Inert Monotypes (stereotype lists - slides) more

LIST OF STEREOTYPES First Series Analytic – Continental 1. Style (or lack thereof) Obfuscatory Pompous, Teutonic, less Wagner and more his patron, (“mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria, who built palaces with crystal grottoes and swans. Extravagant, fantastic, absurd, sentimental, self-important. 2. Inherent Weakness for “Arguments from Authority” b) Levelling the distinction between philosophy and literature (“Don’t argue with me, I’m an artist.”) c) Sophistry (“Continental Philosophy: Making the Weaker Argument Stronger since 450 B.C.!”) d) Historical/Cultural “Embeddedness” = Unsocratic (“It doesn’t matter whether it’s TRUE, it’s about the fact that my philological virtuosity could knock Jakob Burkhardt into a cocked hat.”) 3) Horrifying Lack of Respect for the Empirical (“What do you mean, ‘it goes round the sun?!?!’) 4) Tendency towards (naïve) relativism. (“Of course, I don’t think I’m “right?” That’s soo Europhallogocentric!) 5) Absurdity of an esoteric politics. (“One day we will play with the law. Like.a. toy.”) Second Series – Continental Analytic 1. Psychosis (thinks the game is REAL.) Translates everything into “analytic” and assumes everything that has not been so is nonsense or MALEVOLENT (probably seeks to undermine natural science.) (“But the real question is: is Hegel a realist or an anti-realist?”) 2.Authorities – i.defers to her own tradition more than she will admit. (“Look. Either you’re wrong or Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy is wrong? Really, which is more plausible?”) ii. acts as if science and logic naturally support people who associate themselves with them. (“If you choose Newton over The Celestine Prophecy you HAVE to choose John Searle over Jacques Derrida.) 3. Hermeneutic Insensitivity. No silly relativism, sure, but also no attention to context, detail, the difference between one thing, and another thing (“KANT IS AN IDEALIST. BERKLEY IS AN IDEALIST. HEGEL IS AN IDEALIST. FICHTE IS AN IDEALIST. AND NONE OF THEM THINK THAT TABLES ARE REAL!”) 4) “Embeddness” in either meta-langauge OR ordinary language. Where is the Socratic questioning of either of these? Assumes that our concepts and categories are right, but then has tied itself to these concepts and categories (“analytic use of idea of ‘intuition”), so why wouldn’t it? (“Ointment. Bottle. Fly. What do you mean, “What is justice?”)