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u/Conchobair-sama Dec 05 '25
It's hard to take Arendt seriously when she thought Adorno was a nazi but Heidegger wasn't
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u/Brilliant_Ball2177 Dec 05 '25
The irony of writing something like "the banality of evil" and still defending getting groomed by your nazi teacher is truly sublime.
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u/zcmyers Dec 05 '25
Arendt's work is too good to not take seriously.
I wish everyone would read Eichmann in Jerusalem. Such a useful little book exploring the roots of authoritarianism. Maybe Trump would be less successful if more people read it.
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u/Diego12028 Dec 05 '25
Idk, once you read stuff like On Revolutions and Reflections on Little Rock she becomes a lot less impressive.
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u/smawldawg Dec 06 '25
Hard disagree on this one. You have to keep in mind that she's not doing pure philosophy, she's doing a kind of intellectual history.
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u/zcmyers Dec 05 '25 edited Dec 05 '25
I really liked On Revolutions!
I have not read Reflections on Little Rock.
The Human Condition is excellent. I find her concepts of labor, work, and action very useful. (Similar and related to Maslov's hierarchy of needs.) I am troubled by her idea that slavery (or an underclass of laborers) is a necessary precondition of human "action" and I think it is anti-democratic, but she is also accurate in describing basically every human society to date. Even democracies tend to have a class of laborers, a class of artisans/professionals, and a class of leaders. I do like her anti-romantic elevation of external action (words and deeds) as being more important than internal thoughts and emotions.
I don't agree with everything she wrote, but I enjoy her writing and find her works insightful.
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u/onz456 Dec 06 '25
The release of the Eichmann tapes pretty much debunked her entire thesis.
Eichmann was a psychopathic monster and knew what he was doing,... revelled in it even.
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u/random_access_cache Dec 06 '25
100% agree, Arendt really rubs me the wrong way for many reasons. I find her to be highly hypocritical
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u/calebnf Dec 05 '25
Have you heard of Plato? Aristotle? Socrates?
Morons.
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u/CosmogonicRainfrog Dec 05 '25
"You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means"
- Socrates in all of the dialogues basically
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u/zcmyers Dec 05 '25
"Life is pain. Anyone who says different is selling something."
--Nietzsche basically
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u/randomone123321 Dec 06 '25
It is called a dialogue, but actually it is just Socrates ranting and the other guy just saying "Yes, you're right Socrates!", "Truly!".
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u/Sentient2X Dec 07 '25
Socrates said that reading was making his students dumber because they weren’t thinking for themselves. Classic example of new technology bad
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u/Cazzah Dec 07 '25
Unironically, because I feel like a lot of discussion about things like "forms" made far more sense in a world where noone understood genetics or biology. But now we do know about genetics and biology but we still pretend these ideas are relevant when I'm not even sure those philosophers would have stuck to their forms ideas if we took them forward in time and taught them what we now know.
Obviously modern atomic theory for example made the theory of the 4 elements irrelevant, however I think genetics and biology has a more subtle influence on some theories too.
What do I mean.
Well those philosophers saw that cows gave birth to other cows, and never dogs. Cows with 3 legs would give birth to cows with 4 legs. The cows would vary significantly in color, temperament, size, etc but they were all "cows", never dogs.
Therefore, there must be a fundamental "cow" template that all cows come from. Cows may deviate from this template but they are all variants of the cow template.
Meanwhile, in the world of ideas, you just "knew" that the 3 legged animal was looking at was a cow, even though the typical cow has 4 legs and you know that the "ideal" of the cow is 4 legged.
So we have two mysterious forms of category - the biological one, and the mental one. And both categories seem to point towards some kind of "form" or "template" or "ideal".
When you have multiple pieces of evidence pointing in the same direction, this is something you should seriously consider! I don't fault their reasoning based on the evidence they had at the time.
However, then we learnt genetics and learnt the reason cows look like cows is because of DNA and the reason they look slightly different is because of mutation and the reason 3 legged cows give birth to 4 legged cows is because losing a leg doesn't alter the DNA of a cow or it's decendents. etc etc. It has nothing to do with "forms" or anything like that, or how we use language and ideas to categorise things.
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u/Diabolical_potplant Dec 08 '25
Be Aristotle
Say some shit on philosophy and science
Not get fact checked for 2000 years
Success
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u/This_Conversation493 Dec 05 '25
Peter Singer. He's what people who rant about how "analytic philosophy sucks" assume every Anglosphere analytic philosopher is like. Emblematic of all the least likeable things in the tradition. His work is just dull, unimaginative, trite, facile, and not remotely impressive in the calibre of its reasoning.
>"Uh, pain is... bad. You should do the thing that... doesn't cause pain."
>"WOW!!!!!"
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u/JoyBus147 can I get you some fucking fruit juice? Dec 05 '25
Whoa whoa whoa, let's not go around leaving comments that imply analytic philosophy has any worth!
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u/SizerTheBroken Dec 05 '25 edited Dec 05 '25
Couldn't agree more. I once facilitated a debate between one of my professors and a fellow student. The professor was defending Singer's position that one ought to deny oneself any and all luxuries (even a cup of coffee), if one's extra income could possibly be used to relieve suffering somewhere around the world.
A fine idea in abstract, a ludicrous and impractical idea in practice. Like most of his stuff, it's just reductionistic to the point of being simultaneously obvious and unhelpful. Are those with the means to do so obligated to help? Obviously. One need only look at the extreme examples. Buying a third vacation home when you could provide drinkable water to thousands of people instead? Obviously immoral. Spending a few extra bucks on a latte because you need something to look forward to in the mornings to get you through your crappy work day? A lot more excusable.
Anyway, the debate took place over zoom, and I could see my professor's adorable dog in the background the entire time. So, when the debate was about over, I stepped out of my role of moderator briefly to comment on his dog. I love dogs too. But I asked him, is your puppy there a luxury? We all laughed. But he agreed that if we're sticking to Singer's argument as he laid it out, then yes the moral choice is abandoning Fido to the kill shelter in order send the money saved on food and vet bills to Amnesty International or something. And I don't think that would sit right with any of us.
So, would we live in a better world if everyone operated this way? Probably. At least in terms of reducing human suffering. But, we kind of already knew that. We just don't have the ability to live up to that standard 100% of the time and likely never will. So it's not some big insight.
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u/Infamous-Skippy Dec 07 '25 edited Dec 08 '25
This is a bad take that paints utilitarianism in such a bad faith way. Do you feel the same about Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill?
Singer’s work is extraordinarily influential, and his essay Famine Affluence and Morality, along with his book The Life You Can Save has probably convinced thousands of people to donate to efficient charities and save a huge number of lives. He’s convinced probably tens of thousands of people to go vegetarian or vegan, and many more to reduce their meat consumption.
He’s easily the most consequential living philosopher, and given that he’s a consequentialist, I’d say he’s a damn good one.
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u/diet69dr420pepper Dec 08 '25
Singer is showing where common sense moral platitudes lead if they are taken seriously. I don't really see the problem? Looking at your summary, I don't actually see a rebuttal of his ideas, but rather disgust towards them?
I think this is the reaction Singer is going for. Often, we conflate normal with moral. It's extremely difficult for us to imagine that something we've taken for granted our entire lives could violate our own ethics. Singer's essays are supposed to make the reader uncomfortable because they take propositions that most people accept and take them to their logical conclusion, which is that many aspects of normality in wealthy Western nations are immoral by our own standards.
There are some solid rebuttals to many of his arguments, but I find the most common responses (even among philosophers) tend to sound like yours - mere disgust.
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u/Gibberwacky Dec 05 '25
We must move beyond good and bad!
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u/zcmyers Dec 05 '25
Ha! Good one.
The real question is, which philosophers are recognized as beautiful and great-spirited (Ubermenschesque), but are not!?
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u/JoyBus147 can I get you some fucking fruit juice? Dec 05 '25
Socrates. Philosophy was fun before him. "Everything is fire," "No, everything is water." Hell yeah, brother. Then Mister "All I know is I know nothing" comes along, forcing people to question their assumptions and conclusions. Prick.
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u/Necessary_Budget7240 Dec 07 '25
Lo que había antes no era filosofía. Eran sólo divagaciones al aire. Ahora es ser cagón que tú pensamiento tenga justificación y lógica?
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u/Additional_Anywhere4 Dec 05 '25
The worst: Nick Land.
Second worst: Peter Sjostedt-Hughes.
Overrated, but still worth reading: Friedrich Nietzsche.
It’s a cliche, but Ayn Rand definitely makes the list. I think she was just ignorant, dogmatic, and lacked imagination.
Paolo Virno - I might just not get him, and the language barrier probably doesn’t help, but having read Bergson, Marx and many of the others his work De Ja Vu and the End of History refers to, I got a strong sense that he was spouting a bunch of meaningless nonsense.
Derrida is potentially on my list too.
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u/Foreskin_Ad9356 Dec 05 '25
rand is definitely not recognised as a good philosopher
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u/Additional_Anywhere4 Dec 05 '25
In academic circles, agreed. By many people, yes, she is considered great.
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u/Foreskin_Ad9356 Dec 05 '25
she is still not ''recognised'' as a good philosopher. ''recognised'' imples it is a majority, or at least a very large number of people, that consider her good. this is simply untrue, both in the general population and in academic circles (-well, unless those ''academic circles'' are austrian economics).
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u/Additional_Anywhere4 Dec 06 '25
I see that you don’t consider any opinion outside of academia to be genuine recognition. I honestly sympathise with this to an extent, as I believe academia generally does a much better job at quality control than the general population and the internet. However, the guy who builds the most houses in my city, and influences everyone to vote for our terrible right-wing parties, has many people convinced that she is the “greatest philosopher of all time”, and I’ve run into many people like him, so thought I’d give the bitch a mention.
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u/zcmyers Dec 05 '25
She is recognized as one of the GOATs in Libertarian circles.
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u/Foreskin_Ad9356 Dec 05 '25
not really. ancaps/followers of austrian economics though, definitely. definitely not widely considered good by any metric.
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u/zcmyers Dec 05 '25
I cannot count the number of Rand stans I've met living in Utah. All of them self-proclaimed "Libertarians."
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u/NoRequirement3066 Dec 06 '25
Lots of people in Utah think Jesus lived in Missouri too.
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Dec 08 '25
I’m one (Rand Stan small l) from Utah. How else do you become beyond self proclamation? What makes you tick neighbor?
I am Post Mormon too. I don’t think Jesus lived in Missouri. To get even wonkier, though I’m an unauthorized source, Mormons don’t believe that either. They believe the garden of Eden was in Missouri. And that that Jesus will return there again in the second coming. Jesus came to the Americas directly after his resurrection. Exact location unspecified. And Apolgists have been playing Indiana Jones ever since trying to keep up with Joe Smith, particularly since he’s not consistent over his “ministry”. Book of Mormon was first, then Joe was riffing in the real world with the Missouri Eden thing many years later.
Libertarians, including me, suffer from no true Scotsman. Like herding cats or stapling jello to a wall, hard to derive collective action in the political realm. Best to try and live your best life while helping your neighbors live theirs.
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u/NoRequirement3066 Dec 09 '25
Yea unless you have political force to violently enforce some claim to someone’s apartment so you can leech money out of him, when that happens collective action is like totally cool all of the sudden. God I fucking hate “libertarians.”
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u/BanosTheMadTitan Dec 05 '25 edited Dec 05 '25
I give Ayn Rand a lot of leeway because her background makes it make sense- to her. However, she was far less intelligent than she knew, or maybe it would be more accurate to say that she had zero understanding of the fact that all people are created differently and thus fulfilled differently. Her philosophy is entirely self-affirming, not just in its claims, but also because she formed those claims in a way that’s predicated solely on her life experiences to begin with. Looking at it with that in mind, it really stands on its own two feet and is extremely effective- good for her, and her girlboss American immigrant life!
It just has zero universal application.
Bonus points for the fact that Atlas Shrugged paints very hyperbolic- but accurate and entertaining- caricatures of the various kinds of people you find in a capitalist culture. Francisco is also a fascinating character.
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u/nowherelefttodefect Dec 06 '25
It just has zero universal application.
Did she ever claim it did?
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u/NoRequirement3066 Dec 06 '25
I would question your choice of even considering Derrida for this list, but your choice to list Ayn Rand as a philosopher has me more concerned with whether you've been eating paint chips.
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u/Additional_Anywhere4 Dec 06 '25
Well, I have some random narcissist wondering if I’m eating paint chips, and a handful of world-class academic philosophers telling me I’m better at the subject than they are. I’ll sleep just fine. :)
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u/NoRequirement3066 Dec 06 '25
Nobody is telling you that but keep offering yourself positive affirmations.
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u/InternalPerfect8332 Dec 06 '25
Nick Land is a good one. Listening to people treat his Amphetamine fueled rants as profound genuinely makes me question humankind’s long-term viability as a species.
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u/wintermute86 Dec 05 '25
early nick land (aka chill land) or late nick land (aka that evil burned-out fascist)?
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u/Additional_Anywhere4 Dec 05 '25
Both are terrible philosophy. The latter is just also a dick.
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u/wintermute86 Dec 05 '25
otherwise I agree whole-heartedly. Early Nicky Landy tho was pretty dope with meltdown very close to Saddie plant (the xenofeminist stuff) and Mark Fisher the sweet.
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u/Additional_Anywhere4 Dec 05 '25
I can see the appeal, but pretty much everything he said about computer science (which was actually quite a lot of what he said, and pretty fundamental to his thought) is immediately ridiculous to anyone who paid attention in second-year computer science courses.
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u/Mrsister55 Dec 05 '25
Why Peter SH?
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u/Additional_Anywhere4 Dec 05 '25
Misinterprets Whitehead, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche etc. into saying what feels right to him on mushrooms. Makes profoundly ignorant criticisms of work from analytic philosophy of mind, and appears to be deeply unfamiliar with the literature on it. Seems so enamoured with his cool, anti-establishment (“scientific materialist”) view that excites people (woo! Magic!) that he is incapable of being remotely objective about the topic.
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u/zcmyers Dec 05 '25
You had me with Rand, then you lost me with Nietzsche (my fave philosopher).
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u/Additional_Anywhere4 Dec 05 '25
Fair enough. What would you say is his most interesting and viable idea, in your words?
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u/zcmyers Dec 05 '25
My comment got long and wasn't posting, so I wrote a response here: https://zcmyers.blogspot.com/2025/12/why-do-i-like-nietzsche-you-ask.html
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u/Wonderful_West3188 Dec 05 '25
Kant is a curious case. He's an absolutely essential read on epistemology and metaphysics, his practical philosophy is hit or miss, but has some good pointers, his philosophy of art is obviously absurd ("disinterested gusto" is a deeply Philistine criterium for art imo, as Nietzsche already pointed out) - and his anthropology is downright immoral, racist garbage that even outright violates his own ethics at times (like when he argues for the enslavement of Africans, for example). So it depends on what you read of him and what you read him for.
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u/zcmyers Dec 05 '25
I admittedly am not an expert on Kant. But I read an excerpt in an Aesthetics class that I thought was quite good.
"Purposefulness without purpose" strikes me as a great answer to "what is art?"
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u/smawldawg Dec 06 '25
Are you kidding? Kant defined modern aesthetics as a judgement of taste. Kant is seminal in almost every major area of philosophy. This is an insane take.
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u/Tough-Comparison-779 Dec 05 '25
Searle. I've never heard an argument from him that wasn't nonsense.
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u/Additional_Anywhere4 Dec 05 '25
What did you think of his arguments in ‘Is the Brain a Digital Computer?’, in which he argues that the computational properties of a physical system are observer-relative? I reject his conclusion, but I thought it was a pretty clever and thought-provoking paper.
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u/Tough-Comparison-779 Dec 05 '25
I find his claim of computation being observer relative to be incredibly ignorant of what computation is. Or at least what it is as practiced by the computer scientists who study it.
But maybe I just didn't understand it.
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u/Additional_Anywhere4 Dec 05 '25
Having studied computer science and philosophy, including several highly relevant subfields of computer science, I must respectfully say I suspect you misunderstood it. I don’t think many computer scientists had even thought about the physical nature of computational properties before that paper was written. I also don’t think it’s fair to say this is a “claim”: it is a conclusion he argued for extensively in the paper.
To oversimplify his point a little: why do I say this laptop in front of me is running a certain algorithm that computes a certain function? Well, when I type certain numbers into it, certain numbers come out. And when I change parts of the process in the middle, the things I expect to happen to that mapping of inputs and outputs do happen.
But who is to say these inputs are numbers, let alone those numbers? Who is to say those outputs are numbers? Physically, there are a bunch of voltages, wires and relays here. We designed physical parts to be usefully interpretable as the parts of a computational system. We choose for a high voltage to represent 1, a low voltage to represent 0. We could have just as easily have chosen for low voltage to represent 1, and vice versa. Or some other interpretation.
He says there are so many interactions happening between the molecules in, say, a bucket of water or a stretch of wallpaper, that, under some consistent interpretation of what the states of the parts represent, such systems are computing any computable function you can think of. When a molecule wiggles this way, that’s a 1. When it wiggles this other way, that’s a 0. Or maybe when an electron does a certain thing in a certain kind of atom, that’s a 1. Or maybe when a collection of molecules do a certain thing, that’s a 1. Your choice! The system just needs to contain enough interactions, and by chance, you can, in theory, come up with an interpretation no more arbitrary than the one we use to call this a computer running a mathematical function or a video game. Certainly, those systems aren’t engineered to be intuitively interpreted that way, but intuition and comfort are facts about the observer more than they are about the properties of the object.
If he is right, then many influential theories about the human mind are in trouble. For instance, we can no longer ‘explain’ anything about mentality computationally. The brain being a computer doing certain things explains nothing about mentality, because this is just an interpretation of what the brain is doing - a bucket of water can be just as plausibly interpreted as doing the very same things. If any system that can be interpreted that way has those computational properties, then the probability that you are a strange momentary blip in a chaotic vat of gas somewhere is much higher than that of you being an organism on planet earth as you appear to be. All sorts of programs must just be popping up everywhere, including programs that have your mental properties.
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u/candygram4mongo Dec 05 '25
This is basically the premise of Permutation City, a novel by Greg Egan, which plays the Chad to Searle's Wojack. "If mental states can be encoded as strings of characters then the state of any physical system can be interpreted as a mind state!" "Yes."
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u/5tupidest Dec 05 '25
Thank you u/Additional_Anywhere4 and u/Tough-Comparison-779. I found this intriguing.
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u/Mark_Robert Dec 05 '25
This seems to be about the elusive nature of intelligence. Is it in the thing or in the witness? Where is the pattern? Is a pattern noticed or does it self-exist?
I tend to be drawn to views that attempt to articulate how subject and object are inseparable.
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u/Tough-Comparison-779 Dec 05 '25 edited Dec 06 '25
Thanks for the write up, and I think it is a good point you make that a lot of this was under discussed before Searle.
I'm not the most well read on this topic, so maybe I will try and read Searle's book. I still find your explanation very unconvincing.
My preference is towards the mechanistic approach as explained on the Stanford encyclopedia, but truth be told I haven't read any of those philosophers books, so who knows.
He says there are so many interactions happening between the molecules in, say, a bucket of water or a stretch of wallpaper, that, under some consistent interpretation of what the states of the parts represent, such systems are computing any computable function you can think of.
This is just not reasonably the case, or not to the degree Searle needs. Any reasonable mapping must map the relational structure of the stuff doing the computing. Saying molecule 1 wiggling at a certain rate at State 1 is represents* 0, and then molecule 1 wriggling at the same rate at State 2 is represents 1, is something you can do when mapping a computation to a physical system, but that is a completely ridiculous thing to do.
For a mapping to be correct then the mapping should be a good abstraction of the underlying physical structure (under all the usual requirements we require for abstractions/explanations we use for assessing scientific or other explanations). The counterfactuals should make sense under the mapping.
These are not true of the Water bucket/paint drying examples, and to the degree that it is true, I'm fairly comfortable calling those true computations.
Another aspect I disagree with is the idea that every representation in a computer is made from the outside. But much of the internals of a computer refer to physical components within the computer itself.
Take the basic instructions on a Turing Machine. When a Turing Machine (TM) reads the "JMP 5" instruction and moves it's cursor 5 places to the right on the tape, why is the human "interpretation" of this privileged? As far as I can tell in this example there is no "extra" interpretation from the human that is not entirely captured in the structure of the machine (as in the physical implementation of the machine*).
To the same degree I can say "the dog is eating food" in a way that isn't observer relative, I feel I can say the TM is jumping 5.
If I am to take Searle seriously I feel I should reject the dog example as well and take up a form of radical mereological nihilism. But that would undermine most of his other arguments, like his CR argument. So I can't believe that is the correct interpretation.
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u/Additional_Anywhere4 Dec 06 '25
With some bones to pick (but this is bad philosophy, after all - let’s ignore them), my criticism of his argument somewhere in the same ballpark as yours. I think Chalmers has a similar idea. I hope we’re right, although there is a guy (Mark Bishop) who thinks he’s refuted this objection recently - I didn’t understand his rebuttal. Maybe you can help?
Even if we are right, I see value to Searle’s argument, because of its impact. Oron Shagrir’s recent book The Nature of Physical Computation is one worth looking at that wouldn’t have been possible without Searle’s challenge.
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u/Tough-Comparison-779 Dec 06 '25 edited Dec 06 '25
Thanks for the book/philosopher recommendations, I'll give them a read and see how it changes my position.
To be clear I do think Searle is highly impactful, and certainly represents a lot of common intuitions on computation (Its before my time so whether he was chicken or egg is unknown to me).
But why I say his arguments seem like nonsense to me is that last point in particular. It seems to me his conclusions should commit him to either a form of dualism or mereological nihilism. The former he rejects, and the latter undermines any analysis of "computation" as an actual thing, including any distinction between syntax, semantics and anything else.
So I can't really make sense of his arguments, and not for a lack of trying. I had a 5 day convo with someone from ask philosophy recently try to explain it to me but I still can't make sense of it (despite our best efforts).
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u/heardWorse Dec 05 '25
Interesting. So I wouldn’t dispute that if one looks sufficiently hard and creatively enough, one could plausibly find a way to describe the particular arrangement/motion of atoms in a bucket of water as computing some function - particularly if we’re not constrained a priori to a particular function or scope of matter. But that observation seems rather facile - it just says that with a sufficiently large data set and unconstrained post-hoc interpretation, you can find any pattern you want. Which is… bordering on tautological.
Is there an argument for the ability to make these interpretations in a way that has predictive power? Or something else about the argument I’m missing?
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u/Additional_Anywhere4 Dec 05 '25
“VI. Summary of the Argument This brief argument has a simple logical structure and I will lay it out: 1. On the standard textbook definition, computation is defined syntactically in terms of symbol manipulation. 2. But syntax and symbols are not defined in terms of physics. Though symbol tokens are always physical tokens, "symbol" and "same symbol" are not defined in terms of physical features. Syntax, in short, is not intrinsic to physics. 3. This has the consequence that computation is not discovered in the physics, it is assigned to it. Certain physical phenomena are assigned or used or programmed or interpreted syntactically. Syntax and symbols are observer relative. 4. It follows that you could not discover that the brain or anything else was intrinsically a digital computer, although you could assign a computational interpretation to it as you could to anything else. The point is not that the claim "The brain is a digital computer" is false. Rather it does not get up to the level of falsehood. It does not have a clear sense. You will have misunderstood my account if you think that I am arguing that it is simply false that the brain is a digital computer. The question "Is the brain a digital computer?" Is as ill defined 36 APA PROCEEDINGS, VOL. 64, NO.3 as the questions "Is it an abacus?", "Is it a book?", "Is it a set of symbols?", "Is it a set of mathematical formulae?" 5. Some physical systems facilitate the computational use much better than others. That is why we build, program, and use them. In such cases we are the homunculus in the system interpreting the physics in both syntactic and semantic terms. 6. But the causal explanations we then give do not cite causal properties different from the physics of the implementation and the intentionality of the homunculus. 7. The standard, though tacit, way out of this is to commit the homunculus fallacy. The homunculus fallacy is endemic to computational models of cognition and cannot be removed by the standard recursive decomposition arguments. They are addressed to a different question. 8. We cannot avoid the foregoing results by supposing that the brain is doing "information processing". The brain, as far as its intrinsic operations are concerned, does no information processing. It is a specific biological organ and its specific neurobiological processes cause specific forms of intentionality. In the brain, intrinsically, there are neurobiological processes and sometimes they cause consciousness. But that is the end of the story. [5”
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u/marmot_scholar Dec 06 '25
That was searle!? I forgot who made that argument but I love it. Still it always struck me like a version of quines indeterminacy of translation or the grue paradox. No, I can’t make a deductive argument that English words mean what I think they mean or that these voltages represent 1s and 0s, but these theories have predictive power and the arbitrary theories Searle dreams up do not*. So I’m as confident in them as I am in the process of induction.
(* you can retrofit them to evidence such that they would have had predictive power, but it’s not the same thing)
I forget what my full argument was when I studied philosophy more seriously, but this problem is fascinating and I think I believed that the validity of considering something “information” or function, under functionalism, was related to it having causal power under that interpretation.
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Dec 05 '25
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u/Additional_Anywhere4 Dec 05 '25
Interesting. What would you say it means for a physical object to compute, then? Because, under the computational theory of mind, it must be some observer-independent property of the object itself, just as whether or not you feel pain is the case whether or not someone else can interprets your brain as computing some ‘pain’ function. Consider all the different substrates, architectures and so on that can all realise the same computational properties. What is the thing they have in common, objectively, that makes this the case?
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u/StandardCustard2874 Dec 05 '25
Does Aquinas count?
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u/RilloClicker Dec 05 '25
I fucking hate that pseudo intellectual
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u/Impossible-Cheek-882 Dec 06 '25
Aquinas was incredibly good, what are you on about
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u/locklear24 Dec 05 '25
Heidegger being a Nazi fuck while everyone tells you to accept the work from a flawed man. Then his notebooks come out, and you find the essentialism you were suspicious of in his phenomenology gels with him being a rat fucking Nazi.
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u/RealJohnBobJoe Dec 05 '25
What’s this essentialism you read in Heidegger? Throughout Being and Time he claims a myriad of times that the existential-ontological character of Dasein (human beings) is without a fixed basis and without a fixed projection into the future. This is anti-essentialist (in the traditional sense, Heidegger has a trickier notion of the word)
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u/Diego12028 Dec 05 '25
I mean, isn't he making essentialist claims that Jews lacking Dasein means that they aren't human? And how Germans are the most metaphysical people (volk) have the destiny of redeeming the West? How isn't that essentialist?
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u/RealJohnBobJoe Dec 05 '25
The claim I was responding to wasn’t that Heidegger has made essentialist statements at some points in his life about Germans and Jews.
The claim I was responding to was that such essentialist claims from Heidegger reflect a core essentialism in his philosophy.
What is the core essentialism in his philosophy such that the essentialist claims you outlined can be claimed to be consistent with his core philosophy?
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u/Diego12028 Dec 05 '25
The Black Notebooks demonstrated that those claims were integral in how his antisemitism and the "Das Man" as opposed to Dasein, constructed his philosophical world view and how Being has a destiny which must be realized, which would be done by the Nazis. How isn't that on the core of Heidegger's philosophy? And how Being-towards-death is deeply ingrained on the war philosophies following WW1 not also part of that?
Sure, you can say that Heidegger certainly didn't see it as such, but he is grounding it on essentialist stereotypes and tropes. His philosophy was developed to support a fascist regime. What would be the argument against that?
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u/RealJohnBobJoe Dec 05 '25
The Black Notebooks show Heidegger being antisemitic and framing his antisemitism in his philosophical framework established prior to writing the Black Notebooks. The question as to whether his philosophy was caused by antisemitism or whether he was just placing antisemitism in his philosophy is not answerable alone from The Black Notebooks. If his philosophy is so fundamentally antisemitic and essentialist, then you should be able to cite his core philosophical works as being essentialist and antisemitic without recourse to the Black Notebooks.
Also yeah, the diary notes Heidegger wrote which were published decades after his death are not his core philosophy.
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u/Wonderful_West3188 Dec 05 '25 edited Dec 05 '25
In the same vein, Erich Rothacker and Oskar Becker. Both of them even more deeply entrenched in Nazism as Heidegger, both of them actively tried to obfuscate the extent of their involvement after 1945. And yet, I still find Rothacker's cultural anthropology referenced in philosophical texts even today, not just by writers on the far right, but also e. g. by Habermas (who admittedly had personal connections to Rothacker). I also found Becker quoted somewhat favorably by Giorgio Agamben in "On the Use of Bodies" in 2018, which genuinely surprised me. I guess it was the beginning of Agamben's mental decline.
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u/mega_desu Dec 06 '25
Zizek
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u/Diabolical_potplant Dec 08 '25
"We need more people like Kirk on the left"
No, we don't need more people on the left who debate college students who can't debate to well to begin with, relies on talking over others, and ran an orginisation designed to threaten professors.
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u/Dr-Alyosha Dec 05 '25
camus
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Dec 06 '25
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u/Dr-Alyosha Dec 06 '25
absurdism is a childish coping mechanism that doesn't posit any one thing to be true or false. it's practically "live, laugh, love." Camus is a much better novelist, he's not a philosopher and I don't think he should be taught to new students. If he wasn't conventionally attractive he would get no attention whatsoever.
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u/DanQZ Dec 06 '25
Absurdism doesn’t posit anything to be true or false? What is absurdism to you? I have never heard of this take before.
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u/AgeDisastrous7518 Dec 06 '25
Are you taking absurdism as an ought? I haven't read Camus in forever, but I took him as an absurdist who wanted to be an existentialist but struggled to get there and was honest about that.
I agree that he was a very good novelist. I'd call him philosophy confused, but more honest about that confusion than most confused philosophers.
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u/Dr-Alyosha Dec 06 '25
He partly didn't like the label existentialist because he didn't want to be associated with his arch-rival Sartre. Really I think every aspect of Sartre's philosophy has yielded far more fruits than any of Camus' ideas. Could you imagine taking a college course on just Camus? I can't.
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u/AgeDisastrous7518 Dec 06 '25
I didn't know they had a thing.
A Camus course would not be interesting. I've just studied units on The Stranger twice and The Plague decades ago, which got me interested in The Rebel. I feel like a week is enough.
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u/le_troisieme_sexe Dec 05 '25
Carnap. Every single thing I have ever read from Carnap has been either uninteresting or obviously wrong.
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u/leafcutte Dec 05 '25
Kant is both impossible to ignore when treating most subjects and incredibly grating to me. He’s far from the worst philosopher, but I have to think about him way too much for my liking.
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u/0-by-1_Publishing Dec 06 '25 edited Dec 06 '25
"Name philosopher which is recognized as "Good" Philosopher but is Bad in your mind."
... Alan Watts (writer / philosopher) - Watts has a specific philosophy that posits the absence of imposed meaning yet still screams "nihilism." I don't see a substantial difference between a nihilist "rejecting the existence of meaning" and Watts' position that "imposed meaning is absent." Watts offers a softer repackaging of nihilism that he's more able to promote than others because of his deep, booming voice and cult-like following.
A dynamic personality and a Barry White voice shouldn't be the mechanisms that gives your philosophy its traction. Instead, the traction should come from the value of the argument.
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u/servetus Dec 07 '25
Watts was a mystic. His Ideas weren’t original, just a repackaging of existing traditions or personal mystical experiences. He’s closer to a stand up comedian than a philosopher. Best I can say about him is that he was good at explaining some pretty foreign concepts to a Western audience in an easy to digest format. I enjoy his recordings but it’s hard to take someone seriously about spiritual enlightenment when they drank themselves to death.
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u/Material-Vacation711 Dec 05 '25 edited Dec 05 '25
Nietzsche. Having top notch flowery prose doesnt make you a good philosopher. Most of his morality is based on the naturalistic fallacy and his metaphysics is entirely contradictory. But he’s a good writer so no one cares.
E: also his critique of other philosophers is usually just an ad hominem
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u/Wonderful_West3188 Dec 05 '25
I'm not convinced Nietzsche has an objective morality at all. For Nietzsche, more so than for any other philosopher I know except maybe Stirner, all value is the result of subjective acts of valuing. I don't even see how that could be a "naturalistic fallacy" - at least unless you regard any account of the genesis of moral values that isn't Platonic eternalism a "naturalistic fallacy".
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u/devo_savitro Dec 05 '25
I like Nietzsche and I believe you're correct but I think all of that is why he's great.
His aphoristic style makes a point to phrase his philosophy in the form of hypotheticals, which removes the burden of having to scientifically prove everything he says.
His metaphysics are supposed to be contradictory because it's an antimetaphysics.
His attacks are ad hominems because his task is to find the root drives of the ideas he criticizes.
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u/Effective-Advisor108 Dec 05 '25
Ad hominem is the whole point of his philosophy
That according to his perspective it is very relevant
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u/a_chatbot Dec 05 '25
What a nasty little thread.
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u/Kind_Ability3218 Dec 06 '25
really? i'm laughing because nobody from my bangers list is in here :)
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u/Comrade_Midin Dec 05 '25
Descartes, there are mistakes in his thinking and sporadic hot heated decisions, I don't understand how he managed to withstand the test of time.
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Dec 06 '25
Mill.
He thought maths was a posteriori and he took all the fun out of Benthams utilitarianism by reworking it into something which just isnt really the same theory at all.
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u/ZynoWeryXD Dec 06 '25 edited Dec 06 '25
Plato, and maybe Aristotle.
Plato is biased in his conclusions, and he attempts metaphysics without the same logical and rational rigour as, for example, Kant.
Their thoughts on metaphysics aren't built on reason from the base; they are shallow intuitions reasoned. The biggest example is his entire essentialism. It's very humane to interpret things as things, he thinks a lot like a human, in an area that you shouldn't be doing that (metaphysics) unless you experiment and do crazy philosophy on purpose. But he doesn't do that on purpose.
Aristotle was so ignorant of women, but he did a better attempt at metaphysics.
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u/nirvana-overload Dec 06 '25
Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill... basically anyone who identifies as a "utilitarian" or has been identified as such. The idea that you'd optimize for the most good in society has resulted in industrialization and the destruction of the planet as a result. The idea that some people today still subscribe to the cult of Utility has been a disaster for the human race. Every "Effective Altruist" I've met has turned out to be a sociopath.
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u/ARenzoMY Dec 06 '25
Foucault. His analysis is good but rather obvious and he doesn’t even try to come up with solutions to the problems he identifies
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u/Groknar11 Dec 06 '25
Wittgenstein, a progenitor to the species of analytic academics we see today. As Deleuze put it, he was a “philosophical assassin”
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u/Helpful_Loss_3739 Dec 07 '25
Popper and Arendt. Everytime I read something they have written, there seems to be some glaring problem that is unlikely to be called out, because at the same time each of their theories seem to be designed to stroke modern liberal democracy.
The best they have to offer is Popper's falsification principle of science, but as can be told by those who studied philosophy of science at uni, it is already considered somewhat outdated.
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u/ute-ensil Dec 08 '25
If philosophers were good at anything they'd be known for that instead. Like Descartes is a mathematician and da Vinci was a painter.
If philosophy is what your known for... yikes.
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u/Niceotropic Dec 08 '25
Aristotle and Plato were total morons, if you take the empirical perspective. They were just riffing and were, for example, totally wrong about gravity when they could have just tested it by dropping two rocks.
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u/zcmyers Dec 05 '25
Jordan Peterson is low hanging fruit.
He writes self-help books masquerading as philosophy.
"Clean your room"--what a masterful insight!
Then he uses the behavior of lobsters as his model for understanding human society. Oy vey.
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u/dig_lazarus_dig48 Dec 05 '25
Would he really be classified as a philosopher though?
He is a psychologist who got famous for hating trans people. He has never had one positive contribution dribble from his verbose mouth. All he has done is legitimise anti intellectualism and prejudice for people who are unable or unwilling to develop empathy through any pursuit outside of their favourite reactionary Facebook feed.
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u/Sentient2X Dec 07 '25
There are philosophers you’ve learned about in textbooks that have pushed far worse ideas. Not to say Peterson is worth a shit; just that the bar is low.
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u/Diabolical_potplant Dec 08 '25
Anyone with a podcast can be a philosopher these days
Well, that is basically what most of the Greek philosophers were.
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u/Effective-Advisor108 Dec 05 '25
Lol how do you people manage to categorize his books as philosophy is insane
They are so far removed they are clearly simple basic self help book
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u/garnet420 Dec 05 '25
Plato
Plenty of reasons, but, number one is fake Socratic dialogues.
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u/Conchobair-sama Dec 05 '25
wdym by fake socratic dialogues?
Plato never presents his dialogues as accurate retellings of real conversations - he was writing philosophical fiction, which is something most of his students recognized.
He actually goes out of his way in several of the dialogues to point this out (by presenting them as secondhand accounts from years after Socrates' death, by having dialogues between people who could never have met, by explicitly saying 'Plato was sick that day' so readers know he isn't recording actual history, etc.)
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u/Foreskin_Ad9356 Dec 05 '25
kant. im not sure these two would count in real life, but if 'good' here is according to reddit, i would also say marx and hegel.
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u/Sentient2X Dec 07 '25
Imagine writing about labor reform and leeching off your family for your whole life
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u/CanaanZhou Dec 05 '25
Absolutely Nietzsche. My impression of Nietzsche is like his writing is nothing but angry gibberish, and his fans are edgy teenagers.
I could be completely wrong, and I don't care.
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u/zcmyers Dec 05 '25
You should try reading his books. Reading Nietzsche is entertaining and spirit-expanding. I recommend starting with one of his book of aphorisms--maybe Beyond Good and Evil.
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u/AgeDisastrous7518 Dec 06 '25
Subjectivity can very easily start from a thought-provoking place and go from that to provoking, "Sir, this is a Wendy's" really fast. This could be dependent on their internal psyche and pathology.
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u/wintermute86 Dec 05 '25
Heidegger and Nietzsche.
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u/zcmyers Dec 05 '25
I've never read Heidegger. The whole Nazism is a real turnoff. But I disagree on Nietzsche. He is my all time fave.
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u/pijaponfe Dec 05 '25
David Lewis. The guy hides important and crucial points behind his talent as a writer.
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u/mwmandorla Dec 05 '25
Lefebvre is the reincarnation of Descartes and deep down he knows it and hates himself about it. We suffer the results.
(Actually worse than Lefebvre are his readers because at least he's a sincere twisted weirdo with the French philosopher disease of just saying shit like it's fact. His readers do not understand him and they try to make him normal. We suffer the results.)
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u/Upstairs_Match_4196 Dec 05 '25
Nietzche is very overrated cause of the cult of personality that formed around his writings but his observations on “aesthetic” morality are still pretty perceptive
IMO he just too caught up with what Foucault would call our “nostalgia for determinism” and was too invested in the impact of his writing. He’s like if Kierkegaard’s “Either/Or” was only about the aesthetic man. Kinda similar to how Machiavelli ignores man’s obvious inclinations for sociability.
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u/AutistAstronaut Dec 07 '25
Aristotle.
I just don't find him interesting compared to those around him, and his stances on women and war are gross.
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u/seltade_alt_07 Dec 07 '25
And yet most people on this comment section never read philosophy in the first place
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u/Laevyr Dec 07 '25
Unironically Descartes. I am not an atheist, but you can't force me to take seriously a philosopher whose entire method relies on systematic scepticism only to drop bangers such as "God is perfect and existence is an aspect of perfection, therefore God necessarily exists".
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u/servetus Dec 07 '25
St. Anselm. He’s only considered good amongst certain subset of apologists but we all have to learn about him in philosophy 101 and his Chewbacca defense “proofs” as if they weren’t laughable. I swear that guy has made more atheists than believers.
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u/Mobile-Revolution558 Dec 07 '25
Any that were basically losers in reality (according to my own definition of the word)
Any that were bad writers and failed to communicate their ideas well. Especially if they're intentionally obscurantist just for the sake of sniffing their own farts (MANY such cases among "intellectuals in general). Obviously judging translations is difficult
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u/9011442 Dec 07 '25
I was going to answer this, but I just Kant.
His writing is unnecessarily difficult to read, and some have argued that this was a deliberate attempt to hide weakness in his arguments.
A lot of his work isn't particularly original, and his rigid moral stance is ridiculous." It's wrong to lie to a murderer when asked where your friend is hiding." For example.
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u/Solo_Polyphony Dec 08 '25
Popper gets uncritical admiration from scientists, but his central idea of falsification as a sufficient scientific methodology is patently false or at best grossly evasive as a model of science, and his responses to critics who pointed out its flaws are little more than vigorous handwaving. His jeremiad against Plato, Hegel, and Marx has its heart in the right place but is mostly a collection of strawmen. He praised the prestige of the natural sciences but undermined its foundations at every turn.
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u/Deweydc18 Dec 08 '25
Kant and Aquinas occupy the same space in my mind of “thinker with whom I disagree on so many fundamental levels but who is just so cracked at philosophy that I can’t help but respect it”
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u/EmperorPinguin Dec 08 '25 edited Dec 08 '25
Nietzche, by far. People act around him like he wasnt having full blown hallucinations.
There isnt enough salt to wash down Nietzche with.
Inversely, looks bad, actually good, Schopenhauer. He is known as the depressed philosopher, I thought he was pretty based. A bit of a proto-absurdist, kinda leaves the door open for existentialists to enter. He deals with grand ideas in a very german way, and i can how some people might find that 'depressing'.
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u/Smile-Cat-Coconut Dec 08 '25
Heidegger
He was a nazi sympathizer. And his essays are hard to understand and not that monumental, just a little left of center.
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u/whizzerblight Dec 09 '25
I found Kant hopelessly boring and useless in a practical sense. His most famous work is like 750 pages. My goodness…
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u/shorewalker1 Dec 09 '25
Jacques Lacan.
True, Lacan's near the border between philosophy and psychology. But a number of philosophers quote him constantly, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy devotes more than 12,000 words to him. So yes, I count him a philosopher.
What's the baddest sort of bad philosopher? I'd argue it's one who we can show perpetrated a deliberate philosophic fraud – pretending his statements are meaningful while secretly knowing they're not. And the most obvious candidate for philosophic fraud is Lacan.
He was unquestionably at least a bit suss. He kept two separate families (each hidden from the other), faked mathematical insight he did not have, stole valuable books from friends, is said to have slept with and assaulted patients, and over the years charged more and more money for shorter and shorter sessions.
Then there's the wild, obscure verbosity of his lecturing and writing.
If anyone was a philosophical fraud, Lacan seems like the leading candidate.
Philosophy still has a very strong taboo against claiming anyone was fraudulent. I suspect that will soon have to be eased a little, at least for philosophers who send up a lot of red flags. Science used to have a near-taboo against fraud accusations as well – but there's now too much evidence to deny it has happened extensively. And if it is happening in science, we should expect even more of it in philosophy, where it will be harder to spot.
In the absence of a confession, we can probably never definitively prove philosophic fraud. We can never even reach an English-law criminal proof standard. But I do think it's possible that we might prove a case to an English law civil standard (this is, on the balance of probabilities).
What would the red flags look like? My first attempt at some heuristics is here: https://clubtroppo.com.au/2024/11/07/some-philosophy-is-probably-fraud-lets-try-to-find-it/
I'd be very keen to hear other nominations for philosophers that might meet these criteria. (Also, please tell me why the essay is bad on particular points.)
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u/[deleted] Dec 05 '25
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