Thanks I read Rousseau a long time ago. It was clear to me then he was a moron. The social contract is the study of the relationship between an individual and the state. R didn't invent it or even the name. It was examined by Hobbes and Locke and others. I read them all. I even read Hegel. Mill, Hobbes and Locke got it about right. Rosseau is an outright moron who predicates everything on his blank slate shit, today known as SJW social constructionism". The fact that we know for a fact this is exactly not true doesn't stop these idots because, hey , once you declare shit like evidence and logical reasoning to be white supremecy, well, anything goes.
I don't think you have read Rousseau. You didn't even know he was the author of the text The Social Contract... fairly basic stuff there, dude. Yes, Locke and Hobbes presented their British empirically centered texts about the state, but to call Rousseau a "moron" is daft, and to strawman him as "the SJW of his day" is comical.
Blank slate (tabula rasa) is in no way aligned with "constructionism" - that is absolute disinformation, and laughable. Tabula rasa was largely propagated by Thomas Aquinas in Summa Contra Gentiles and Summa Theological as he repackaged Aristotle's hylomorphic epistemology (vis a vis Metaphysics, book *Lambda" specifically) with that of Christianity.
I'd be cautious with reductionism (MIT) here - that is the bailiwick of "SJWs" - by negating any metaphysical essences for want of pure mathematical certitude, the thing itself (human nature, in that "forum") is relegated to pure myth. Descartes was the gateway to science, but in so doing, scientism and the notion that we are essentially a compilation of matter, nothing more. i.e. there are no "women" or "men" by extension. We can only know something in "clear and distinct [ideation]" (math). It opened up a can of worms that are really starting to crawl out in the postmodern SJW era.
BTW - that editorial you linked is by a psych prof from Harvard.
the thing itself (human nature, in that "forum") is relegated to pure myth.
Not the way I see it. I see the claim at having no nature as a product of idealism, not reductionism.
I just disagree with the relationship between "pile of matter type reductionism" and the denial of essences. Believing one doesn't imply I must believe the other.
I can be "reduced" to my elements but still display maleness. Those don't contradict each other.
Of course, you can get there by saying "well if we're all just a bunch of X then all differences between things disappear" but that's a confusion of levels of description.
The level of description at which men and women really exist is not the level of description of subatomic particles. One doesn't negate the other. I am a male made of particles, both. No problem there.
The pernicious idea that people are blank slates consequently potentially equal in ability but for society's interference or tharting of the individual is responsible for everything from the French Revolution to Marxism to BLM to antifa and SJWism and Woke.
It's been throroughly rebutted by Pinker and others most recently. Piaget showed children's minds reach capabilities on a predefined schedule irrespective of their enclosing social context. That's a bioligical process unfolding, not a blank slate absorbing things from its society.
Studies of people with brain damage and genetic defects all show that the human character is dependent on the human brian and damage or failures in brain development lead directly to defects of "character" or ability.
There is zero reason to suppose all brains are alike in kind or ability within a competency. This last point I think was becoming clearer and clearer in the academy and set off a panic amongst academicians in the social sciences and humanties. They saw it coming in the 80s and set about to attack the basis of that forbidden knowledge- science itself.
They needed to drive the conversation as far in the other direction as they could to make it politically impossible for people to talk about innate differences in ability because it offended their R sense of equality and shattered their R-inspired notions of causality of human beings who act badly. So they moved the Overton window to another state.
They're loading up their own backlash and when it comes it's going to be all over forever and ever for Marxism and all its miscreant offshoots.
You once wrote a paper on Mill. It wasn't on the social contract. Therefore, Mill is not about the social contract?
It was JS Mill who had the idea of blank slate and R who gave us the proto-Marxist " "Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains" which is exactly what that is. R was all about the "noble savage" which itself is a set of assumptions about innate human character just as wrong as the blank slate which is probably why i ran them together in memory since I read them at the same time.
R just does what philosophers of that age do- assume a metric shit ton of stuff then start reasoning. The ultimate referents of their sentences are ideas popular of that time, ill defined and actually corresponding to often to nothing in the real world. Positivism is too dogmatic and leaves real questions not just untouched but untouchable but it was a welcome relief from R's modis operandi.
He wasn't a literal moron, of course. What he did was introduce a bunch of bad ideas into the world which have persisted. Here they are:
"People are born good and do evil because of the influence of a corrupt society" . This led directly to externalizing responsibility for negative individual actions onto society. It's society's fault- that's pure R.
This opens the door to massive numbers of assertions about why people actin negative ways with concomitant prescriptions for changes in society. That's all R.
The perfectability of humans- truthfully, this predates R but he popularized and elaborated on it and it is the most modern antecedent to SJW movements.
Scientific progress is the basis of immorality or at least amplifies it. Now we're in somewhere between the Amish and unibomber territory. This dovetails with his demands for economic equality, because science makes the powerful more powerful and will only be used to disadvantage mankind. It's like he couldn't see that people might help people with science.
(This applies not just to R but to all those guys)- they start with ideas which , uh, sound good to them, reason forward in a logically rigourous way and out the other ends pops truths about people, their nature, how they ought to live and what sort of government they ought to enact.
To modern readers, we just come away feeling like we just know more than they did about humans, largely thanks to science, and their ideas have scant referents in the real world. Their "logical reasoning" is not a way to produce knowledge about any of the issues which concerned them.
I had to jog my memory here on this guy since he did not impress me and it was a long time ago.
Meh, probably not many people are going to make a bragging point of having read R so telling me I didn't when I did, I am just not sure where that is coming from.
The modern (philosophical period of modernity) context of "Tabula rasa" comes largely from Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding - from the modern empiricist thrust of that era. Mill wasn't really known as a large purveyor of tabula rasa tenets or social contract tenets - his most notable work is his eponymous text Utilitarianism - a widely anthologized work on ethics coining an entire subset within ethics.
Rousseau's eponymous Social Contract echoes the sentiments more broadly described in Hobbes' Leviathan - basically we relinquish rights to the state in exchange for security. But the argumentative thread in all those works is such that it is, in fact, a contract. When one party breaks the contract, things get odd.
Thanks. I am operating from having read these guys, not en toto at a young age and posting going only on memory.
That is Mill's most influential work for but he of course took up the Big Questions of his day also.
My beef with R (whose name I can never bring myself to learn to spell right without checking ) are as listed earlier, those and his overall process at arriving at truth.
Kant was the best at that sort of thing with his Critique but the level of effort needed to take him sentence by sentence and understand it just to see if he was actually saying anything substantive was just too much work for too little gain for me. Of course I run the risk of re-inventing the wheel by accident but it's a chance I'll take. I read interpreters of him back then.
I think of R and Hobbes as representative of "natural philosophical types" of people.
Hobbes is a grown up and facing unpleasant realities and R is dreamer and idealist.
These types of people, that is, people with brains which interpret reality in these ways and present to their owners mostly less cogent theories of reality which approximate these two polar opposites, just occur in nature unbidden as a matter of genetics.
Your brain can theoretically be graded on a scale between them and in each case, those brains also come with the same cluster of not-logically-necessitated -by-their-ideas beliefs about people and society. They're brian types which produce philosophical types, even if they don't know what philosophy is.
This is how I see Marxism and the left and especially SJWs also. They have those brains. Well, the most humane amongst them do. For a lot of them maybe even the majority, there's real malice subtending those beliefs.
They want to kill people, lots of people. They use R-type idealism and assertions about the nature of humanity and the individual's relationship to society as a cover and a justification for that ulterior goal.
Really, we can disconfirm R by studying chimps in the wild and we did. It's stuff like that that makes them antiquated and unrewarding to slog through for me.
Thanks I read Rousseau a long time ago. It was clear to me then he was a moron. The social contract is the study of the relationship between an individual and the state. R didn't invent it or even the name. It was examined by Hobbes and Locke and others. I read them all. I even read Hegel. Mill, Hobbes and Locke got it about right. Rosseau is an outright moron who predicates everything on his blank slate shit, today known as SJW social constructionism". The fact that we know for a fact this is exactly not true doesn't stop these idots because, hey , once you declare shit like evidence and logical reasoning to be white supremecy, well, anything goes.
Which is the point with R and them both.
I don't think you have read Rousseau. You didn't even know he was the author of the text The Social Contract... fairly basic stuff there, dude. Yes, Locke and Hobbes presented their British empirically centered texts about the state, but to call Rousseau a "moron" is daft, and to strawman him as "the SJW of his day" is comical.
Blank slate (tabula rasa) is in no way aligned with "constructionism" - that is absolute disinformation, and laughable. Tabula rasa was largely propagated by Thomas Aquinas in Summa Contra Gentiles and Summa Theological as he repackaged Aristotle's hylomorphic epistemology (vis a vis Metaphysics, book *Lambda" specifically) with that of Christianity.
More people than myself run blank slate and noble savage together:
http://forum.mit.edu/articles/the-blank-slate-the-modern-denial-of-human-nature/
I'd be cautious with reductionism (MIT) here - that is the bailiwick of "SJWs" - by negating any metaphysical essences for want of pure mathematical certitude, the thing itself (human nature, in that "forum") is relegated to pure myth. Descartes was the gateway to science, but in so doing, scientism and the notion that we are essentially a compilation of matter, nothing more. i.e. there are no "women" or "men" by extension. We can only know something in "clear and distinct [ideation]" (math). It opened up a can of worms that are really starting to crawl out in the postmodern SJW era. BTW - that editorial you linked is by a psych prof from Harvard.
Not the way I see it. I see the claim at having no nature as a product of idealism, not reductionism.
I just disagree with the relationship between "pile of matter type reductionism" and the denial of essences. Believing one doesn't imply I must believe the other.
I can be "reduced" to my elements but still display maleness. Those don't contradict each other.
Of course, you can get there by saying "well if we're all just a bunch of X then all differences between things disappear" but that's a confusion of levels of description.
The level of description at which men and women really exist is not the level of description of subatomic particles. One doesn't negate the other. I am a male made of particles, both. No problem there.
The pernicious idea that people are blank slates consequently potentially equal in ability but for society's interference or tharting of the individual is responsible for everything from the French Revolution to Marxism to BLM to antifa and SJWism and Woke.
It's been throroughly rebutted by Pinker and others most recently. Piaget showed children's minds reach capabilities on a predefined schedule irrespective of their enclosing social context. That's a bioligical process unfolding, not a blank slate absorbing things from its society.
Studies of people with brain damage and genetic defects all show that the human character is dependent on the human brian and damage or failures in brain development lead directly to defects of "character" or ability.
There is zero reason to suppose all brains are alike in kind or ability within a competency. This last point I think was becoming clearer and clearer in the academy and set off a panic amongst academicians in the social sciences and humanties. They saw it coming in the 80s and set about to attack the basis of that forbidden knowledge- science itself.
They needed to drive the conversation as far in the other direction as they could to make it politically impossible for people to talk about innate differences in ability because it offended their R sense of equality and shattered their R-inspired notions of causality of human beings who act badly. So they moved the Overton window to another state.
They're loading up their own backlash and when it comes it's going to be all over forever and ever for Marxism and all its miscreant offshoots.
You won't take anything form me so here:
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/sanjacinto-philosophy/chapter/john-stuart-mill-on-liberty-chapter-4-of-the-limits-to-the-authority-of-society-over-the-individual/
You once wrote a paper on Mill. It wasn't on the social contract. Therefore, Mill is not about the social contract?
It was JS Mill who had the idea of blank slate and R who gave us the proto-Marxist " "Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains" which is exactly what that is. R was all about the "noble savage" which itself is a set of assumptions about innate human character just as wrong as the blank slate which is probably why i ran them together in memory since I read them at the same time.
R just does what philosophers of that age do- assume a metric shit ton of stuff then start reasoning. The ultimate referents of their sentences are ideas popular of that time, ill defined and actually corresponding to often to nothing in the real world. Positivism is too dogmatic and leaves real questions not just untouched but untouchable but it was a welcome relief from R's modis operandi.
He wasn't a literal moron, of course. What he did was introduce a bunch of bad ideas into the world which have persisted. Here they are:
This opens the door to massive numbers of assertions about why people actin negative ways with concomitant prescriptions for changes in society. That's all R.
The perfectability of humans- truthfully, this predates R but he popularized and elaborated on it and it is the most modern antecedent to SJW movements.
Scientific progress is the basis of immorality or at least amplifies it. Now we're in somewhere between the Amish and unibomber territory. This dovetails with his demands for economic equality, because science makes the powerful more powerful and will only be used to disadvantage mankind. It's like he couldn't see that people might help people with science.
(This applies not just to R but to all those guys)- they start with ideas which , uh, sound good to them, reason forward in a logically rigourous way and out the other ends pops truths about people, their nature, how they ought to live and what sort of government they ought to enact.
To modern readers, we just come away feeling like we just know more than they did about humans, largely thanks to science, and their ideas have scant referents in the real world. Their "logical reasoning" is not a way to produce knowledge about any of the issues which concerned them.
I had to jog my memory here on this guy since he did not impress me and it was a long time ago.
Meh, probably not many people are going to make a bragging point of having read R so telling me I didn't when I did, I am just not sure where that is coming from.
The modern (philosophical period of modernity) context of "Tabula rasa" comes largely from Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding - from the modern empiricist thrust of that era. Mill wasn't really known as a large purveyor of tabula rasa tenets or social contract tenets - his most notable work is his eponymous text Utilitarianism - a widely anthologized work on ethics coining an entire subset within ethics.
Rousseau's eponymous Social Contract echoes the sentiments more broadly described in Hobbes' Leviathan - basically we relinquish rights to the state in exchange for security. But the argumentative thread in all those works is such that it is, in fact, a contract. When one party breaks the contract, things get odd.
Nice chatting. Have to be gone for a longish while starting day after tomorrow so if I don't replay don't take it wrong.
Thanks. I am operating from having read these guys, not en toto at a young age and posting going only on memory.
That is Mill's most influential work for but he of course took up the Big Questions of his day also.
My beef with R (whose name I can never bring myself to learn to spell right without checking ) are as listed earlier, those and his overall process at arriving at truth.
Kant was the best at that sort of thing with his Critique but the level of effort needed to take him sentence by sentence and understand it just to see if he was actually saying anything substantive was just too much work for too little gain for me. Of course I run the risk of re-inventing the wheel by accident but it's a chance I'll take. I read interpreters of him back then.
I think of R and Hobbes as representative of "natural philosophical types" of people.
Hobbes is a grown up and facing unpleasant realities and R is dreamer and idealist.
These types of people, that is, people with brains which interpret reality in these ways and present to their owners mostly less cogent theories of reality which approximate these two polar opposites, just occur in nature unbidden as a matter of genetics.
Your brain can theoretically be graded on a scale between them and in each case, those brains also come with the same cluster of not-logically-necessitated -by-their-ideas beliefs about people and society. They're brian types which produce philosophical types, even if they don't know what philosophy is.
This is how I see Marxism and the left and especially SJWs also. They have those brains. Well, the most humane amongst them do. For a lot of them maybe even the majority, there's real malice subtending those beliefs.
They want to kill people, lots of people. They use R-type idealism and assertions about the nature of humanity and the individual's relationship to society as a cover and a justification for that ulterior goal.
Really, we can disconfirm R by studying chimps in the wild and we did. It's stuff like that that makes them antiquated and unrewarding to slog through for me.