Great Quotes III: Source and Context are Key

[Mouthwash]

"Life is a sexually transmitted disease with a mortality rate of 100%."

-Ronald David Laing

Sorry, but this person comes across as not having read anything remotely about dialectics, if he thinks that is dialectics. It's no mystery, btw, there are famous works which present the concept. Although they often are named in such a way that *possibly* (said in Blackadder tone) one would not identify them as relevant, eg "The Parmenides, or On Dialectics"

He was responding to someone who told him this: "All this talk about how Marxists don’t frequent this blog and you go and make a post arguing for a Hegelian dialectic. Yes, yes of course this blog has always been on the side of Thesis. And certainly we must always beware the great enemy Antithesis. But let’s end the essay by arguing that what we really need is Synthesis! The professor in college who taught me what dialectical reasoning was warned the class that once we understood this, we’d see dialectics everywhere. And once again he was proven right."

 

[Kyriakos]

"Life is a sexually transmitted disease with a mortality rate of 100%."

-Ronald David Laing



He was responding to someone who told him this: "All this talk about how Marxists don’t frequent this blog and you go and make a post arguing for a Hegelian dialectic. Yes, yes of course this blog has always been on the side of Thesis. And certainly we must always beware the great enemy Antithesis. But let’s end the essay by arguing that what we really need is Synthesis! The professor in college who taught me what dialectical reasoning was warned the class that once we understood this, we’d see dialectics everywhere. And once again he was proven right."

Oh.
Yes, that isn't dialectics either. Hegel is barely philosophy as it is. ^^ (Marx isn't at all)

 

[hobbsyoyo]

What are dialectics?

 

[Kyriakos]

What are dialectics?

It is the study of internal relations, eg in language or other things not existent in the physical/natural (physis=nature) world. For example, in the classical era (by Aristotle) the dialectics were placed in juxtaposition (as different category of philosophical thinking) to physics. Recall how Newton still had the title "physical(natural) philosopher" etc.
Eg a known ancient dialectical issue is how to define "one". It branched out to physics as well; the notion of the atom was coined by Democritos exactly in an argument against the eleatic positions of (probable) infinite divisibility.

According (again) to Aristotle, the oldest method of (argument in) dialectics is by Zeno, and is the famous (from math) reductio ad absurdum. ("εις άτοπον απαγωγή")

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

In Nigeria, politicans come in bags. Had to do a double take at that last part.
"But in the meantime, there was a spate of political trials against corrupt politicians and others and a major quarrel with the UK over the attempt to smuggle presidential advisor Umaru Dikko through Heathrow in a trunk labelled 'diplomatic baggage' in 1984."
-p. 158, Nigeria: A New History of a Turbulent Century

 

[Traitorfish]

What are dialectics?

Not worth the cost of reading Hegel.

 

[Hygro]

It is the study of internal relations, eg in language or other things not existent in the physical/natural (physis=nature) world. For example, in the classical era (by Aristotle) the dialectics were placed in juxtaposition (as different category of philosophical thinking) to physics. Recall how Newton still had the title "physical(natural) philosopher" etc.
Eg a known ancient dialectical issue is how to define "one". It branched out to physics as well; the notion of the atom was coined by Democritos exactly in an argument against the eleatic positions of (probable) infinite divisibility.

According (again) to Aristotle, the oldest method of (argument in) dialectics is by Zeno, and is the famous (from math) reductio ad absurdum. ("εις άτοπον απαγωγή")

This is consistent with a final conclusion offered by the original quote.

 

[Kyriakos]

No

 

[Hygro]

go on about how it's not understanding something by relation to its opposite by telling us how it's actually about understanding things in relation to their opposite.

 

[Kyriakos]

Sorry, but sophists never explain stuff for free, been that way since (at least) Protagoras.

 

[Arakhor]

In modern English usage, a sophist is a person who reasons with clever but fallacious and deceptive arguments.

 

[Kyriakos]

In modern English usage, a sophist is a person who reasons with clever but fallacious and deceptive arguments.

Probably because that was the reputation they got in another english location, Athens of the 5th century
Remember that Socrates was accused (also in his trial) of being a sophist. To which he funnily answered by saying he never took money from his pupils, but accepted gifts if they insisted.

That said, some sophists were clearly important, and (not just going by how much Socrates/Plato envies him and tries to put him down) Protagoras was a towering figure in philosophy. Sadly his works are lost, other than a few lines, eg "man is the meter of all things". Keep in mind Protagoras was a dirt poor carrier until the illustrious Democritos himself discovered him and made him his pupil.

 

[Kyriakos]

ὦ τρεῖς κέλευθοι καὶ κεκρυμμένη νάπη

δρυμός τε καὶ στενωπὸς ἐν τριπλαῖς ὁδοῖς,

which would translate to something like "oh, (you) three roads (linking up) and hidden, forested ravine, and narrow passing of that triple roadway".
Ie the place where Oedipus killed king Laios, his father.

The play is simply excellent.
The three roads refer nominally to a place in the mountain Kithaeron, but also to the linking prophecies, according to which he would kill his father and marry his mother.

 

[Traitorfish]

"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”

- Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

 

[Kyriakos]

"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”

- Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

Cheap boots will do that. I know from experience...

 

[Kyriakos]

οὐδὲν γὰρ ἀνθρώποισιν οἷον ἄργυρος κακὸν νόμισμ᾽ ἔβλαστε.

Which in english would be "nothing else quite as evil as money ever appeared among humans"

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

"We must not be enticed by mathematically attractive assumptions into pretending that the contingencies of men's social positions and the asymmetries of their situations somehow even out in the end."
-John Rawls, p. 171, A Theory of Justice (Belknap Press, 1971)

 

[Hrothbern]

Which in english would be "nothing else quite as evil as money ever appeared among humans"

yes, the mercurial evil of money
before that, there was only landownership

“It's an unwritten and widely unacknowledged fact, that land always ends up belonging to the most violent.”
― Mango Wodzak, The Eden Fruitarian Guidebook

 

[Arakhor]

"Einstein was wrong when he said, 'God does not play dice'. Consideration of black holes suggests, not only that God does play dice, but that he sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can't be seen."
~ Professor Stephen Hawking (1942 - 2018)

 

[Kyriakos]

"Einstein was wrong when he said, 'God does not play dice'. Consideration of black holes suggests, not only that God does play dice, but that he sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can't be seen."
~ Professor Stephen Hawking (1942 - 2018)

Sounds like a "god-servant", as Nietzsche would say. Ie how/why would a god bother with trying to confuse humans?
Noting something off-hand in Hawking's phrase, not speaking of what he alluded to with physics, of course