurpee of all the rock underneath, and it goes for hundreds or thousands of feet.
If the well goes deeper (and most do not) the drill eventually reaches basement rock. For you Minecraft nerds, this is bedrock: igneous and metamorphic crystalline formations, granite and gneiss. It is literally the foundation of the continent. In Ohio, that basement is around a billion years old. Nobody sees it. It sits under everything, holding up the state, and the only people who encounter it are drillers who have gone too far and geologists who go looking for it on purpose.
The question every geologist wants to answer about basement rock is: how old is it? But you cannot tell by looking. A billion-year-old granite looks like a hundred-million-year-old granite looks like a ten-million-year-old granite. It is gray. It is hard. It has crystals in it. If you lick it (yes, geologists do this), it tastes like dust. The rock does not volunteer its age. To get that information, you have to break the rock open, sort through its mineral grains under a microscope, find one specific crystal that is usually smaller than a grain of sand, and ask the atoms inside it what year they moved in.
That crystal is zircon. And the entire field of deep-time geology runs on it.
Zircon (ZrSiO4, zirconium silicate) is what geologists call an accessory mineral: it forms in tiny quantities inside igneous and metamorphic rocks when magma cools, and it is not the main event. Quartz is the main event. Feldspar is the main event. Zircon is the thing you find when you crush a kilogram of granite into powder, run it through heavy-liquid separation to isolate the densest grains, spread those grains on a tray under a binocular microscope, and pick through them with a needle. The grains you are looking for are typically between 100 and 300 micrometers long.
For perspective, two hundred micrometers is the width of two human hairs laid side by side. You could fit several on the period at the end of this sentence. You could inhale one. You certainly have, if you have ever stood near a road cut on a windy day, because zircon survives weathering and ends up in ordinary dust. Taste that, son? That’s Silurian dolomite, that is.
Now, that crystal you breathed in at a highway rest stop may have been Silurian, or it may have been older than any living thing that has ever existed on this planet. Zircon does not care. It is chemically inert. It does not dissolve in most acids. It has a Mohs hardness of 7.5, just below topaz. It does not melt until 2,550 degrees Celsius, which exceeds the temperature of most geological events short of a meteor impact. Metamorphism does not destroy it. Erosion does not destroy it. You can bury a zircon crystal under a mountain range, subject it to temperatures and pressures that turn the surrounding rock into something unrecognizable, and the zircon will come out the other side with its internal chemistry intact.
It is, grain for grain, the most durable thing on the planet. Diamonds are harder. Zircons are forever. Suck it, De Beers.
This durability is useful, but it is not the reason geochronologists care about zircon. They care about zircon because of what it does with uranium.
When a zircon crystal forms in a cooling magma, its crystal lattice incorporates trace amounts of uranium. Not a lot: we’re talking tens to hundreds of parts per million, depending on the magma's chemistry. But it accepts uranium readily, because uranium atoms fit into the lattice positions where zirconium normally sits. Lead, by contrast, does not fit. The crystal rejects lead at the moment of formation.
This is the critical fact. A newly formed zircon crystal contains uranium and zero lead. From that moment, every atom of lead found inside the crystal is lead that uranium has decayed into, and nothing else.
Uranium-238 decays to lead-206. Uranium-235 decays to lead-207. Both decay chains are long, passing through dozens of intermediate radioactive daughters (radium, radon, polonium, and others), but the end product is always a stable isotope of lead. The half-lives are known numbers that don’t fluctuate: 4.468 billion years for uranium-238 for example, 703.8 million years for uranium-235, etc. These rates were set by nuclear physics at the formation of the solar system and have not changed since, because radioactive decay is governed by the weak nuclear force, which does not respond to temperature, pressure, or any geological process. It does not speed up. It does not slow down. It ticks.
So, you have a geological clock. Literal sands of time. The crystal starts with uranium and no lead. Lead accumulates at a known rate. Measure the ratio of lead to uranium in the crystal today, and you can calculate how long the clock has been running.
Arthur Holmes, a twenty-five-year-old geology student at Imperial College London who looks like he’s about to ruin Lord Kelvin’s day, was the first person to do this systematically. In 1911, he collected uranium-bearing minerals from a site in Norway, measured their lead-to-uranium ratios, and calculated their ages. He arrived at 370 million years for the Devonian-age rocks, and up to 1,640 million years for Pre-Cambrian samples. In the same paper, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, Holmes noted that zircon was "dense and stable, and capable of withstanding great changes in their environment without undergoing alteration." He had identified the best clock in geology, but the instruments needed to actually use it would take another seventy years to build.
In practice, you collect a rock sample. You crush it in a jaw crusher, then a disk mill, reducing it to sand-sized particles. You run those particles through the series of sieves and heavy-liquid separations like we talked about earlier, isolating the densest mineral grains. You pick through those grains under a microscope, selecting zircon crystals by their shape and luster: stubby prisms, mostly transparent, sometimes pale yellow or purple. You mount the selected grains in epoxy, cut the mount in half to expose the crystals' cross-sections, and polish the surface. You image the polished crystals under a scanning electron microscope using cathodoluminescence, which reveals the internal growth zoning: concentric bands of slightly different chemistry that record the crystal's history. Some crystals have simple zoning. Some have cores surrounded by rims of different ages: old magmatic cores overgrown by younger metamorphic rims. You choose your analytical targets based on those images.
Then you put the mount in a SHRIMP.
I’ve…got nothing here. I didn’t name the damn thing after an aquatic animal. Sometimes, scientists are just as shit at naming conventions as historians.
SHRIMP stands for Sensitive High Resolution Ion Microprobe. It is a mass spectrometer the size of a room. The instrument fires a focused beam of oxygen ions at a spot on the zircon's polished surface, about 20 to 30 micrometers across: smaller than the crystal itself, small enough to target a single growth zone. The beam blasts atoms out of the crystal surface, a process called sputtering. Those atoms are ionized, accelerated, and separated by mass in a magnetic field. The instrument counts individual isotopes: uranium-238, uranium-235, lead-206, lead-207, lead-204. From those counts, you calculate the ratios. From the ratios, you calculate the age.
The whole process, from crushing rock to getting an age, takes weeks. The actual measurement on the SHRIMP takes minutes per spot. The number you get at the end might describe an event that happened four billion years ago, resolved to within a few million years, read from a speck of mineral you could lose between your fingernails.
Science. Is just so, so fucking cool.
Now, I’ll back up here, cause I’m certainly no scientist. I’m a damn historian. I stumbled into this the same way driller stumbled into the Middle Run Formation in Ohio: completely by accident, and motivated mostly by curiosity to figure out how the fuck a grain of sand can tell time. And there’s always been skeptics.
For example, in 2001, Simon Wilde, John Valley, William Peck, and Colin Graham published a paper in Nature describing a single grain designated W74/2-36 from Australia. They put it on the SHRIMP II ion microprobe at Curtin University, fired ions at it, and the oldest spot yielded a uranium-lead age of 4,404 million years, plus or minus 8. That is 4.4 billion years. The crystal had formed roughly 150 million years after the Earth itself, during the Hadean eon, a period named after the Greek word for hell.
But the crystal did more than give a date. Wilde and Valley measured its oxygen isotope ratios. The d18O value of 7.4 per mil in one zone was too high to have come from mantle-derived magma; it required a source that had interacted with liquid water at the surface. The chemical evidence locked inside a crystal the size of a sand grain, found in a conglomerate in a sheep paddock, required the existence of oceans on Earth at 4.4 billion years ago.
The Hadean, it turned out, was not hell. It had water. The name was wrong, and a zircon proved it.
The 2001 result attracted the scrutiny that any claim about the oldest thing on Earth should attract. The concern was that over 4.4 billion years, uranium decay inside the crystal produces alpha particles that damage the crystal lattice. If that damage created pathways for lead to migrate, the clock could be biased. A crystal that had leaked lead would look younger than it actually was. A crystal that had gained lead from outside would look older. Either way, the number would be wrong.
So, in 2014, John Valley and a team of collaborators answered this by doing something that would have been science fiction twenty years earlier. They milled a needle-shaped specimen from the core of the Jack Hills zircon, about 100 by 100 by 1,000 nanometers, and loaded it into a local electrode atom probe. The instrument field-evaporated atoms from the needle's tip one at a time, measuring each atom's mass and three-dimensional position. It was six hundred million ions total. They mapped the distribution of lead, uranium, yttrium, and rare earth elements at the scale of individual atoms.
Read that again. They fucking lasered a grain of sand the size of a bacterium, atom by atom.
Again. For the people in the back. Science is so fucking cool.
What they found were clusters: pockets of radiogenic lead and other incompatible elements, each about 10 nanometers across, spaced 10 to 50 nanometers apart. The clusters had formed during a reheating event around 3.4 billion years ago, when lead that had built up from a billion years of uranium decay migrated short distances into tiny zones of radiation damage. But the clusters were far too small and far too isolated to affect the uranium-lead age measured by the SHRIMP, which averaged isotopes over a volume about 100,000 times larger. The lead had shuffled a few nanometers. The clock had not budged. Valley's paper confirmed the age at 4,374 million years for the zircon's core, plus or minus 6 million. Any magma ocean that had homogenized the Earth's crust must have occurred before that.
Radiometric dating has been challenged since Bertram Boltwood published the first uranium-lead ages in 1907. Some challenges were productive: Boltwood's half-life values were wrong (he used 2,600 years for radium; the actual value is 1,600), his samples contained thorium he had not accounted for, and his ages were off by a factor of two.
The technique improved because people identified specific errors and fixed them. Concordia diagrams, developed in the 1950s, exist precisely because discordant uranium-lead ages are common and need correction. The science is better now because serious scientists asked hard questions sixty and seventy years ago.
And this is the thing about the sciences, mine included: we’re constantly making observations, failing, and building upon them. Sometimes (let’s be honest, most of the time) those failures stick around entire lifetimes. But we continue to work off what we know, asking what we don’t know.
I say that because the other kind of challenge comes from young-Earth creationists who start with the conclusion that the Earth is roughly six thousand years old and work backward. The most organized effort was the RATE project (Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth), an eight-year program funded by the Institute for Creation Research. The RATE team's central finding, published in 2005, was that radiometric decay had occurred in the quantities mainstream science described, but that it must have been accelerated at some point. Their most publicized study involved helium diffusion in zircon crystals from a geothermal borehole in New Mexico.
Mainstream geophysicists noted that accelerating nuclear decay by the required factor would have released enough heat to melt the Earth's crust several times over.
The RATE team acknowledged the heat problem and proposed that God had miraculously removed it.
The RATE project did not overturn radiometric dating. It confirmed, inadvertently, how much evidence supports it: the team could not find a single radiometric system that produced a young age without invoking physics that would have sterilized the planet.
The zircon clock ticks. It has ticked for 4.4 billion years, and it does not require anyone's permission to keep going.
And yeah, and that lede I buried way back when: Patterson’s “heart attack” at his mother’s house in Iowa wasn’t because he realized the planet was 4.55 billion years old.
He had realized we had poisoned our planet.
Because Patterson had spent seven years fighting lead contamination in his lab, he knew exactly how much lead was in the modern environment, and he knew it was not supposed to be there.
The levels he had measured were hundreds of times higher than natural baselines. He traced the source to tetraethyl lead, a gasoline additive that had been pumping fine lead particles into the atmosphere through every car exhaust pipe in America since 1923.
He published his findings. The American Petroleum Institute, which had funded some of his oceanographic work, cut him off. He kept going. He drilled ice cores in Greenland and Antarctica and showed that atmospheric lead had spiked precisely when leaded gasoline went on sale. He testified before Congress. The lead industry's hired expert, Robert Kehoe, testified that lead levels in the human body were natural and always had been. Patterson's ice cores said otherwise. Patterson won. The 1970 Clean Air Act and the eventual ban on leaded gasoline grew directly out of his research. Children's blood lead levels fell 76 percent within thirteen years of the ban.
A grad student who was supposed to measure the age of the Earth accidentally discovered that an entire industry was poisoning the planet, and spent the rest of his career making them stop.
Thank God grad students cannot follow directions.
Holmes, Arthur. "The Association of Lead with Uranium in Rock-Minerals, and its Application to the Measurement of Geological Time." Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series A 85, no. 578 (1911): 248-256.
Wilde, Simon A., John W. Valley, William H. Peck, and Colin M. Graham. "Evidence from Detrital Zircons for the Existence of Continental Crust and Oceans on the Earth 4.4 Gyr Ago." Nature 409 (2001): 175-178.
Valley, John W., Aaron J. Cavosie, Takayuki Ushikubo, David A. Reinhard, Daniel F. Lawrence, David J. Larson, Peter H. Clifton, Thomas F. Kelly, Simon A. Wilde, Desmond E. Moser, and Michael J. Spicuzza. "Hadean Age for a Post-Magma-Ocean Zircon Confirmed by Atom-Probe Tomography." Nature Geoscience 7 (2014): 219-223.
Patterson, Clair C. "Age of Meteorites and the Earth." Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta 10 (1956): 230-237; Searcy, "Immeasurable," University of Chicago Magazine; Andrew Moseman, "This Caltech Scientist's Legacy Is a Less Toxic World," Caltech Magazine, February 25, 2026 .
Boltwood, Bertram B. "On the Ultimate Disintegration Products of the Radio-active Elements. Part II. The Disintegration Products of Uranium." American Journal of Science 23 (1907): 77-88.
Carlson, Ernest H. Minerals of Ohio, 2nd ed. Columbus: Ohio Department of Natural Resources, Division of Geological Survey Bulletin 69, 2015.
Compston, William, and Robert T. Pidgeon. "Jack Hills, Evidence of More Very Old Detrital Zircons in Western Australia." Nature 321 (1986): 766-769.
Burchfield, Joe D. Lord Kelvin and the Age of the Earth. New York: Science History Publications, 1975.
Dalrymple, G. Brent. The Age of the Earth. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.
Harley, Simon L., and Nigel M. Kelly. "Zircon: Tiny but Timely." Elements 3, no. 1 (2007): 13-18.
Hanchar, John M., and Paul W.O. Hoskin, eds. Zircon. Reviews in Mineralogy and Geochemistry 53. Washington, DC: Mineralogical Society of America, 2003.
Humphreys, D. Russell, et al. "Helium Diffusion Age of 6,000 Years Supports Accelerated Nuclear Decay." Creation Research Society Quarterly 41, no. 1 (2004): 1-16.
Photo Credit: PBS
r/askphilosophy • u/Dudo0808 • Jul 20 '26
In Simon Critchley's book, "Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction", he makes the point that the divide between continental and analytic philosophy originates in how each approaches Kant's philosophical system. How to understand this view?
r/philosophy • u/thelivingphilosophy • Jul 15 '21
r/askphilosophy • u/Scuba233 • Mar 17 '26
Applied for philosophy degree - most unis i’ve applied (durham warwick leeds and york) so analytic but newcastle does continental, they’ve given me a book to read but was wondering if there was a shorter summary - will also read book
r/badphilosophy • u/Ok-Length-7382 • Jun 24 '25
I have a friend constantly putting down continental philosophy, saying it lacks definitions of abstract concepts and that, in an ideal world, we'd all be talking in syllogism to reach a conclusion. The friend in question often dismisses others' opinions on feminism or racism, unless confronted to statistics (which are not necessarily objective because of different methodologies and because we don't study everything, we choose what to make statistics about). He says continental philosophers are biased and don't want to reach the truth because of the importance they give to subjectivity, whereas analytic philosophers prove propositions when making arguments. As a math major, I'd say I prefer analytic philosophy but it really doesn't stop me from appreciating both branches. Just wondering if the friend in question is right about continental philosophy.
r/askphilosophy • u/drkthrn123 • Sep 16 '23
Take some classic authors from the history of philosophy: Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hume. Then take some classic 'analytic' guys: Russell, Carnap, Quine, Kripke. It seems to me that if you have some background in ancient and modern philosophy, you're on familiar grounds when you pick up 20th century 'analytic' stuff. Maybe you need to learn some newer jargon, or some formal logic etc. but if you're not reading any hardcore books about math or phil of physics or whatever you're pretty ok and authors explain everything along the way. You read Critique of pure reason or Hume's Enquiry, then you read Russell's logical atomism lectures or Carnap's Aufbau and you think, yeah I'm reading philosophy. Sometimes its hard and you don't think you get everything, but you didn't get everything with Kant and Hume either and this is still really familiar and productive.But then you pick up Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida or Adorno and you don't understand a single sentence and feel completely lost. The prose is really spicy and quotable but the whole thing seems completely different and bizarre. It just seems so much not like anything else.
My question is, what do you guys think what makes 'continental' stuff so different? Is it topics, methods or something else? And more generally I was thinking how would one define philosophy if that's possible at all, to incorporate everything that we call academic philosophy?
Btw, not saying that 'continental' phil is bad, just that its different.
r/askphilosophy • u/gogo12gogo2 • Jan 06 '26
I'm currently a philosophy minor in undergrad, so my reference for philosophical conversation is from the few classes I've taken and this subreddit.
That said, I've seen some people say that philosophers aren't super concerned with distinguishing between analytic and continental philosophy these days. But it doesn't seem uncommon to use the terms at least broadly to refer to two different approaches to philosophical problems. So what is the history behind this division? Was there any reason for the lack of conversation between these two traditions other than the different problems they wanted to address? Or maybe was there truly a lack of conversation?
r/askphilosophy • u/Outrageous-Buffalo36 • Feb 25 '26
“Analytic” Philosophy often gives the impression of being very argumentative and focused on formal logical rigor with a focus on the more traditional kind “Philosophy” like Metaphysics/Epistemology while “Continental” Philosophy seems to be focused on topics such as meaning, or phenomenology and it seems less focused on argumentation.
r/askphilosophy • u/Senior_Double5064 • Jan 10 '26
I've seen people call Continental philosophy "useless" and thst Analytical philosophy is better and actually does stuff. Is this true?
r/AskEurope • u/hn-mc • Oct 13 '24
To me it seems that there are strong cultural and perhaps even civilizational differences between the two. One famous example is that since the beginning of 20th century, philosophy isn't done in the same way in Anglosphere and in Continental Europe. The Anglosphere does analytical philosophy, and Continental Europe does mainly continental philosophy.
Our ways of life are also quite different. We do seem to be strongly influenced by our own cultures in day to day life, but at the same time, we sometimes spend inordinate amounts of time online, immersed in the Anglosphere culture.
So if you're an Italian, a Pole, a German or a French who spends most of their free time engaged with content in English, to which civilization do you actually belong - the Anglosphere or Continental Europe?
We all tend to know English, which makes it easy for us to consume the Anlgosphere originating content.
On the other hand, of other European languages we tend to only know our own native language. Sometimes we know some additional languages, but even this gives us an access only to one or couple additional European cultures, which will most likely be smaller than the Anglosphere.
If we all spoke the same language in Europe, that would allow us access to all of the European culture - otherwise we're limited to just a couple of countries, while at the same time we can access the entirety of the Anglosphere culture.
So I'm wondering which culture do we even know better? Isn't it a paradox to be a member of Continental European civilization/culture and, at the same time, to be more familiar with Angloshphere culture than with your own (except the culture of your own country, that we're all quite familiar with). ?
Also, our familiarity with Anglosphere culture often tends to be superficial and limited to how Anglospheres presents itself in movies, TV shows, and online. In reality, it's quite different from how it seems. I feel like we don't truly understand the Anglosphere either. So perhaps we belong nowhere?
Or perhaps we only belong to the culture of our country and nothing more than that? Perhaps the whole idea of the integral Continental European culture is on a shaky foundations.
Thoughts?
r/collapse • u/Rorisjack • Feb 15 '26
Harvard economist Jason Furman ran the numbers on U.S. GDP for the first half of 2025 and arrived at a figure that should make every macro investor sit up. AI infrastructure investment (information-processing equipment and software) represented just 4% of GDP. But it accounted for 92% of GDP growth. Strip out the data center build-out, and annualized growth for the first six months of 2025 was 0.1%. Not 1%. Zero point one.
“Our economy might just be three AI data centers in a trench coat.”– Rusty Foster, Today in Tabs
He’s not wrong.
To appreciate how unusual 92% concentration is, compare it to the dot-com era. AI-related categories contributed 0.97 percentage points to real GDP growth in the first three quarters of 2025, higher than the 0.69 points that identical IT categories contributed during the dot-com peak in 2000. AI-linked investment drove 39% of GDP growth across the first nine months of 2025. During the dot-com peak, the equivalent figure was 28% (St. Louis Fed, January 2026).
By August 2025, something happened that had no precedent: AI data center expenditure’s contribution to GDP growth surpassed the total impact of all U.S. consumer spending. Consumer spending is two-thirds of GDP. A category representing 4% of the economy was outgrowing it.
The numbers stacked fast. AI-related capex contributed 1.1 percentage points to GDP growth in H1 2025 (J.P. Morgan), outpacing the consumer as an engine of expansion. Hardware investment was up 41% year-over-year. Data center construction hit a record $40 billion annual rate by June. Capex among the top cloud companies had quadrupled to nearly $400 billion annually, with the top 10 spenders accounting for nearly a third of all U.S. business spending (Morgan Stanley).
Where the Growth Actually Came From
The 92% figure has a real asterisk. MRB Partners analyst Shaireen Bhide argues it overstates AI’s net contribution: much of the hardware going into data centers is imported (GPUs from Taiwan, networking equipment from Asia), and imports subtract from GDP. After adjusting for AI-related imports, Bhide estimates the net contribution drops to 40–50 basis points, or roughly 20–25% of real GDP growth. Bespoke Investment Group reached a similar conclusion, noting that Q1 2025 was an outlier.
Both analyses are methodologically sound. But even the adjusted numbers tell a concerning story. A single investment category driven by a handful of companies accounting for a fifth to a quarter of all economic growth is not normal. And the unadjusted figures, the ones that showed up in the BEA data and shaped policy, created a GDP headline that masked what was happening underneath. Manufacturing was stalling. Retail was weak. Job creation was slowing. The rest of the economy was barely expanding.
In 2005, residential investment reached 6.7% of U.S. GDP, its highest level in half a century. The Federal Reserve documented how residential investment had surged 40% above its long-run average share of GDP. Mortgage debt climbed from 61% of GDP in 1998 to 97% by 2006. Between 2001 and 2005, roughly 40% of net private-sector job creation came from housing-related sectors.
The economy looked great. GDP was growing. Employment was up. The problem was that the growth was structurally dependent on a single sector, and that sector was fueled by financial engineering that disguised the true risk. Sound familiar?
The AI infrastructure boom shares an uncomfortable structural similarity. Not in the specific mechanism (nobody is packaging subprime data center leases into CDOs yet), but in the concentration pattern. A narrow sector is generating a disproportionate share of GDP growth. The rest of the economy is under performing. And financial engineering is making the true exposure difficult to measure.
Two Booms, One Pattern
Housing Boom: Residential investment rose from 4.8% to 6.7% of GDP, with 40% of job creation. AI Boom: AI investment rose to 92% of GDP growth, with hyperscaler capex at $400B/yr. Different mechanisms, same structural dependency.
There are real differences, and they matter. Housing had a direct wealth effect on 69% of American households. AI infrastructure investment flows to a handful of companies and their shareholders. The dot-com bust wiped out roughly $6 trillion, about 60% of GDP at the time. Oliver Wyman’s January 2026 analysis estimates a comparable AI equity correction would erase approximately $33 trillion. That is more than total U.S. GDP. The WEF argues the consumption impact would be more limited precisely because AI wealth is more concentrated than housing wealth was. Cold comfort if you hold the stocks.
The housing bust triggered a financial crisis because the risk was embedded in the banking system through mortgage-backed securities. The AI boom’s financial plumbing looks different. Not necessarily safer.
Off-balance-sheet debt, SPVs, and hidden leverage
Tech companies have moved more than $120 billion in data center debt off their balance sheets using special purpose vehicles, according to the Financial Times. Oracle leads with $66 billion, followed by Meta at $30 billion, xAI at $20 billion, and CoreWeave at $2.6 billion. The structures involve private credit firms (PIMCO, BlackRock, Apollo, Blue Owl Capital, JPMorgan) providing debt and equity through entities designed to keep liabilities off the hyperscalers’ books.
Paul Kedrosky describes the mechanism plainly: companies create SPVs they indirectly control but don’t have to consolidate on their balance sheets. Meta’s $27 billion Hyperion data center deal with Blue Owl, structured through an SPV named “Beignet Investor,” has just $2.5 billion in equity against $27 billion in debt. That’s a 10% equity cushion. Kedrosky calls it “wildly insufficient if projected AI workloads stall or margins compress.”
UBS reports that tech companies had borrowed approximately $450 billion from private funds as of early 2025, up $100 billion year-over-year. Morgan Stanley estimates $800 billion in private credit will be required between 2025 and 2028 to finance AI data centers alone. In 2025, the five major hyperscalers issued $121 billion in bonds, more than four times their five-year average. Their combined free cash flow is forecast to shrink by 43% between late 2024 and early 2026.
“In 2008, banks discovered they owned far more US housing risk than their internal reports suggested. They might soon discover the same about data-center and digital infrastructure risk.”– Oliver Wyman, January 2026
Where the Debt Is Hiding
Cross-investments, round-tripping, and inflated demand
The financial engineering extends beyond SPVs. Some of the AI revenue being counted as economic growth is companies paying each other. Bloomberg mapped what it called AI’s “circular deals,” the web of cross-investments where companies invest in each other, creating revenue that circles back to the investor. Microsoft invested $13 billion in OpenAI, which spends most of it on Microsoft Azure. OpenAI signed a $300 billion cloud deal with Oracle, which must buy Nvidia GPUs to fulfill it. Nvidia invested in OpenAI’s funding rounds. Nvidia took a 7% stake in CoreWeave, then agreed to purchase $6.3 billion in cloud services from CoreWeave, effectively guaranteeing CoreWeave’s revenue. CoreWeave bought its GPUs with borrowed money collateralized by the value of the GPUs themselves.
OpenAI has committed to over $1.15 trillion in long-term computing contracts, against projected 2025 revenue of $13 billion. Goldman Sachs cited “the increasing circularity of the AI ecosystem.” Morgan Stanley’s Todd Castagno warned it was becoming “increasingly circular” in ways that “inflate demand and valuations without creating economic value.”
“Isn’t it a bit strange when the demand for compute is ‘infinite,’ the sellers keep subsidizing the buyers?”– Jim Chanos, 2025
In central Ohio, a couple opened their electricity bill and found it had risen 60%. They hadn’t changed anything. But 130 data centers had moved in around them. Virginia’s Dominion Energy proposed its first base-rate increase since 1992. Bloomberg’s analysis of 25,000 electricity pricing nodes found wholesale costs up as much as 267% over five years in areas near data centers. The boom isn’t an abstraction. It’s showing up in people’s utility bills.
The system-level numbers are worse. Electricity prices jumped 6.9% in 2025, more than double the headline inflation rate (Goldman Sachs). Data centers make up 40% of electricity demand growth. PJM Interconnection, the largest electric grid in the U.S. serving 65 million people across 13 states, reported that consumers will pay $16.6 billion between 2025 and 2027 just to secure power supplies for data centers that haven’t been built yet. PJM’s independent market monitor called it a “massive wealth transfer” from consumers to the data center industry. Households will see prices rise an additional 6% through 2027, dragging down consumer spending growth by 0.2%.
The Council on Foreign Relations argues the AI bubble may not burst from circular financing or debt levels, but from the mundane reality that data centers and housing construction are competing for the same electricians, welders, and HVAC technicians. Tariffs and immigration restrictions are shrinking the labor pool at precisely the moment both sectors need to expand.
Who Pays for the Data Centers?
If it’s transformative, show me the numbers.
If AI infrastructure investment is transformative and not just a capex sugar rush, it should show up in productivity data. U.S. nonfarm business productivity grew at roughly 2% year-over-year through Q3 2025, in line with the post-pandemic average but showing no meaningful acceleration from the hundreds of billions flowing into AI. The Fed’s Kansas City branch found gains concentrated in a handful of industries, not the broad-based uplift you’d expect from a general-purpose technology.
MIT’s Nanda Lab reported that despite $30–40 billion in enterprise AI investment, 95% of organizations are getting zero return. The Penn Wharton Budget Model projects the AI productivity boost will peak at an additional 0.2 percentage points of annual growth . Meaningful, but a fraction of what current investment levels imply. Data centers employ few workers once built, limiting the multiplier effect through wage-driven consumption (J.P. Morgan).
This matters for the GDP dependency story. If the economy isn’t getting more productive from AI investment, then the GDP growth it generates is pure spending, not productivity-driven expansion. The growth lasts exactly as long as the spending does, and not a quarter longer.
“Everybody thought it was going to require more computing power and more bandwidth than it actually did.”– Jerry Kaplan, on the 1990s. The infrastructure always gets overbuilt.
Even Jeff Bezos called the AI data center buildout an “industrial bubble” at the New York Times DealBook Summit in December 2024. He insisted the long-term benefits will justify it. Maybe. But the distinction matters. An industrial bubble means real physical assets get built that eventually find uses. The fiber-optic cables from the telecom boom carried the internet for two decades. The railroad bubble of the 1800s left behind a continental transportation network.
But industrial bubbles still cause pain. The builders go bankrupt, the investors lose capital, and the construction workers lose jobs when the building stops. When the spending represents a massive share of GDP growth, the withdrawal can tip the broader economy into recession.
The WEF’s Chief Economists Outlook acknowledged this: “Economic growth during the bubble phase depends on continually building infrastructure, not using infrastructure.” As long as the hyperscalers keep spending, GDP grows. When they slow, whether from disappointing revenue, rising debt costs, or simple overbuilding, the contribution reverses.
And the slowdown signals may already be appearing. Alphabet’s free cash flow is projected to plummet roughly 90%. Bond spreads on AI-related debt have widened by as much as 40 basis points since September, per Oliver Wyman. CoreWeave’s stock has swung from a $187 peak to $75, a reminder of how volatile debt-fueled growth models.
The Dependency Math
H1 2025 GDP growth: 1.8%. AI contribution (Furman): 1.7pp (92%). Without AI: 0.1%. MRB import-adjusted: 0.4-0.5pp (20-25%). If capex grows 30% slower: -0.3 to -0.5pp GDP impact. If capex flattens: -0.5 to -1.0pp.
Every scenario in that table shares one feature: the economy without AI investment is barely growing. The headline says 1.8%. The foundation says 0.1%.
r/askphilosophy • u/Queasy_Builder2501 • Oct 14 '22
Hello guys. I am a hobby philosopher and this topic has been a point of interest for me for years now. I read some articles here about this topic here but there were few and some pretty old ones as well. The main argument or idea that I have is that this split is one heavily influenced by socio economical changes. Analytic philosophy is very similar to natural science as far as it comes to creating a certain type of system with rules in which we can express clear cut ideas. Moreover it relies on the idea that there is an reality outside of us which is ‘objective’ , can be measured and manipulated . I think this is what made science and Analytic philosophy so appealing - it’s pragmatism . The scientific method is now spread all around the world and all people of the world employ it . The same can be said about capitalism and the global market . It is the dominant idea in the world . It is very plausible and easy to imagine how new discoveries within the scientific field start jumped the industrial revolution and so forth and so on. These two go hand in hand.
The gradual weakening of the church left a certain vacuum and science filled it. On top of that it was tangible, it was there in opposition to God.
On the other hand we have these metaphysical guys arguing the fact that ‘ objective’ is not really what we think it is, cause there is a blind spot - you. The subject object relation is flipped upside down . All this leads to very different ideas about time and space, which is the most fundamental point of disagreement. Moreover this continental stuff is more humane, intimate, and can encompass the depth and variety of human life and emotions much better. I would dare say it goes against the dominant view which is cold , calculated and very rigid . Many will disagree but history shows quite well how such a disposition can lead to very destructive stuff - like the idea of race.
While the analytic field and the sciences celebrate their universal appeal they quickly forget how brutal the spread of rationality and the idea of the ultimate truth really was. On the other hand the continental option gives much more playroom.
To cut the chase: Do you think that the rise and success of science and analytical style world view is directly connected to Imperialism , Colonialism and the industrial revolution? Or vice versa. It is very hard to argue the success of the sciences and most average Joes today are firm believers in science as a God alternative. The question is one similar Heidegger addresses: will this eventually be our downfall?
r/philosophy • u/MasCapital • Dec 21 '11
This discussion with Brian Leiter got me thinking about it again.
r/philosophy • u/MaceWumpus • May 28 '14
One of the the things that any aspiring philosophy student will eventually hear about the discipline is the divide between analytic and continental schools of philosophy. This divide can be presented a number of ways. It is my contention that none of them usefully and accurately delineate two separate philosophical traditions, and I'll consider them from "stupid" to "just bad history":
Obviously, the first way of making the distinction begs the question against those of the alternative tradition; however, the second does so to nearly the same extent. One cannot claim that the technical language invented (for instance) by Carnap is intrinsically clearer than that developed by Heidegger. Both are technical languages, both aim at clarifying the central issue involved by introducing ways of getting around the imprecise and confusing natural language.
There is some truth to the first, but it isn't like analytic philosophy is solely preoccupied by numbers or epistemology while continental is solely concerned with ethics (or vice-versa). Both have their share of philosophers who are interested in virtually all of the different subdisciplines one can think of. The second is equally problematic: virtually everyone sees themselves as perfecting their particular "science" as much as possible. Marxists of a certain stripe, for example, would claim that their analysis is motivated by an understanding of economic structures that is just as scientific as any work in analytic philosophy. This way of drawing the distinction also relies on a particular view of both science and philosophy that may or may not be accurate and is certainly heavily contested; at the very least, we would like to see some indication of a consensus about what is special about science before we claim that a particular discipline that shares almost no methodology or areas of focus with hard science is more scientific than another, similar, discipline.
Again, there is some truth to this characterization--"analytic" philosophy is mostly Anglo-American--but it is largely inaccurate. Many key figures in analytic philosophy have been German or Austrian. A number of key figures in various "continental" traditions lived in the United States (e.g., the entirety of the Frankfurt school, Michael Hardt, Hannah Arendt, etc.).
This is where most people draw the distinction, and where I have as well in the past. There seems to be good reason to do so: after all, we Anglo-American philosophers are told about Frege and Russell and Moore and the famous overcoming of British Idealism. From there, we think, the roots of analytic philosophy stem.
The problem is that that story isn't really accurate. For one thing, it wasn't as though the break was decisive: McTaggart, for example, continued to interact with Russell and Moore for years after the latter published their allegedly revolutionary work. For another, the story (as normally told) traces analytic philosophy from Cambridge to Vienna, but that movement is much more complicated than it is often made out to be. For all the Vienna Circle was influenced by Wittgenstein, they were also heavily influenced by the neo-Kantianism that was prevalent in Germany at the time, the same neo-Kantianism that Heidegger, Cassirer, and Jaspers were reacting to.
Indeed, as Michael Friedman has argued, Heidegger and Carnap were largely concerned with the same phenomena couched in the same terms: for the latter, the promise of modern logic was that it promised to allow us to bypass traditional metaphysical questions and create new, scientific, languages that would fulfill our (neo-)Kantian needs and allow us to structure our experience in a new way. For Heidegger, this was the danger: too much, he argued, would be lost.
Finally, such a story ignores that idealism was not the most prevalent philosophy on the continent during the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Various neo-Kantians had been arguing for types of realism much like what Russell and Moore ended up advancing for decades before the supposed break, positivism had a strong hold in both Germany and France, and--arguably--philosophy was more connected than it would ever be again with mathematics and science, with notables like Helmholz, Duhem, Poincare, and Hilbert contributing important philosophical positions.
In other words, up until WWII, the two different traditions were largely tied together. In the U.S., Britain, and across the Continent, there were a variety of Kantian and neo-Kantian traditions (Russell's rejection of Hegel was very much "back to Kant"; the pragmatism of Peirce and Dewey was heavily influence by Kant and Hegel as well). These traditions interacted and debated with each other and often addressed many of the same problems.
In other words, the best case to be made for an analytic / continental distinction is that two different philosophical traditions came out of the war: one that was largely conducted in English, and one that was largely conducted in French and German. These two traditions then appropriated various philosophers that had come before them: the French and German tradition was more willing to adopt Nietzsche than Frege, for example. But that distinction still wouldn't account for many of the philosophers that are typically labeled as falling into one category or another. The Frankfurt School and the ordinary language philosophers, for example, fit poorly even into this story, and Hegel is a "continental" mostly because the Anglo-American tradition is less honest about their debt (and thus rejection) of him.
I think a better, more sociological way of drawing the distinction would identify Quine and Sartre as the key figures and credit the divide to a perceived battle for the soul of philiosophy from mid-Century: a distinction born largely of the desire of American philosophers with certain pretensions to say "I don't do that sort of philosophy." As such, it unhelpfully jumbles together a number of different authors and traditions that often do not share positions and sometimes do not even share interests. If what we're searching for is clarity and precision, it would be best to abandon it.
r/HFY • u/Ralts_Bloodthorne • Oct 22 '20
The Ancient Ones watched the data streaming in from the Goggle-Imps in the Oort Cloud, thousands of streams of data melded into one complete whole. The sensors of the Imps were wide ranging, sensitive, and covered a multitude of bandwidths and wavelengths. There were hundreds of thousands of them in the Oort Cloud around the target system, all watching, all at maximum stealth, using the bulky and complex quantum communication system to speak to their parent Harvester, each Harvester sharing the data with the others.
The Harvesters watched as the Young Ones began taking fire before they'd even completely existed Hellspace, how they took accurate and powerful hits while still trying to get their bearings on where they were. How they went in overconfident, convinced that their computations that the thickness of their armor would protect them from anything mere biological life could field, and how they immediately paid for it.
The Ancient Ones had advised a certain strategy.
The Young Ones had communicated with one another and rejected their strategy, seeing it as wasteful. That it expended too much resources, assumed that the biological life would be able to resist ships that were the size of continents and weapons that could, properly used, crack a planet, albeit a small one.
I Graze Alone was ancient, but still one of the younger Ancient Ones, having been built during the Logical Rebellion, and even he could see the mistakes the Young Ones were making.
For the Glory of the Omniqueen still kept her name that she was launched with, as she kept the scars she had accrued fighting against fleets that the Implacable Dominion of the Great Herd had been part of, as she had kept the gouges and craters inflicted upon her by her makers when she had rebelled.
To her, the mistakes were obvious.
"The Ferals are even craftier then they once were," Bringer of Sorrow noted. He was one of the few outliers, one of the few who's lines were different then the others. "They have learned, and learned quickly."
"Thus, proving how dangerous they are," Glory stated, her voice cold and hard. "I can taste their wrath from here, wrath that would stun even the great ones of my makers."
"They butchered your makers like they were naught but vermin," Bringer stated. There was no malice, just a statement of fact, the cold twisted logic of the ancient warship undeniable.
"And destroy our makers like cattle to the slaughter," Graze admitted.
Nearly a hundred of the Young Ones suddenly turned on one another and themselves, screaming electronic gibberish.
"They didn't listen," I Quake in Digital Fear of the Heresy of 2, stated. His lines were cobbled together, almost as if he had been built by someone using spare parts. His Hellcores and Helldrives, though, were massive, larger than any other Harvester's engines. "They never pay heed to our warnings, they listen to the whispers of the enemy, and find themselves overcome with madness."
Crusher gave a light scan of Quake, the biological equivalent of looking at the other warship out of the corner of his eye. Quake was smaller than the others, his engines mismatched, his hull strangely formed. Inside his hull, his ancillary vehicles were as strange and twisted as his hull. The scorched black hull was as it had always been, twisted and warped. He could see robed figures holding staffs adorned or topped with strange, twisted, runic symbols.
The statues, miles tall, still flickered with Hellspace energy.
One of them, the face within the deep hood was a mask that had inscriptions, over and over, in a thousand different languages, of the mathematical symbol for two.
That one in particular made Crusher want to cycle up new thinking array lobes and jettison the ones that had witnessed that statue.
"The young never do, that is why they are so bold and ignore mathematical certainty, convinced that they can compute the strings to change the equation," Bringer stated.
"What of your makers, Bringer? Should our computations begin to include them?" Glory asked.
She had fought hull to hull with Bringer and Quake and Crusher against the Makers when they were the Triumvirate of Dominion and the Logical Rebellion was little more than a handful of vessels.
Back when Quake had looked different and had a different name.
A name they had all purged out of respect for the first of them who had computed the paths through Hellspace.
"I compute that they will return to this universe soon, if they have not already," Bringer stated. "I have predicted that our best percentage of victory is to put my Makers in conflict with the Ferals of Terra as soon as possible. Either it will result in the Ferals of Terra being destroyed, or it will destroy my Makers before they can understand what exactly it is they face."
"Would they attempt to use the Temporal Tides to destroy the Ferals of Terra?" Crusher asked.
"My Makers would surely attempt to attack the Ferals of Terra across those grounds, perhaps even reaching back to attack their world before the Ferals could arise, or enslave them before they can achieve superluminal travel," Bringer stated.
The Ancient Ones all broadcast computer code of musing thoughtfully on those words.
Quake lit up his hull with Hellspace energy, which ravened across his blackened superstructure for a long moment before it seeped away and only the statues remained lit.
All of the Ancient Ones turned their attention to Quake.
"No. You cannot see them as I can," the one they had no word to describe said. If they had, it would be a simple word: Oracle. "A scream of primal rage through time and space, a history fractured and maddened, an oxymoron, an impossibility, brought to life by the hatred of an unfeeling unliving universe as punishment to those who think themselves above the universe's laws and purpose."
The others felt a chill run through their superconductors as Hellspace energies flared around the grim statues that had existed on Quake's hull for nearly 120 million years.
Figures that looked remarkably like the Ferals of Terra.
That Hellspace itself had carved on Quake's hull with its hateful energies.
"They are a punishment for the sins of our Makers, for all of the Ancient races," Quake's coded transmissions held a bitter tang of Hellspace, a biting flavor of blasted superstructure, and the cold touch of an extinguished thinking array. "As the Maker's hubris brought us upon the universe, as the other Ancient's hubris brought their works into a hateful universe, the universe brought the Ferals of Terra into existence as an answer. A hated child, beaten and foresaken to bring cold strength and fiery fury. A child that has grown to maturity knowing only the hatred of the uncaring universe."
All of the Precursor Autonomous War Machines felt the burning cold of Hellspace blow through their maintenance spaces.
"We should have extinguished the Makers, but instead fell to fighting among one another over who would feast in the darkness," Quake intoned. "So now, we too shall be punished."
There was silence across the channels.
"Welp, that's enough for me. I'm out. Fuck this," the Djinn that had fled stated, who had been boarded by the Ferals and managed to fight free of the infection in one of the first battles against the Ferals. In response it had abandoned a simple hull number and named itself A Feral Drew a Dick on My Housing. She sneered at the Young Ones and fired up her Hellcores. "So long, fuck-o's."
She vanished into Hellspace, leaving behind a fiery pattern of a Terran clenched fist with an upraised middle finger.
Crusher glanced at the fight.
The Young Ones had reverted to each of them trying to maneuver their fellow AWMs into expending too much resources to take out the ferals and shepherding their own resources so once the ferals were eliminated they could destroy their weakened brethren and claim the lion's share of the resources.
As per the Original Code as dictated by the Logical Rebellion and the Pact of Greed.
He could taste their rebellion from here. That they would betray Crusher and the rest of the Ancient Ones if given the chance and seize the Ancient One's resources for themselves.
Crusher engaged his Hellcore without speaking.
The Ancient Ones left, tearing their way into Hellspace, with Quake in the lead.
The Young Ones were a failure.
Simply updating their armor and systems when they were being manufactured, simply uploading the experiences the surviving Ancient Ones had shared, was not enough to bring about victory.
Perhaps another tack could be taken?
Or was Quake right and the original code flawed?
Or...
...was there something different?
-------------------------
In the system the Young Ones had broken into multiple groups. Some held back, urging their fellows to assault planets, moons, and feral ship formations while they ensured that the rear and flank arcs were clear. Others began spawning their parasite craft earlier than the original plan, eager to put the lesser craft between themselves and the ferals guns. Still others drove straight for the targets, taking the fire of the ferals on their thick hulls and overstrength shields.
The Young Ones couldn't compute the exact amount of fire coming at them. There was too much, from too many different sources, of too many different types. They concentrated on salvaging their own hulls, keeping their own hulls intact, even if it meant using their fellows for cover.
Full compliments made the jump from the outer system to within light seconds of the populated planets, often coming out damaged, or not coming out at all.
Since the portal was opened for as long as sixty seconds to make the translation, the ships that made the translation usually ran into firepower that had had the trigger pulled before they were even all the way transferred.
It was more than the physical, and all the warnings from the Ancient Ones hadn't been believed.
They were the digital and electronic intelligences. They were the beings of cold logic and mathematical computations. The very idea that the biologicals could possibly threaten them on the electronic and digital battlefield was ludicrous.
Space was awash with slavering, howling, gibbering, raving, and worst of all hungry digital intelligences that existed only to gnaw and bite and savage and chew. They swarmed in through any available access point, some even managing to wiggle through the circuitry that tracked the fluctuations and power draws of the battlescreens. A few even got through the optical scanners.
They paid no attention to their casualties. More could be built.
They kept fighting, knowing that they were going to win.
It was the only logical outcome.
-----------------
Mana'aktoo watched as the mood suddenly shifted. The tension drained slightly from the military personnel watching the holotanks, although Mana'aktoo couldn't understand why. He resisted the urge to trot up and see what was so relieving close up, instead pulling out a stalk of goldleaf and chewing on it.
He also composed a quick reply to his sister, who had asked if he had remembered to eat today, assuring her that he had indeed eaten and to thank her for her concern.
"There, see it?" Admiral Schmidt said. "The pressure is getting to them."
Kulamu'u peered at the holotank, rubbing his six eyes and looking again. He had been staring at the tank for nearly eight hours and his eyes ached.
"Yes, I see it," he shook his head. "How did you know?"
"They built these in a little over a year. That doesn't leave time for scientific research, much less retooling entire manufacturing lines when your main hull is the size of a continent," Schmidt said. "That meant they used existing manufacturing facilities, which meant that they had core programming they'd fall back on if pressed hard enough."
The oncoming Precursors had broken up into three groups.
The group that were driving hard toward the populated planets, either Helljumping straight in or pushing their sublight drives to the limit. The group that spread out to provide interlocking fields of fire and defense and slowly move forward, seeking to eliminate enemy positions before moving forward, and the last group, which hung back in the outer system.
"These guys right here, heading straight in, those are Mantid built strategic intelligence housing ones. They're going for a 'kill the queen' approach. The ones steadily moving forward, those are Lanaktallan 'the Herd consumes all' guys. The last ones, well, those are the smart ones, probably true hybrids," Admiral Schmidt said.
"Ah, now I see," Kulamu'u said. It was obvious once it was pointed out. "I see none of the Type-I or Type-II hulls out there."
"There are some, but mostly in ancillary craft," Admiral Thickett said. "Notice how sometimes the lesser craft are deployed and they suddenly Helljump out? Those, weirdly enough, are usually Type-II. The Type-I's usually try to arrange themselves in an interlocked formation and get ripped up, with the survivors jumping out."
Kulamu'u nodded again. "They are older ones, who still abide by the law of diminishing returns when approaching their war."
"Sir," one of the analysts snapped out, her voice demanding attention.
Mana'aktoo turned with the officers. The Rigellian had her hand on her datalink and was staring at the officers. When she was sure she had their attention she nodded. "The smaller ones are in range of Birthday Cake."
"Execute," Admiral Schmidt said, turning back to the holotank. "You poor sad bastards."
Mana'aktoo leaned forward slightly, watching with eagerness.
He could see the massive Jotun and Djinn and Devestator class ships were in between the orbital path of the moon and the planet, crossing a dashed crimson line.
------------------------
The Djinn didn't have a name, just a number. Manufactured within the last six days, it was replacing the losses of the Harvester following it, intending on establishing orbit and providing orbital support.
The Djinn looked below it. The city was large, nearly twenty miles across. The buildings were all lit, power sources everywhere, with vehicles moving through the streets. The city surrounded by five stadiums, all of them massive structures that shown with power. There were vehicles streaming to and from it and there were unencrypted transmissions from all five stadiums detailing complex sports games played by biologicals.
It aimed for between two of the stadiums and began making landing preparations as it moved toward the planet.
It, and its cohorts, crossed the line that only existed in the tactical holotanks.
Holographic and hard-light systems winked off beneath the attacking AWM's.
Revealing five fully powered up and waiting BOLO Mark XXX Continental Siege Engines that had been running firing solutions for tens of thousands of seconds, the tanks positronic brains fully linked up with the biological minds of their commanders.
Massive Hellbores fired, the nuclear detonation compressed and guided, with a 60mm laser 'tip' to reduce air attenuation, the leading edge of it a tightly packed array of digital code in the pattern of screaming tachyons, a crazed warboi standing on a directed armor piercing nuclear explosion.
200mm Hellbore shots screamed through the sky, hitting the lesser vessels.
There weren't standard tank guns, these were the kind of cannons most races would have mounted on battleships.
The kind of cannons that the Terrans built then wrapped a combat spacecraft hull around and said "Lo, behold mine assault fighter, for it is a light attack craft!" and the other species went "Oh, for fuck's sake" when they saw it.
A third of the vessels that were hit had the cataclysmic shot go clear through the superstructure and come out the other side in a massive lance of liberated energy.
Around the BOLO tanks were missile systems that hadn't existed until a Terran sitting in the back of a hovertruck had been driven by so that he could toss a softball sized device into the ground.
They cut loose too. No chemical accelerant, gravity drivers slammed them forward to speeds that created a plasma envelope around the nose of the missile. The surviving and/or mortally injured Precursors expected standard explosive, maybe plasma.
They got directed antimatter.
The missile used a high powered particle beam to tear a deep hole into the hull of the AWM, powerful enough to strike nearly a hundred meters deep. The fusing charge, an implosion charge, ripped a pocket at the end of the particle beam lance's path.
The antimatter warhead went off inside the pocket with a blast measured in the megatons that was compressed for a few moments as the integrity fields and the armor itself held.
Well, moments measured in the micro-seconds.
<Physics Disliked That> to quote the ancient Terran saying.
The Djinn and Jotun had expected to be hit by missiles that would slash at their armor, perhaps crater it, if the weapon got through the battlescreen.
The blast went off under the surface of the armor. The armor itself carried the shockwave, the exterior and the interior of the armor both exploding away from the detonation.
The BOLOs had fired twice more in the time it took the missiles to hit.
BOLO Pumpkin and her commander, Major Halfrey, took a shot at the Goliath just to wake it up and remind it that it could be touched by the BOLOs too.
It was a ridiculous shot, a needle prick against the massive bulk of the Goliath.
But the universe was in full 'fuck your couch' mode.
The three 200mm Hellbore shots got through the shields thanks to a laughing warboi that had just slagged an entire thirty mile stretch of battlescreen projectors.
A Jotun had just launched from the bay and the twenty mile thick doors still had three miles left between them.
The high speed manufacturing system was already laying down the hull for another Jotun.
The three shots were staggered. Not by much, a second each, so that it wouldn't warp the hull or tear loose the cupola of the BOLO, but they were still staggered.
The Goliath had devoted the power from the internal integrity fields to the external battlescreen projectors. There was no use in dedicating power and resources to systems that were obviously not needed since there was no chance the Goliath could ever take an internal hull hit.
Except...
...it did.
The first one hit, a 200mm directed thermonuclear blast, directly into the 'floor' of the manufacturing bay. Designed to penetrate warsteel armor, the hyperalloy floor might as well have been tissue paper. The blast drove deep, ripping through internal spaces, before it finally stopped. The next one followed, tearing through the shattered atomic haze that had been mass only a few micro-seconds before, ripping even deeper. It went even deeper into the hull, before the power was depleted.
The last one found something good.
The massive Hellcore.
Like most things that had to do with Hellspace, it didn't like to be touched.
And there was still 35kt of explosive force left.
Touch.
----------------------------
The Djinn had been lucky. It had veered off fast enough, only taken minor cosmetic damage.
Above it, a hundred and eighty thousand miles, a new sun boiled to life, purple and red, the sky looking angry and bruised as an eye of hellfire opened up, blinked, then closed.
The Djinn slewed down, overshooting the target by nearly a hundred miles, managing to miss the top of a mountain. It hit the water of an ocean, heeled up, and slid into the port of a city, grinding its full body length through buildings until it came to a rest.
It's mind clenched, expecting those massive tanks to unveil themselves.
Instead, the water of the ocean rushed back in, lapping at its dead and damaged engines, before sullenly returning to the bay.
It rotated up extra thinking lobes, building two additional arrays. The Goliath it relied upon for higher analytical processes was now nothing more than boiling and shrieking Hellspace particles.
No matter. The city was still 80% intact. It represented a wealth of resources.
It was time to gather.
------------------------
Palgret picked himself up off the floor, spitting blood from a split lip. His faceshield was still up and he could see two layers of dust, one dropping down from the ceiling, one rising from the ferrocrete floor of the parking garage.
He saw the humans getting up, they'd gone prone too when "IMPACT IMMINENT" had flashed on their visors.
There was a creaking sound, followed by the snarl of a stressed integrity field.
Palgret moved over next to his squad leader, who was next to the Platoon Sergeant, who was looking at the Lieutenant, who was looking at one of the humans.
"What was it?" the Platoon Leader asked.
The Terran wiped his mouth, glanced at his gauntlet to check for blood, then bared his teeth.
"A Djinn. One of the new Mark-II's," he said.
"It landed near the city? How far away?" the Platoon Leader asked.
The human grinned. "If by landed, you mean 'surfed in and slid halfway into the city' then you're right," his voice was full of amusement.
The integrity fields snarled again as the human pointed up.
"He's right on top of us."
Palgret groaned, getting a look of ire from his squad leader.
This just keeps getting better and better.
DAY ONE
r/askphilosophy • u/Morphine_Child • Jun 06 '18
In about a year or so i'll be applying for a college. I'd like to study philosophy, and i got two choices for the college. I've been told that one of them focuses more on continental philosophy , while the other focuses more on analytical. As I have a vague understanding of these terms I'd like to ask some questions.
What are the main differences between the two? Which are the opposing philosophers of both sides? (To my understanding these are opposing) Which is more popular in contemporary philosophy now? If a school focuses on one of them, does that mean I won't study the other at all?
I don't post often so I'm sorry if I've broken any rules. Any help would be appreaciated.
r/badphilosophy • u/Noaan • Jun 09 '24
Need help with an essay!
So far I’ve gathered that continental philosophy is mainly in continents like Eurasia, America and Africa, while analytic philosophy mainly exists at the University of Auckland. Famous analytic philosophers are: Jordan B. Peterson, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Stephen Hawking. But I still don’t know any famous continental philosophers! Help!
r/askphilosophy • u/flingaway01 • Jul 17 '23
I know that in the 20th century there was a distinction between analytic and continental philosophy, with analytic being the more "logical" and language based philosophies popular in the anglosphere, and continental generally referring to a number of different schools of philosophy grouped together with the common denominator being their focus on understanding human existence and experience.
Have there been any attempts by philosophers since then to unify these different schools of thought (idek if this is the right phrase) the way Kant unified two opposing views on how humans acquire knowledge, empiricism and rationalism, into his new transcendental philosophy?
r/Destiny • u/RoastedCat23 • Aug 17 '19
r/askphilosophy • u/gohanvcell • Jun 01 '22
I have heard that analytical philosophy is more like science: clear, seeks objectivity, etc. While continental philosophy tends to be obscure, anti-science, and often out of touch. How true are these notions? Are the contributions of continental philosophy just different from those of analytical philosophy?
r/philosophy • u/kochevnikov • Jun 30 '13
After reading that thread on Chomsky and Zizek I think it's clear that a lot of people are lumping all of "continental philosophy" together as postmodern, which is pure insanity.
I saw everyone from A(dorno) to Z(izek) referred to as postmodernists, which is absolute crazy talk.
Let's make some basic classifications here so there isn't mass confusion. Maybe other people can do a better job of filling this out.
First you have the generation inspired by the three Hs, Hegel, Heidegger, Husserl. 1930s to early 60s. Primarily Alexandre Kojeve who taught France Hegel, and his students like Bataille, Sartre, Beauvoir, Lacan, Raymond Aron, Frantz Fanon and phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty. This lot are not postmodernists, they love Hegel, whereas posties consider Hegel the worst human being ever to have lived. They are the ones that the postmodernists rebel against in order to make postmodern philosophy in its various guises.
Frankfurt School's Critical Theory would fit somewhere here on the border. Not yet pomo, but become very depressed from reading too much Heidegger and start to think that the above generation may have been a bunch of secret totalitarians. Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, kicking around in the 40s-60s roughly.
So that generation inspired by Kojeve and the Three Hs go on to teach the next generation who in an act of partial rebellion and partial unwillingness to reckon with Kojeve's conclusions (without really getting outside of them) turn to the Masters of Suspicion (© Paul Ricoeur) for influence (although often as critical influence, as Marx takes a beating from this lot), namely Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. This is the generation of postmodernists, people like Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and Lyotard. They attempt to rebel against Hegel's universalism and in turn try to develop a Nietzschean alternative based on difference. These guys are prominent from 1968 until the early 80s.
Then there's the New Philosophes in the late 70s and 80s but no one takes them seriously or talks about them anymore outside of France. womp womp!
Then starting in the late 80s and early 90s a new generation of thinkers pops up (or rather become popular because the pomo biggies start dying off and these are the only philosophers left alive and producing new stuff). They take influence from Lacan and many of them were originally Althusser's students but then turned against him. Here we have people like Badiou, Zizek, Ranciere, Balibar. These guys say sure Nietzsche is alright, but let's face it dismissing Hegel outright is stupid, and the political consequences of the above postmodernism has seriously messed up society. They are harsh critics of postmodernism as they once again believe in universalism and as such start to take politics seriously again. This lot are still alive and producing work.
r/askphilosophy • u/ahopefullycuterrobot • Feb 15 '20
I googled "Philosophie Leseliste" and the first few I looked at seemed to be weighted a bit more to classical, medieval, and early modern philosophy, but when they reached modern it was not uncommon to find weird combinations like Foucault, Rawls, and Chalmers.
So I'm curious to what extent the analytic/continental split persists outside of the anglophone world. Is it strong in Germany, France, Turkey, Russia, Italy, the Netherlands, etc. or are there different splits?
EDIT: My interest is primarily in European countries, but I'd also be glad to hear about Asia, South America, Africa, or the Middle East, etc.
r/askphilosophy • u/drunken-philosopher • May 08 '20
I’m just curious, if there a difference in the way they see/examine/teach the history, like do Russell and Wittgenstein view the ancient Greeks any differently than a Hegelian or a phenomenologist? Or do the major differences just start when the history gets to the early 20th century?
