For real, for real? Me!

Leave me alone. I'm not ready to talk.

The literature suggests that becoming a parent tends to make people (very slightly) more focused on self-interests and conservative. The effect you mention is probably confined to the more decent end of the spectrum.

Foucault's lesson on how the encounter with a different way of carving up the world, a different episteme if you will, shows us the possibility of thinking otherwise really brought home to me by noticing that they put the bins out on a differernt day up the hill.

*Former* Roman Dictator? Did something happen? There's been nothing on the news.

An Oxford cafe. Two elderly* people are chatting. “Are you seeing much of the grandkids?” “Oh! I love them, really. But I thought I was done with child rearing. It’s a kind of Derridean hauntology, where they return to you in uncanny form.”
* older even than me.

So a slip on your part and a lack of clarity on mine - the latter causes you think I take the point to apply to Epstein style research.

Not everyone takes work; that's true. And some people aren't worth the effort (you can find out either by expending the effort or by testimony). But calling (Cohen-style) bs is just bs.

If, like OOP, you read Sartre and Merleau-Ponty (ffs) without intellectual charity, you will find them impentrable. Exactly the same is true of Kant or Leibniz.

Having attended talks at All Souls by Althusserian Marxists, I can report with full confidence that Cohen knew exactly where he disagreed with Althusserians. He could understand them when he wanted to. He just wasn't willing to engage charitably with them on occasions....

Go back to Cohen and Balibar. Was Cohen really unable to grasp Balibar's "nonsense"? Frankfurt had a go in his exchange with Cohen, and seemed to get it. The person engaging in bs here was in fact Cohen.....

I was using bs in yet a third way: it's perfectly intelligible and I see no reason to accuse OOP of not caring whether it's true. It's just so obviously untrue it has to stem from some sort of failing. What's the failing? Intellectual charity....

Balibar: "This is precisely the first meaning we can give to the idea of dialectic: a logic or form of explanation specifically adapted to the determinant intervention of class struggle in the very fabric of history.” ....

When Cohen founded a Marxist discussion group, he called it the "No Bullshit Marxism Group." Althusserians, like Balibar, his prime example of bs.....

...Cohen's bs: assertions where any attempt at clarification must fail (a kind of "nonsense"). That's more relevant because Cohen's prime examples is "Francophone philosophy," like Deleuze, Kristeva and his special concern, the Althusserians....

Short thread expanding. What do I mean it's bulllshit? There are accounts of bs in the literature. The one that gets all the intention is Frankfurt's: roughly, assertions when the person doesn't care if they're true. Cohen's account is more relevant....

Quote on your page 3 from me ends with a reference to Epstein. Reading it, I thought "oh, that was a mistake - I shouldn't have mentioned Epstein there." Turns out, I didn't.
It's a tiny thing. Your discussion of research scaffolding as essential is very illuminating and much more important.

Not only should the debate be dead, but really analytic and continental as categories are pretty much dead.

It’s as unadulterated example of bullshit as I’ve seen for a while. I especially like Sartre and Merleau-Ponty being described as unintelligible. Real world class bullshit.

Maybe DYOR is bad wrt to mature science. Mature science: vaccines, climate change, evolution. There was no settled science round HIV at the time. That would place COVID circa 2022 on the DYOR okay side of things: I'm fine with that. The hard trick is principled criteria for counting as mature.

But it's not meant to! He's confabulated a citation to Epstein in the passage he quotes. That's not to say that I *have* a good response; just that I didn't take the distinction to be a response. A first thought about a better response? 2/3

A veeeeery minor annoyance with @rbnmckenna.bsky.social's excellent qualified defence of doing your own research. He says a distinction I make between truth-directed and exploratory research doesn't get at what's going right with patient research in the AIDS crisis. He's right! 1/3

Middling?

Momento mori.

Me too.

Race communism: Everyone gets a race and no one gets more than one.

I am old enough that my first year at uni was without a word processor. I bombed (scraping by was my norm). Changed course and uni and ...my sister bought a computer she let me use. That's why I am an academic today.

I sometimes play chess online for relaxation.* I often play against people with usernames like "Grandmastersfearme" or "TheNewMagnusCarlsen." Bro! You're splashing around in the shallow end just like me.

*if there is a worse way to relax, I haven't found it.

What's weird is that Stoljar focuses exclusively on ways to overcome embarrassment. Don't see oneself as tied to the history of philosophy; see philosophy as epistemically successful. I think these are bad responses: we *should* be embarrassed and we should live with that embarrassment.

According to Stoljar, philosophical embarrasment can be moral (I am embarrassed that so many great philosophers were racist) or epistemic (I might be embarrassed that philosophy doesn't solve its problems.
1/2

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...