Aurelius
Cody
YaBB God
Posts: 4,163
Political Matrix
E: 3.35, S: 0.35
|
 |
« on: August 05, 2022, 11:30:20 AM » |
|
Philosophers and specialist academics often come up with very specific definitions of words, that are well understood within their specialty but are completely different from the widely understood definition. The most obvious example is the very specific definition of "racism" used in critical race studies and certain parts of sociology. If some nonwhite guy targets white guys for crimes based on obvious racial animus, and people are discussing this, two things are guaranteed to happen:
1. People start talking about how this is racist.
2. Someone else drops in to haughtily declare that "only white people can be racist".
And then the discussion turns to even more of a dumpster fire than it probably already was.
It's one thing to use very specialist neologisms in generalist discussions, because I can look them up and at least attempt to understand what they mean (although don't expect everyone else to agree with the implications and of the term - just because some academic comes up with a neologism for some behavior or worldview, with the clear subtext that such behavior or worldview is Problematic or Bad, doesn't mean that it actually necessarily is, or that said academic's way of looking at it is even useful or relevant). It's much worse to demand everyone else use your very special secret definition of a word that everyone else uses to mean something very different.
A different thing that irks me more than anything is when someone says something like "lmao, you're completely wrong, read <obscure 1,000 page book>" instead of explaining why they think you are wrong, based on concepts drawn from said 1,000 page book. No, I am not going to read the entire works of Proudhon just to satisfy some internet stranger. At lower levels of discourse, the same thing happens with 3-hour youtube videos.
A lot of modern philosophy, especially in the continental tradition, is built upon generations of previous philosophers whose work often is also very abstruse. I'm learning this the hard way right now, as I've been trying to pretty much learn the basics of the western philosophical tradition from scratch (and because I've been reading a lot of arguments between historians, especially Lincoln historians, in the Claremont Review of Books and these guys love the 20th century continentals). During undergrad I was way too immature and unfocused to approach this in a good way. I mostly just tried to label everything as "right" or "wrong", where right was that which I could twist into my preexisting worldview, and wrong was everything else, which I simply rejected. I'm thinking about studying history at the graduate level, and my big area of interest are the foundings of the various American colonies, the various ideas they were based on, and how these went on to influence the trajectories of these colonies, and then eventually the Founding and the course of the nation as a whole. This requires understanding a lot of philosophy. It's a big slog, and I've only just scratched the surface. It's like learning to read and understand a whole different language, and when people post stuff that looks like it could have been cribbed from a Judith Butler diatribe they should be mindful of that.
(Fun fact: a high school English teacher thought it would be a great idea to assign us something by Judith Butler to read. It was short, but none of us even began to understand it. Not sure what she was thinking on that one.)
|
