#robert brandom

[amatorfilozofus]

Scruton on Rorty’s Legacy

Richard Rorty died on the 8th of June, 2007. The English philosopher Roger Scruton wrote an article entitled „Rorty’s Legacy” where he summarises what he takes to be Rorty’s philosophical legacy.  In this post I am going to go through Scruton’s criticism and defend Rorty’s views.

I would like to start right at the end of his essay. Scruton does have some nice things to say about Rorty regarding his thought on contingency and irony, but he finds his central disagreement with Rorty on truth: “However I believe that the concept of truth is fundamental to human discourse, that it is the precondition of any genuine dialogue, and that real respect for other people requires an even greater respect for truth. I therefore cannot go along with what seems to me, whenever I encounter it, to be a wholly specious and even cheap way of arguing, which Rorty typified and indeed perfected.”

Rorty’s views on truth sometime might have been expressed in an over dramatized form, which might have alienated some people from his writings. I must admit I don’t know much about Scruton’s views on truth, so I don’t know what he means by it being central exactly. However I do believe Rorty is not challenging the everyday use of truth, what he is challenging is a metaphysical use of truth, such as the correspondence theory of truth. Since he states his disagreement with Rorty and I assume this is not based on a misunderstanding of Rorty it seems to me then that Scruton must be committed to a metaphysical view regarding truth, and then the question is if this metaphysical truth is really necessary for “human discourse” and “respect for other people”. For the first I would like to refer to an essay by Robert Brandom titled "Why Truth is Not Important in Philosophy". Brandom’s philosophy was always endorsed by Rorty, as he takes it to be demystifying, and dissolving standard philosophical problems. Brandom substitutes the central role of truth with that of inference and thereby makes the metaphysical problems of truth obsolete, while at the same time saving everything people take to be important with regards of the concept of truth. I do think Rorty would be happy with this approach outlined by Brandom regarding truth. So I disagree with Scruton, and agree with Rorty and Brandom, that truth doesn’t need to be our central notion for human discourse to be possible. For “respect of other people” I see even less need for the metaphysical concept of truth. Respect for other people to me seems more to be a matter of seeing people as “one of us” rather than “one of them”, which ideally would extent to treating everyone as “one of us” simply for being a human being. I don’t see how a metaphysical theory of truth would help achieving this.

For the claim that Rorty’s way of arguing is cheap, I cannot really say anything except that I respectfully disagree.

“Rorty was paramount among those thinkers who advance their own opinion as immune to criticism, by pretending that it is not truth but consensus that counts, while defining the consensus in terms of people like themselves.”

I don’t think Rorty considered his opinion “immune to criticism”, I can think of many instances where Rorty actually accepted criticism as valid. Rorty was just being a good pragmatist I think when he was considering consensus. We can think about truth as something sublime, which is more than just mere consensus, but if we look to practice, how we are actually going about identifying truth, then unforced consensus with others really seems the best way to truth. As Rorty said: “Take care of freedom, and truth will take care of itself”. I agree with him that ensuring free inquiry is much more important that working out a theory for truth.  

Now that we clarified the main disagreement, let’s go back to the beginning of the essay.

Scruton says that Rorty “was a philosopher whose high reputation was bestowed on him, not by fellow philosophers, but by the many literary scholars who took comfort and inspiration from his writings.” This is something which is usually said about Rorty, although I could never understand why. His book “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” is praised by prestigious philosophers such as Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Cornel West, and is released with a forward by Michael Williams (see here). There is a book edited by Robert Brandom titled “Rorty and His Critics”, with articles on Rorty’s philosophy from such people as Jürgen Habermas, Donald Davidson, Hilary Putnam, John McDowell and Daniel Dennett. So I could never understand why Rorty is considered not to be all that influential within philosophy, seems to me he is taken quite seriously.

In the beginning of his article Scruton compares Rorty to Jacques Derrida. „Like Derrida, Rorty had a mind that ranged widely over philosophy, literature and the history of ideas; and like Derrida he was less concerned to present valid arguments than to offer a subversive perspective, in which the distinctions between valid and invalid, true and false, real and imaginary, would disappear or at any rate lose their former importance.” I cannot speak for Derrida, but I think this presentation is misleading regarding Rorty. I agree and I think even Rorty would more or less agree with the statement that he is not (mainly) trying to provide arguments rather he is trying to show us a point of view which makes the standard problems of philosophy seem obsolete.  Rorty’s point is not that valid and invalid, true and false, real and imaginary should disappear completely. What he wants is that the philosophical uses of these distinctions should be deflated.

Scruton continues the article with Rorty’s early career as an analytical philosopher, and he finds in it a turning point “At a certain point, however, Rorty suffered a conversion experience, rebelling against analytical philosophy not, primarily, because of its finicky irrelevancies, but because of its entirely erroneous vision - as Rorty saw it - of the nature of human thinking, and of the relation between thought and the world.” This type of “turn” is usually attributed to Rorty but I personally think, after reading his early papers that it is overrated. When I read these early essays maybe I was biased since I read “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” first, but it seemed to me that those themes which are in the later book are already present in an embryonic state in the early essays. Also in an interview later about the book Rorty says he didn’t intend the book to be controversial, since what we was trying to do is to bring together arguments from his favourite linguistic philosophers (Willard Van Orman Quine, Wilfrid Sellars and Dondald Davidson). The work of these philosophers can be seen as following up on the classical pragmatist philosopher Peirce, James, and Dewey (for an account of this see John P. Murphy’s book Pragmatism: From Peirce to Davidson.) So my point here is not that Rorty had a sudden change of heart and turned against analytic philosophy: Rorty thought that the best of analytical philosophy is still worthwhile such as Wittgenstein, Quine, Sellars, Davidson and Putnam. But he felt that analytical philosophy is undermining itself with the work of these philosophers and arriving at points which resemble the classical pragmatists.  Rorty wouldn’t say that analytical philosophy has an “erroneous vision of the nature of human thinking” what he would say is that, the way we have been thinking about the “nature of human thinking” led to problems which we have been trying to solve unfruitfully for a long time now, what would happen if we took a different view to rid ourselves of the classical “problems of philosophy” and find something better to do?

Scruton then turns to Rorty’s well known book: “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” and I think he is right about it being a bit of a “schizophrenic book”. When I read it for the first time I was also puzzled a bit about the view of the mind presented in the first half and the view of philosophy presented in the second. Rorty himself also had second thought later about his book. But I still think that the arguments gathered from Quine and Sellars in service of a pragmatist view is still relevant.

Scuton then says: “Rorty tried to make sense of his new position by espousing a version of "pragmatism" - the school associated with CS Peirce, William James and John Dewey, which holds that the concept of truth is to be understood through that of utility.” I think it is misleading to put things in this order.  Rorty was already well aware of pragmatism before he made his “turn”, so he didn’t reach his new position first, and then espoused pragmatism, pragmatism was his motivation all along. The pragmatist theory of truth is one of its most misunderstood features, and unfortunately it seems the pragmatists themselves were quite responsible for this. Rorty himself regretted that this was presented as a “theory” of truth and would have rather avoided giving a theory. What the pragmatists should have done is to say: look, we cannot step outside our language to see if the objects we represent in our language really do stand in a correspondence relation to our sentences about them or not. What we can do is see if our beliefs “work” or not, and if they do we can consider them at least temporarily true. For example if we use relativity theory we can make GPS systems work, so it seems relativity theory is a good candidate for truth. Saying “OK, it works but is it really true?” is asking for some kind of metaphysical justification which science cannot provide, and if science cannot do that, it seems unlikely that philosophers can.

Scruton continues, and this part I would like to quote at length:

“Rorty experimented with highly politicised applications of the pragmatist idea, arguing that "pragmatists view truth as... what is good for us to believe. So they do not need an account of a relation between beliefs and objects called ‘correspondence', nor an account of human cognitive abilities which ensures that our species is capable of entering into that relation. They see the gap between truth and justification not as something to be bridged, but simply as the gap between the actual good and the possible better. From a pragmatist point of view, to say that what is rational for us now to believe may not be true, is simply to say that somebody may come up with a better idea..." (Objectivity, Relativism and Truth, 1991).

That quotation would prompt a quick response from any philosopher suspicious of the pragmatist tendency, namely: "When is one idea better than another? When it is more useful? Or when it is more true? Are we not going round in a circle here?" However, Rorty had become convinced that such questions are irrelevant: they presuppose the very language that he was trying to put in question, the language which makes "truth" the central aim of discourse, and which represents all our utterances as attempts to approximate to a reality independent of our perspective.”

Scruton is completely right in saying that Rorty wanted to put aside these questions. However let me approach this from a different point of view. Rorty is not a relativist. He does not say that one idea is as good as another. What he is saying is that we need to consider better and worse in a given context. It makes sense to ask if one physical theory is better than another. For example does it explain more of the observed phenomenon? Does it lead to more accurate measurements or better predictions? What doesn’t make sense is asking for general criteria when is an unspecified “idea” better than another. For example one could say that an idea is better than another when it is closer to truth in the sense of representing reality more closely than the other. But since there is no independent test for the accuracy of representation of reality than to put the idea to work, this explanation is completely empty.

The final point which I would like to comment on is when Scruton says: “… he [Rorty] tried to reconcile his view that some versions of political order are superior to others, with his belief that there is no trans-historical perspective from which any such judgment can be made. It is a testimony to his literary skills that he was able repeatedly to stare refutation in the face, and to go on staring.” I think this interpretation is completely wrong. Rorty’s point is that you don’t need a “trans-historical perspective”. If someone needs a metaphysical trans-historical perspective to justify that democracy is better than totalitarianism this seems to be an unhealthy obsession with philosophy (see his essay “The priority of democracy to philosophy”). Rorty thought philosophy makes overly ambitions claims, trying to be in a position to evaluate all of the other parts of culture and trying to provide foundations” for them. Rorty believed that the enlightenment was a great step forward by saying we don’t need religion as an authority which tells us what to do, but he thought the project was incomplete. He also wanted people to be emancipated from the need to replace religion with some sort of transcendental reality before which we need to humble ourselves and have the obligation to “get right”. Rorty wanted us to recognize that we only have responsibility for each other and not to anything non-human. I think this message is still inspiring.

[sinterhinde]

Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, 1956

The most important work by one of America’s greatest twentieth-century philosophers, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind is both the epitome of Wilfrid Sellars’ entire philosophical system and a key document in the history of philosophy. First published in essay form in 1956, it helped bring about a sea change in analytic philosophy. It broke the link, which had bound Russell and Ayer to Locke and Hume—the doctrine of “knowledge by acquaintance.” Sellars’s attack on the Myth of the Given in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind was a decisive move in turning analytic philosophy away from the foundationalist motives of the logical empiricists and raised doubts about the very idea of “epistemology.”

With an introduction by Richard Rorty to situate the work within the history of recent philosophy, and with a study guide by Robert Brandom, this publication of Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind makes a difficult but indisputably significant figure in the development of analytic philosophy clear and comprehensible to anyone who would understand that philosophy or its history. (Harvard University Press)

Wilfrid Sellars (1912–1989) graduated from the University of Michigan in 1933. He taught at Iowa, Minnesota, and Yale, and was University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh from 1963 until his death. His works include Science and Metaphysics (1968) and Science, Perception, and Reality (1963).

Richard Rorty (1931–2007) authored several landmark books and essay collections, including Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature; Consequences of Pragmatism; Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity; and Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. He taught at Wellesley College, Princeton University, the University of Virginia, and Stanford University.

Robert B. Brandom is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh and a Fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy. He delivered the John Locke Lectures at the University of Oxford and the Woodbridge Lectures at Columbia University. Brandom is the author of many books, including Making It Explicit, Reason in Philosophy, and From Empiricism to Expressivism. (Harvard University Press)

I'm attaching a link to b u y the text. Note: attached text is not Rorty and Brandom's 1997 edition.

http://www.ditext.com/sellars/epm.html

[sabakos]

Out of curiosity, why do you like Hegel so much, yet dislike philosophers inspired by him, like Marx? I get the impression you don't see a lot of Marx's writing as...idk rigorous? Intelligentual serious? But most of the people I see making that complaint oppose continental philosophy in general and want significantly more mathematical rigor in philosophy, which you don't seem to agree with. So I'm not really sure what your objection is and what you feel makes Hegel different

The first thing here is that Marx was not directly inspired by Hegel and, according to Hegel biographer Terry Pinkard, seems to have read very little of him. Marx studied under Bruno Bauer (one of the many attendees of Hegel's lectures who also probably over-exaggerated his connection to Hegel) and Marx also read summaries of German idealism that were written by Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus, who is responsible for the infamous misconception that Hegelian dialectic had anything to with the essentially meaningless triad of "thesis-antithesis-synthesis." Following Walter Kaufmann, most Hegel scholars these days will now outright assert that "thesis-antithesis-synthesis" to be a misrepresentation of Hegelian dialectic, rather than trying to compromise with the Marxists. So a decent part of the reason I dislike Marx (and more accurately, his followers) is that without Marx, there would be far fewer misconceptions about Hegel. As for Marx taken by himself, I have some rather strong objections to social conflict theory, but that could be its own long post.

I'm also much less bullish on the idea of "Continental" philosophy, less so even the more I read of it. Continental philosophy is a somewhat loose term, which often includes not just Hegel, but also the rest of the German idealists, and technically even Kant and his contemporaries in some formulations. But usually in my experience when people object to continental philosophy they're objecting to the 20th century German and French thinkers from Husserl and Heidegger through Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze, all of whom are imagined to have taken their lineage from Hegel, Marx and Freud, while the "Analytic" philosophers took their common departure with Kant and followed Frege, Carnap, Russell etc. And at some point in the 1920's everyone realized they couldn't talk to each other anymore.

Like all nice and clean histories of philosophy, though, none of this is really true if you look any closer. Both American pragmatism and early British analytic philosophy were heavily influenced by or in reaction to the Hegelian British idealism, and in the past 50 years many analytic philosophers have re-evaluated Hegel in light of philosophers such as Quine and applied Hegel's work more directly to their own metaphysics, Robert Brandom being the most notable example of that. So I don't really believe that the common notion that Hegel is the first exclusively continental philosopher is useful or accurate now, or that it ever really was in the past.

Meanwhile, most of the 20th century and especially post-WW2 era continentals apparently took their notions of Hegel from Marx, and so they aren't necessarily representing much if anything of him accurately. For example, I spent a decent amount of time a while back trying to figure out if Sartre had actually ever read Hegel before citing him, and most of the evidence pointed to "probably not" which seems to be a broader trend in how citation works within that subfield. Even charitably, I think it's hard to avoid the conclusion that at least a large chunk of the last 80 years or so of Continental philosophy has been primarily about fraudulent scholarship and obscurantism in the name of vague gesturing at some rather distasteful social and political ideologies. I think it's a rather shameful era of the history of philosophy, and I hope most of it is consigned to the dustbin of the past.

As for why I like Hegel: I tend to see Hegel as a synthesizer (in the general sense of the term) of everyone he read who came before him, especially the Greeks. He certainly didn't invent dialectic (according to Plato, that was Zeno of Elea), but he formalized and modernized it, and then used that formulation to define the interaction of a large number of broad concepts such as culture, religion, art, philosophy, etc. I see his dialectic as a useful shortcut when analyzing logical statements that use words as concepts: since it doesn't require an exact definition or understanding of a concept before attempting to reason with it, but instead clarifies that concept itself in the process of reasoning, it avoids the preliminary hurdles of trying to establish a rigid exact definition that might not prove to be useful.

In addition to finding the dialectic method of conceptual analysis itself to be useful in its own right, I also think that many of these concepts still have contemporary relevance, especially the conflict between aesthetic and moral concerns that leads to the much-misunderstood "Death of Art," or the conflict between freedom and authority that leads to "positive" freedom found within the State, both of which have influenced my own thinking. While these are also obviously not ideas that you must take from Hegel, as they can certainly be found elsewhere, within his system they have a common unity that makes understanding them together require less effort. But also, admittedly, you do need to invest the effort to understand his system first, so it's hard to say if it's worth it. At this point I mostly don't recommend Hegel to others, but I won't discourage anyone either.

However, while I don't think Hegel was a "mystic" or any such nonsense like that, I do fault him specifically for popularizing the idea that dense, esoteric prose is some marker of profundity, which if anything is the true influence the dreaded later "continentals" took from him. The difference between him and them is that if you read secondary literature on Hegel from critical scholars who study him (rather than those original thinkers like Kojeve or Zizek who take their influence from him), you'll discover that there is much more substance beneath that dense surface, which will make you wish he didn't write in that tortured, horrible style to begin with! But if you do this with Derrida or Deleuze you will quickly discover that almost no such secondary literature exists, and that what does exist either makes it evident that their dense prose lacks any such substance beyond some trivialities, or is itself written in the same tortured style for the same obscurant purpose. Caveat lector, I'd like to be proven wrong about that last part, but if there is something hidden in there it's value-negative for me at this point to look for it.

[dipnotski]

Slavoj Žižek – Cinsellik ve Başarısız Mutlak (2023)

Slavoj Žižek, felsefi sisteminin bugüne kadarki en titiz çalışmasında, diyalektik materyalizmin yeni bir tanımını sunuyor. Bu kitabında, Alain Badiou, Robert Brandom, Joan Copjec, Quentin Meillassoux ve Julia Kristeva gibi isimlerin eserlerini yorumlamakla sınırlı kalmıyor; popüler bilimden kuantum mekaniğine, cinsel farktan analitik felsefeye uzanan bir macera vadediyor. Žižek Möbius şeridini,…

[yuyapecotakeda]

Takeda, Y. (2023). Illuminating (dis)enlightenment: Critical media literacy and/or conspiracy theories? [Doctoral dissertation, University of British Columbia]. https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0437186

Abstract:

The point of departure of this dissertation is the striking similarities between the dispositions critical media literacy education aims to cultivate and the characteristics conspiracy theorists claim to embody. The golden question of critical literacy, “who benefits?” is in fact the central question of conspiracy theorists: “cui bono?” While critical media literacy educators teach learners to disrupt the common sense, to interrogate multiple viewpoints, to focus on sociopolitical issues, and to take actions and promote social justice (Lewison et al., 2002), conspiracy theorists claim that they do exactly those things (Harambam, 2020). The question, however, is not demarcating “critical” from “conspiratorial,” but “desirable” from “undesirable” exercises of critical reading and writing. This is because the former demarcation presupposes the undesirability of conspiracy theorizing, the danger of which is evident from the fact that actual conspiracies take place rather frequently in politics and, thus, stigmatization of conspiracy theorizing makes it easier for conspirators to get away with their conspiracies (Pigden, 2007).

To demarcate educationally desirable from undesirable enactments of critical reading and writing, this dissertation embarks on dialectical investigations of analysis, critique, and argument. The analysis part consists of discourse analysis of educational YouTube videos on conspiracy theories. With this, I identify the ways in which conspiracy theories are constructed in educational discourse and highlight the reductive sense of rationality promoted in it. In the critique part, such a reductive sense of rationality is criticized. Through a conceptual examination of meanings, care, and values, I highlight the limitations of the overreliance on scientific objectivity and facts in the discussion of conspiracy theories and claim that literacy education ought to pay attention to the centrality of meanings and values in the textual genre of conspiracy theories. In the argument part, drawing on Robert Brandom’s (1994, 2019) inferentialism with an existentialist spin, I argue for an educational approach that is capable of accounting for conspiracy theories in terms not only of epistemic matters of facts but also of axiological matters of concern. Through this, I offer my answer to the demarcation question and discuss educational implications that arise from it.

[perkwunos]

Spent this foggy early October morning writing some thoughts I had while reading Robert Brandom on Kant

[maaarine]

Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas (Robert Brandom, 2009)

“The selves of self-conscious creatures exhibit a distinctive structure: what they really are—as Hegel says, what they are in themselves—depends on what they take themselves to be—in Hegel-speak, what they are for themselves.

And that means that a self-conscious being can change what it is in itself by changing what it is for itself.

Self-conscious creatures accordingly enjoy the possibility of a distinctive kind of self-transformation: making themselves be different by taking themselves to be different.

Because what they are in themselves is at any point the outcome of such a developmental process depending on their attitudes, essentially self-conscious beings don’t have natures, they have histories.

Or, put differently, it is their nature to have not just a past, but a history: a sequence of partially self-constituting self-transformations, mediated at every stage by their self-conceptions, and culminating in their being what they currently are.

Understanding what they are requires looking retrospectively at the process of sequential reciprocal influences of what they at each stage were for themselves and what they at each stage were in themselves, by which they came to be what they now are.

Rehearsing such a historical narrative (Hegel’s ‘Erinnerung’) is a distinctive way of understanding oneself as an essentially historical, because essentially self-conscious, sort of being.

(The twentieth-century existentialist slogan “Existence precedes essence” is an attempt to express a weak, watered-down version of this Hegelian conception.)”

[kenotype]

But now we must ask: whose fault is it that the doing is unforgivable? - the doer or the forgiver? Is the failure that of the bad agent or of the bad recollector? Is it a matter of how things anyway just are? Or is it because the recollector couldn’t come up with a more norm-responsive narrative? [...]        The responsibility the individual tragic heroic agent takes on himself is accordingly spread out and shared. The doing of each (in one sense) is now the doing of all (in another, recognitively complementary sense). For all share responsibility for each action. The distinctive role played by individual agents is not obliterated. For the responsibility acknowledged by and attributed to the initiating agent is different from the reparative and recollective recognitive responsibility undertaken by those who shoulder the burden of forgiving the agent. Every deed now shows up both as a practical contribution to the content of all that came before it, and as acknowledging a recollective responsibility with respect to all those deeds. The temporally extended, historically structured recognitive community of those who are alike in all acknowledging the authority of norms, confessing the extent of their failure to be norm-governed, acknowledging their responsibility recollectively to forgive those failures in others, confessing the extent of the failure of their efforts at recollective and reparative forgiveness, and trusting that a way will be found to forgive those failures, is one in which each member identifies with all the others, at once expressing and sacrificing their own particular attitudes by taking co-responsibility for the practical attitudes of everyone. It is the “‘I’ that is ‘We,’ the ‘We’ that is ‘I.’” Robert Brandom, “A Spirit of Trust.”                                                                 

[seafood-disco]

“One understands items (for instance, propositions or properties) as determinate just insofar as one understands them as standing to one another in relations of material incompatibility.”

-Robert Brandom, ‘Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality’ 

[aderyncarn]

🔪 ~ 𝐼𝑡𝑠 𝐺𝘩𝑜𝑠𝑡𝑦 𝑇𝑖𝑚𝑒 ~ 📞

[reflections-in-a-critical-eye]

I was listening to a podcast talking about mass formation and the psychology of totalitarism and was struck by how so much of what was said could be applied to fandom/shipping discourses (hello taekook cultists). It really got me intrigued and I was wondering if by any chance you know any good ressources that explore fandoms in the lens of literal "fanatism"? Or analysis going more in depths about the shipping aspect? I also read an article about erotomania recently and was wondering if erotomania by proxy could be a thing lol there’s some aspects of erotomania that were reminding me so much of the hardcore shippers. Sorry this ask is going in different directions, I find all this so fascinating!

Hi anon!

I did a quick research for this ask and I found some very interesting articles for you. I think I might just read them myself because I was planning to go back and dig a bit more into the psychological aspect of fandom and fandom formation. I think this type of community cannot be fully understood if we don't look at the way people think and why they act a certain way after they become part of a group, or worse, a cult. It's easy to say ''that's crazy, I could never be fooled or get tangled in that'', but it's actually not that difficult or impossible because the easiest way for people to be lured is to be offered a sense of belonging, of being with like-minded people. If the object of obsession has a strong grip on someone, their beliefs, values and ethics might change, without even realizing. That's when it becomes harmful because it can become part of their identity. I'm not saying that everyone in a fandom acts like that, it would be ridiculous. I do believe that a lot of people see it as a means to enjoy themselves, it's part of their passion and as every group out there, there are good and bad aspects to it.

I'll leave here some titles, I hope they can be useful to you.

Gregorio Fuschillo, Fans, Fandom, or Fanaticism?

Karl A. Roberts, Relationship Attachment and the Behaviour of Fans Towards Celebrities

J. Edlom, J. Karlsson, Hang with Me – Exploring Fandom, Brandom and the Experiences and Motivations for Value Co-Creation in a Music Fan Community

Francis Farrelly, Exploring Consumer Fanaticism: Extraordinary Devotion in the Consumption Context

L. McCutcheon, D. Ashe, J. Houran & J. Maltby, A Cognitive Profile of Individuals Who Tend to Worship Celebrities

[onetwofeb]

"From German Idealism to American Pragmatism--and Back"

Robert Brandom

University College Dublin 2015

[gabilu2009]

The impact of cinematography throughout the world

1.- Birth

This story begins on the 28th of December in 1895 in Paris, the adventure begins at the hands of August and Louis Lumiere and although there is no photograph to confirm it, there are 33 witnesses and one recording.

It all started when these ingenious brothers began to become pioneers of technology, not only in Paris but also outside the boundaries of France, all thanks to their incredible inventions such as instant photography, photographic plates, among other inventions.

During 1895 they created one of their greatest inventions that is still loved today.

It is nothing more and nothing less than the first cinematographic tape, in other words, the first film in the world.

2.- Audience acceptance

This film was not a film in itself, it was a short film called "Exit from the Lumiere factory", in the short film you could see a train leaving the Lumiere facilities, many people were frightened because the train was heading towards the camera but nothing happened.

That spark of suspense made people love the short film and more people came to appreciate it, this made the brothers want to dedicate themselves completely to cinema and they started with their network of films such as "Trip to the moon", "La mer", "La luna a un metro", etc.

3.- Types

Cinema, as artistic manifestations during the 20th century, has different currents. In some cases, it represents a break with previous styles, especially classical Hollywood cinema, where the avant-garde cinema is born, which represents a break with the narrative of conventional cinema. Together with literature and art, they dominated the first third of the 20th century. Avant-garde cinema has many stages, one of them are:

Impressionism: The purpose of this style is to demonstrate the feelings of the protagonists. This gives importance to emotions and psychology. Example: The Book Thief.

Surrealism: It seeks the liberation of the spirit and challenges the logical, aesthetic and moral order. In the same way it attacks the pillars of bourgeois society and its questioned values. Example: An Andalusian Dog.

4.- Purpose

The purpose of cinema during the 20th century was to create a distraction so that people would forget about the wars that took place during that century, such as The Triple Alliance V. S The Triple Entente, the First and Second World Wars.

5.- Icons of modern and old cinema

One of the greatest representatives of the old cinema are Kirk Douglas, Mario Moreno, Robert de Miro, Marlo Brandom, Sara García, Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe

And those who represent the current cinema are: Silvestre Stallone, Magaly Solier, Dwayne Johnson, Jackie Chan.

Gabi Lu 2009

[anaxerneas]

“Schutz’s manuscripts on Bergson, produced from 1925 to 1927 and finally published in English in 1982, illuminate his subsequent works, with which they share the general purpose of “the grounding of the social sciences in the Thou experience.” In reaction to positivistic approaches of the Schlick Circle that reduced experience to what the method of natural scientific observation found tolerable, Schutz sought to give an account of the life-form of pre-scientific experience preceding conceptual-categorical comprehension, the “highest and most powerful life-form” Of course, by moving in this direction, he encountered the problem, faced by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Wilfrid Sellars, John McDowell, Robert Brandom, and others, namely, how it is possible to access the pre-conceptual without conceptualizing it. Hence, he acknowledged that his work is “in conflict with its material” since it “is forced to resort to conceptual formulations”. This problem parallels the problem of reaching the life-form of the present unfolding of experience (duration) since one can only speak of it by arresting its flow, distinguishing its moments, and thus remembering what has lapsed—but then one is in the new life-form of memory. Although this gap between present duration and memory prompted his turn to Husserlian phenomenology, the problematic itself highlighted for him the pervasiveness and hiddenness of interpretive activity as one moves between interpretive frameworks—a principal theme of all his later work. He took notice of this theme when he frequently pointed out how one’s reconstitution of a past experience in memory varied according to the interests of the present from which one remembered the past. Indeed a favorite example from Bergson’s work involved an actor reflecting upon a prior process of choosing and interpreting it as if it had been a choice between two clearly defined possibilities, whereas in fact the process often oscillated between several options, retaining, reproducing, comparing, and modifying them in succession. In general, Schutz concurred with Bergson on such notions such as attention to life, planes of consciousness, the body as the intersection of outer and inner temporality, music as the model of duration, and multiple types of ordering, but rejected his bio-evolutionary theory, vitalism, and the idea of a supra-personal elán.”

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schutz/#BerWri

[bibliophilicwitch]

could you please list some of your favourite fantasy and romance books? ^-^

I don’t read a lot of romance, but I’ll see what I can compile for you:

Fantasy

Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett

A Winter’s Promise by Christelle Dabos

In Other Lands (YA) by Sarah Rees Brennan

The City of Brass by SA Chakraborty

Truthwitch (YA) by Susan Dennard

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

Six of Crows (YA) by Leigh Bardugo

Libriomancer by Jim C Hines

The Kiss of Deception (YA) by Mary E Pearson

Watership Down by Richard Adams

The Demon King (YA) by Cinda Williams Chima

The Queen of the Tearling by Erika Johansen

Mistborn by Brandom Sanderson

Sabriel (YA) by Garth Nix

Dead Witch Walking by Kim Harrison

The Heralds of Valdemar series by Mercedes Lackey 

Romance

When Dimple Met Rishi (YA) by Sendhya Menon

Fangirl (YA) Rainbow Rowell

To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (YA) by Jenny Han

The River of No Return by Bee Ridgway (literally don’t remember what happens in this book as I read it 6 years ago. i just know i liked it)